Every industry is full of non-technical hills that people plant their flag on. What is yours?
(The other post was technical hills. I changed the question to non-technical.)
Every industry is full of non-technical hills that people plant their flag on. What is yours?
(The other post was technical hills. I changed the question to non-technical.)
I’m not a stickler for vocabulary when I ask people to explain something. You can use other words if you want, describe it like you’re a caveman, draw a sketch, even explain it with interpretive dance for all I care.
And it is fine if some detail is lost in the explanation. However, you should be able to communicate it in some manner.
I literally use food as examples when talking about work. The whole fast food, cooking, planning market trips. Its all relevant to everyone.
Example: Sorry I dont sell chocolate cones! you shouldnt have sold a 25 million project promising them in 3 months. Ask them if they take waffle for temp use while I talk to vendor.
I mean, the linguistic mastery necessary to be able to talk around gaps in vocabulary is still itself a skill set completely distinct from knowledge about a different subject.
Plenty of skills aren’t easily reduced to verbal explanations, or even the ability to teach. Plenty of world class athletes become mediocre coaches, frustrated that their players don’t seem to get things the way they used to. Same with musicians, actors, public speakers (merely repeating the words of a speech won’t necessarily carry the same charisma and gravitas), and all sorts of other experts.
One can know something without being able to explain it. That doesn’t invalidate the knowledge.
Which is why I mentioned other ways to explain things. If you’re dealing with a spatial problem but can’t draw what you are trying to explain, that is indicative that you don’t know what you’re dealing with.
It’s the reason why I mentioned communication beyond the written word.
I really feel like you’re digging in your heels on a fundamentally flawed point. Plenty of people are bad at drawing. That doesn’t make them bad at visualizing or reasoning spatially, or somehow invalidate the spatial understanding that they do have.
My ability to explain things in Spanish isn’t all that well correlated with my internal knowledge of those things, but is more closely correlated with my Spanish skills in those subjects. At the same time, there are nonverbal people who understand stuff without the ability to meaningfully convey messages to other humans.
The ability to communicate is its own skill, independent from other areas of knowledge, such that the correlation between ability to explain to others and the actual internal understanding is weak, at best.
You’re digging in your heels in that they only can communicate in one medium. You then pick a language which I don’t know what your competency is.
If you can’t communicate an idea in any method of communication at all to a point where an educated person in that field can’t see what you’re trying to communicate, it shows that you don’t understand the idea. This is especially true if you can’t repeat the ideas in the media it was presented.
How else is someone supposed to show how they understand an idea?
No, some people are just bad communicators in particular mediums, and some mediums are bad channels for conveying other ideas.
Fundamentally, not every bit of knowledge is easily translated into words (or images). You see it a lot when teaching others how to cook (or especially bake), where smell, texture, feel, and all those are both important and knowable, while simultaneously difficult to describe. I can show people how to bake a sourdough loaf, but reducing it to text loses a lot, to the point where the typical person won’t be able to actually derive the knowledge from that text. And plenty of people I’ve tried to teach don’t have the attention to detail to be able to absorb it. I can be an expert in the actual craft while not quite grasping why other people in my orbit just don’t get it. That’s the phenomenon of superstar athletes retiring and then struggling to become decent coaches.
The experts in a lot of fields didn’t learn their knowledge in a book. Or even instructional videos. Limiting your definition of “knowledge” or “expertise” to only be the subjects that can be learned in those settings is too small a view.
No amount of book reading will teach someone how to be a good basketball player, a good guitar player, a good public speaker, a good friend, or even a good writer. That doesn’t invalidate their expertise, or even require they be good at explaining their craft to be considered knowledgeable in those fields.
At the end of the day, plenty of people are bad at communication. But just because someone is bad at communication doesn’t mean that they’re inherently not knowledgeable. And that’s the fundamental error in your view.
Using your cooking analogy, what I’m talking about are people who can’t even describe the basics of how to cook.
What ingredients do you need to bake bread? I don’t know.
What cooking equipment do you need to bake bread? I don’t know.
About how long will it take to bake bread and when do you need to start? I don’t know.
I’m not talking about how to communicate being an expert at a craft and teaching it to someone else, I’m talking about understanding the basics.