During my research meeting this past Tuesday, my advisor kept on repeating: “Pretend I’m a manager. I’m interested in the practical applications of your work, but not the technical details. What did you learn?” This was to help me from going on runaway tangents about the assumptions I made and the different experiments I ran with different distributions, and don’t forget that the coefficient of variance doesn’t matter in this case, and on and on.

I’ve learned a lot about importance of explaining technical concepts simply from my experiences as a tutor and teaching assistant - break things down into managable pieces until you start on the same level of understanding. What I realized I haven’t learned is how to explain concepts both simply and convincingly. Forcing yourself to explain something to a manager shocked me into the correct frame of reference.

A manager doesn’t understand jargon and wants things boiled down to simple rules. If I encounter situation X, I should do Y, unless I observe Z, in which case I should do A. This constraint forces me to make abstractions. If I don’t have enough information to construct one, then I should investigate until I do. If reality is complicated and multi-branched, then what’s the most common case and its associated action, and that’s a procedure we can follow the rest of the time?

Setting up the “manager” as a tool to help me better do research reminds me of the software developer’s “rubber duck”. When a developer encounters a problem or a bug, they should totally commit to explanining it in detail to an inanimate object. Usually, the problem reveals itself in the complexity, as a kind of depth-first-search approach to thinking takes over and every minor detail is interrogated for being the potential source of the problem. It’s this kind of thinking that I’m most used to, and also the one that’s the least useful to managers!

Whereas the rubber duck is a microscope, the manager is a macro lens, forcing you to abstract away from the details. The next time I talk to my advisor, I’ll make sure to have a long chat with the manager beforehand.