Expertise in a topic does not make you an expert in presentation. You may know more than anyone else in the room. That does not necessarily mean they will understand by reciting that. Nor does not mean they will remember. It does mean they will not act. This is where the presentations of most experts fail. Information is shared but not translated into effective action. Depth of knowledge does not carry a message. Being an expert in a topic does not make you an expert in presentation.
Being an expert is more than knowledge. Attempting to transfer knowledge is not the same as plugging in a USB and hoping the download works for the whole audience. The reasons are complex, but not least, experts are unclear about what the audience doesn’t know. Your expertise has taken you a long way from where you started learning. You have internalised the structure and are fluent through complexity. That is mastery. It does not necessarily make you a teacher.
If you are a skilled driver, tasks such as changing gears or reversing are completed without higher-order thinking. The audience is in their first lesson, unsure even how many pedals are on the floor, trying not to stall. You’re likely to have forgotten how much they don’t yet know, how time has blurred the progress you have made and how what is simple, unthinking or even missed because of your experience are fundamental and challenging to grasp. You skip steps, they trip up on them. You leap ahead, they stumble. Unconscious expertise is the enemy of clarity.
An effective presentation requires communication with purpose, not simply facts. Journals, textbooks and blogs provide facts; your task is not teaching but their learning. This is what sets the p³ model apart. Not simply a pile of data to download, but effective communication that leads to learning. It is about helping the audience progress their thinking beyond knowledge and how they use that. This is Bloom’s Taxonomy.
p₁ forces you to choose your message. Not everything. Just what matters now.
p₂ helps you build media that supports learning. Not media that proves effort.
p₃ reminds you that delivery is not about projection. It is about connection.
Teaching is not a one-way process that happens when you speak. It is a two-way interaction that leads to learning. It is what happens when the audience understands. It is not about diluting the information or patronising the audience, but as Albert Einstein famously said, when explaining concepts that only he could grasp.
“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”
This is a skill. This is about the distillation of expertise into becoming an educator. This is where the message is fundamental. This is what it means to be an expert.