code-switching

You can and should adapt your language, tone, and level of detail for different audiences to ensure your message lands.

Whether you are speaking with novice learners, C-suite executives, or technical peers, you should however remain consistent in who you are, but you can alter the tone, the speed, and the tempo.

Funnily, you’re more likely going to be simplifying and talking stupid to the most senior leaders. They like things to be communicated to them simply because they are time poor.

You can generally break a room down into 3 groups

• The clueless novices:
• People with limited understanding of what’s going on.
• They don’t understand tech.
• They don’t understand the business.
• These people value clarity, analogies, and slow, long, boring foundational explanations.
• The advantage however is this group is often primed to listen and excited to learn, so they are fun to be around.
• Pro practitioners that have a broad capability set:
• People that know what you’re talking about.
• They appreciate precision of language.
• They want to understand scope, method, trade-offs, and strategic positioning.
• This group is good to work with, because they’ll zone in on the detail and get to business.
• Interested and disinterested Executives & Stakeholders:
• I need to break this group into multiple sub-groups:
• Pro’s that want an outcome: This group will ferociously go after something. They’ll push you to work a problem through. They’ll work with you to refine it, and they’re often strong inspirational leaders.
• Pro’s that are disinterested in the outcome: This group won’t prepare for meetings. They’ll listen, but be lazy in understanding. It’s always a next step, and they’ll often slow-walk everything.
• Pro’s that actively block progress: This group is nearly impossible to get around at times. If they have sway or power, they can cause absolute chaos. Often when you encounter one of these, you either need to pivot a different direction, or you’re going to have to play a long game to roll them.
• Dud leaders that want an outcome: This group is absolutely obnoxious. They’ll set deadlines. Drive things. But they won’t listen, and won’t have a clue what’s going on. They’ll go to every meeting as if it’s their last. They’ll cut the important people out of information flows. Take credit for things they didn’t do. They’re truly awful. Just get out of these people’s way. It’s only a matter of time before they fall over.
• Dud leaders that are disinterested in an outcome: This sums up most dud leaders almost universally, and there is a LOT of these. They’ll just ask heaps of questions, make sure no action is on them, and just hope things just stop through attrition.
• Dud leaders that want to block progress: This is the group you take on. You just hammer them. In fact—in some situations you can just find another path and ignore them. They won’t even know what’s going on, and as long as it doesn’t affect them they won’t care.
• Technical experts that have no broad understanding—broadly your nerd techos:
• This group is incredibly frustrating at times.
• Some of them are incredibly smart. Others not so much.
• They do however draw enormous self-esteem from their technical skills.
• If you don’t respect it—watch out. In this group, I’ll break it down also:
• Absolute gun technical experts with emotional intelligence—these people are unicorns. They literally almost never exist.
• Absolute gun technical experts who can’t even talk to you, but are loyal. These are the autistic types. These people—are guns. Keep em dear.
• You have the Technical Person who can’t deliver anything—but think they are the boss of the delivery team—these people are to be avoided at all costs. Companies love hiring these people. These people will lead the absolute gun technical experts almost guaranteed.
• Then you have a technical person who just pretends. They are on a team but know absolutely nothing about anything; and you’ll be left bamboozled how they are not fired every day. Walk over these people. They’re chaff—don’t waste your time.

If you want to find out which one is which, just talk to them for 15 mins and you’ll instantly know.

How to adjust your messaging ‘broadly’

Now, this is the controversial bit. The most talented people can play at all 4 levels. The only question is how much you can tolerate each level. And if you can do it—it's a dangerous place to be:

• Stand in front of a group of execs with technical knowledge—and you frustrate and outperform the group, and question why they operate at such a simplistic level.
• If you can operate at the practitioner and exec level, the Experts won’t like sparring with you, cause they’ll see tech as their thing.
• Being a solid practitioner with other skills makes you stand out in that group.
• And you have the adaptability to win over the novices—and quickly teach them not to be novices which is a risk to everybody else sitting around the table.

You will get no thanks, seriously. So just understand—there are lanes. And if you cross multiple lanes you could have problems.

Here are some techniques to effectively code-switch and get away with it

1. Layer your communication (so Tier the explanations)—What does this look like?
• Start with a short sharp, 30-second overview to satisfy the execs of the ‘what and why’, then progressively get more detailed section by section.
• You can go up and down that ladder depending on the interest and feedback from the audience—and you can skip over elements you can talk about in side bar.
• Why this technique is so powerful. It’s called Minto.
• Minto is the technique where you give a truth, then say why, why, why underneath it. It’s great for satisfying the top of the pyramid—and if they’re interested, they’ll humor you to further unpack the detail. Good Executives will trust the opening statements, but want to progressively be convinced to validate and complete the picture.
2. Using analogies and metaphors
• Don’t ever think analogies are persuasive. In fact they are not persuasive.
• They can be useful to explain a concept to novices or executives that don’t know the domain.
• Make sure the language or example isn’t too complicated.
• Trust me when I say it, dumb people will ask 100 clarifying questions to know if the pretend analogy is right or not, and you’ll waste 10 mins focusing them on the element of the analogy that is important.
3. Progressive disclosure communication tactics
• Reveal information incrementally and in layers.
• Start with broad strokes.
• Then let the users ‘drill in’ as needed.
• This is a great idea for a lot of Execs.
• They want to be in control of the discussion, and in that event you’ve got to be careful. Go in, open up, and see where they go.
4. Audience signaling
• Explicitly state at the start which audience the content is for: “For non-technical readers…” or “Developers: skip to Step 3.”
• Then when someone cracks it or doesn’t like the format you can tell them to sit down till it’s over, and you can switch to their method at a different time. ‘We’ll take the technical discussion offline’.

Framing how to execute good communications

Frame your audience:

• WHO is the deliverable for, WHAT is it for, What OUTCOME do you want:
• You may want to map out what you think each chorum of members in the meeting wants.
• Hone in on what is important. A mistake I see a lot—is people will WRITE for the audience—but overlook the objective they’re trying to achieve.
• Talking sweet nothings to executives that don’t want to do your project is a pointless exercise—so in some instances you need to shake the box to see what falls out.

Don’t muck around. Just write down in lay terms what you want to say:

• In plain English, work up a neutral capturing the essence of what you want to convey.

Produce variants and do that with AI:

• If you are smart, you’ll take the lay terms you wrote out, then give a persona to AI to go and create a number of versions. Simple, technical, honed out, honed in.
• The different versions will give you the flex to create any version you want.

Review and iterate it with speed:

• Start with detail; but
• Solicit feedback quickly—of both the outline and some detail.
• Start with too much detail, and hone stuff out.
• Once you hone it for clarity and resonance you’re ready to go.
• Make sure the final product sounds like something a human wants to listen to and you want to say. People forget that bit and bore everyone.

Tools you can use to execute

This depends on what you want to achieve.

• You can start with corporate templates:
• These are all universally bad.
• They’re poorly structured.
• Bad fonts that are too big.
• The margins are too wide and they completely limit what you can do.
• But damn it—if you follow it—you’ll be safe.
• Slide techniques:
• Each page should have a heading that is in a smaller font, 2-3 lines of text. And you use it to tell a story from page to page. You can actually read a story from start to end just by reading the strap lines. A great technique to keep yourself pumping out the right story.
• Make sure the margins of slides are precise on every page, so when you flick from page to page there is a level of graphical precision. Ditto with colors and formatting. You want your slides to be tight.
• Use advanced charting, and graphics to tell stories. Often slides with less words land better.
• Specifically label slides for Audience. Call out who the slide is for, and thematically show it so people know.
• Use visual hierarchy for each slide. You want to structure slides from left to right by default, and then up and down. Use larger fonts for key points, subtle color contrasts for emphasis, and white space to avoid clutter. I cannot say enough less is more with slides. Critical messages need to stand out and be easily digestible.
• Incorporate a concept called data storytelling. When using advanced AI (or other techniques) to chart—you want to embed the narrative into the data. Use annotations, callouts, or progressive reveals to highlight key data points.
• Slides should follow a consistent design system. Beyond precise margins and colors, you want to establish a coherent collection of icons and fonts that are branded to you. This ensures uniformity across slides and saves time.
• Build out content that is modular and doesn’t mix concepts. You want to be able to easily rearrange or omit slides for different audiences. Design the core narrative, and appendix slides, and clearly label the sections so you can choose what to consume.
• Try visually reading the deck. If you can’t get the gist of what it's telling you just by reading the headings and looking at the pictures without verbal explanation, it needs more work.

Conclusion

I’m not going to tell you to become an old-school management consultant—but the skills stand the test of time. Here is an absolutely free tip. All of the above tips are well understood by AI systems, so if you were to feed them into an AI with some content and told it you were looking for a slide deck in this pattern—using the above tactics—it’ll eat that alive.

Tell it you want to draw it out for you in HTML and it’ll even draw it out for you.

PowerPoint is probably on its last legs, but it’ll last another 50 years.

I’d be looking for alternatives. In the world of AI, PowerPoint probably only works neatly with MS CoPilot. Anything else will muck the graphics. Maybe it’s time to look around. Google Slides is good. Canva is better. Even Apple’s Keynote is OK. Branch out a bit. It’s also cheaper to branch out.