For reasons that are obscure to me, I invested some of the last 18 months learning ancient Greek. That exercise had no practical value (not a criterion for physicists) as anything I would ever want to read was already translated by multiple authors. The importance of learning a language, as all polyglots know, is that no translation carries the cognition, the impact, or the nuances of the original. Translations can be poor, controversial, vague, ambiguous, and even misleading. (There are how many English translations of the Bible?)
Shakespeare, of course, wrote in English. Consider his rendering of Hamlet’s soliloquy, as the young prince contemplates the uncertainty of death:
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
A translation cannot carry the meter, the gravity, or the force of this masterpiece of writing.
Or, again, as Henry V faced insurmountable odds against the French at Agincourt,
But we in it shall be rememberèd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England, now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
What does this have to do with technology and persuasion? Everything.
If you want to persuade decision makers, you must speak in their language.
The antithesis of learning their language is to say everything in your own language, the language of the technologist. “I calculated the electromagnetic field strength using Maxwell’s equation equating the curl of the electric field to the negative partial derivative of the magnetic flux. But, in this case, I needed the magnetic field strength so I multiplied by the permeability of the encasing medium.” Now, that’s Electromagnetic Field Theory 201, but it’s Decision Maker Kick-Your-Butt 101. Decision makers have no idea what you just said, why you would say it, or why anyone in their right mind would want to know it, especially them.
If the electric field intensity is not important to them, do not bring it up. It’s not in their language unless it affects their decision making. If you want to be persuasive, it is essential that you speak to their needs and not to your own.
If the electric field is important to them, tell them what the field is and why they should care. All of which must be in layman’s terms, of course. If you say, for example, “The electric field intensity is 40 millivolts per meter,” that clearly is not in their language. What then?
I ask you, “Is it important?” “Yes,” you reply. Okay, then follow with dialog that answers, “What value is too high? What value is normal? What difference does it make in your product? How does it affect the quality? What should be done about it? How much will it cost to fix? Is there liability? Are there health risks?” Do not follow with, “Here’s what a millivolt is, here’s what an electric field intensity is, here are Maxwell’s equations.”
Recall Apple’s recent iPhone 4 debacle, the human-interference-with-the-antenna problem? The decision makers, in this case, the buyers, were not concerned about strengths of electric fields, capacitances, or dielectric constants. The decision makers wanted Apple to acknowledge and take responsibility for Apple’s design error. They wanted Apple to take action. They wanted decisions. This is the difference between speaking the language of the technologists and speaking the language of the decision makers. The technologists want to explain every detail. They cling to acronyms, alphabet soup, and jargon. The decision makers want to make decisions. They speak costs, returns, markets, and impact.
If you want to become the Persuasive Wizard, learn the language of the decision makers.