Scale of Understanding
Meet people where they are before you explain
The scale of understanding is a way of picturing how much someone knows about a topic. Imagine a line from A to Z. At A, a person has never heard of the thing and doesn’t care. At Z, they’re an expert who knows the details cold. Everyone you explain something to sits somewhere on that line, and the job of an explanation is to move them one step further along it.
The problem is that experts forget where they started. Once you understand something deeply, you can’t remember what it was like not to. So you explain from your own spot near Z — full of detail, jargon, and edge cases — to someone sitting at C, who just wanted to know why it matters. This is the curse of knowledge, and it’s why so many explanations from smart people fail.
The fix is to find where your audience actually sits, then start just below them. Low on the scale, people need context and a reason to care: what is this, why should I bother. High on the scale, they want precision: how exactly does it work, what happens in this case. Give context to an expert and you bore them. Give precision to a beginner and you lose them.
A ─────────────────────────────────────────── Z
"never heard of it" "knows it cold"
low end -> why should I care? what is it?
high end -> how does it work? what if...?There’s a trade-off between two kinds of explanation. A forgiving explanation uses plain words and analogies; it tolerates a listener who knows little, at the cost of some precision. A direct explanation is exact and detailed, but assumes you already know a lot. Most failed explanations are direct ones aimed at people who needed a forgiving one first.
The idea comes from Lee LeFever, whose company Common Craft built its name on short videos that explain hard things simply.
A doctor tells a patient their results show “elevated LDL with a borderline ApoB, so we’ll target a statin.” The patient hears noise. They were at the low end of the scale and needed the why: “Your cholesterol is high enough that it’s worth lowering, and there’s a cheap, well-tested pill that does it.” Same facts, but the second version starts where the patient is standing instead of where the doctor is.