Use analogies to simplify complex technical concepts

If explaining what you do is a challenge, you are not alone. These days, as businesses and technologies become more specialized, many people find it difficult to articulate to non-techies exactly what the differences among competing technologies are. Rather than confuse your audiences with too much tech-speak, however, try guiding their understanding with analogies.

An analogy (drawing a parallel between one thing and another) is an excellent way to make complex technical or theoretical information more meaningful. An analogy increases understanding by using what is already known and accepted by the listeners, then connecting it to concepts they don't yet grasp.

Bridging the understanding gap
Consider the "first mouse, second mouse" analogy often used by technology firms to explain their position in the marketing food chain. In this analogy, the inventor of the technology — the person who grinds away at the challenges of making an idea a reality — does not reap the biggest reward. The inventor is compared to the "first mouse" — the mouse that gets its head caught in the trap when it reaches for the cheese. The engineering and marketing teams that learn from the inventor's mistakes, fine-tune the invention and successfully bring it to market are the "second mouse." The second mouse stops by after the trap has been sprung. He gets the cheese.

Astronomer Carl Sagan was a master at explaining scientific information in ways that could be understood by a general audience. Here's one way he described the enormity of cosmic time: "Imagine the 15-billion-year lifetime of the universe … compressed into the span of a single year. All recorded history occupies the last 10 seconds of December 31; and the time from the waning of the Middle Ages to the present occupies little more than one second."

Lean on the familiar
For an analogy to work, however, it must use something the listener already knows about as a springboard for comparison. If the listener isn't familiar with the components of the analogy, it won't work. That's why the best analogies use familiar, everyday things as a starting point.

The following example, paraphrased from the User's Guide to the Information Age by Kenneth M. Morris, uses a traffic analogy to explain the concept of broadband to nontechnical listeners:

To understand the power of broadband, picture a suburban street in mid-afternoon, where an occasional auto occupied only by the driver rolls along. That's like a low-bandwidth telephone call on analog copper wire. Now think of a four-lane interstate. It is crammed with single-passenger cars and trucks, buses and carpooling automobiles. Add a light-rail system running down the highway median. You have vehicles carrying more people but you also have more lanes, or channels, of traffic integrated into a single transmission path. That's broadband.