Explain-to-Understand Test
Expose knowledge gaps by explaining complexity in simple language
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- 94%
The Explain-to-Understand Test treats explanation as a diagnostic rather than merely a communication task. Begin with a concept you believe you know and describe it in plain language to a nonexpert, avoiding jargon and unexplained acronyms. Confusing, circular, or overly technical passages reveal gaps in your own mental model. Mark those gaps, consult source material or practitioners, and reconstruct the concept around its essential mechanism. Then rewrite and test the explanation again. David Enrich describes discovering that years of reporting experience did not guarantee he could clearly explain derivatives or interest-rate swaps. The struggle forced him to conduct more research until the ideas became genuinely understandable. The result is both deeper mastery and communication that allows a broader audience to engage with an otherwise opaque subject.
Origin
Extracted from Masters in Business, where David Enrich described testing financial explanations on his parents and researching derivatives again when his draft exposed gaps in his understanding.
Core principles
- 01Clear explanation requires genuine understanding
- 02Jargon can conceal confusion as well as complexity
- 03A failed explanation identifies what to research next
- 04Simple language makes specialized knowledge accessible
- 05Testing explanations on nonexperts reveals hidden assumptions
How to run it
- 1
Select the concept
Choose a specific idea, process, or instrument that you need to understand well enough to communicate.
Pro tip Use a narrow question such as how an interest-rate swap works rather than a broad subject such as finance.
Watch out Starting too broadly makes it difficult to locate the exact gap.
- 2
Explain it plainly
Write or speak an explanation using ordinary words and short, direct sentences. Define every necessary technical term.
Pro tip Imagine explaining it to an intelligent person with no domain background.
Watch out Do not substitute acronyms or jargon for causal explanation.
- 3
Test with a nonexpert
Give the explanation to someone outside the field and ask them to restate the idea in their own words.
Pro tip Observe where they hesitate instead of asking only whether they understand.
Watch out A polite yes is not evidence that the explanation worked.
- 4
Locate the gaps
Highlight passages that become circular, vague, or difficult to simplify. Treat each one as evidence that your understanding is incomplete.
Pro tip Write down the precise question you cannot answer cleanly.
Watch out Do not blame the audience for confusion before checking your own model.
- 5
Research the mechanism
Return to authoritative sources or experienced practitioners and resolve each unanswered question. Focus on inputs, transformations, outputs, and incentives.
Pro tip Ask experts to walk through a concrete example from beginning to end.
Watch out Collecting more terminology without understanding relationships will deepen the confusion.
- 6
Reduce to the essence
Rebuild the explanation around the smallest accurate causal model that preserves what matters.
Pro tip Use one concrete example to anchor an abstract mechanism.
Watch out Simplification must not introduce a false or misleading claim.
- 7
Retest and refine
Explain the concept again and repeat the cycle until the listener can accurately restate it and use it in an example.
Pro tip Keep earlier drafts so you can see which assumptions were removed.
Watch out Clarity in one rehearsed sentence does not guarantee flexible understanding.
In the wild
A financial writer drafts an explanation of an interest-rate swap but notices that the description merely repeats technical terms. She asks a former trader to walk through two companies exchanging fixed and floating payment obligations, rewrites the mechanism in ordinary language, and tests it on a reader unfamiliar with derivatives.
→ The writer gains a causal understanding and produces an explanation a general reader can accurately restate.
An engineer believes he understands a message queue but cannot explain what happens when a consumer fails. He identifies the gap, reviews acknowledgment and retry behavior, and then teaches the full message lifecycle to a colleague outside the project.
→ The explanation exposes an operational blind spot before it causes a production incident.
Common mistakes
Hiding behind jargon
Specialized vocabulary can create the appearance of expertise while leaving the underlying mechanism unexplained.
Testing only with experts
Experts may silently fill in missing assumptions, preventing weaknesses in the explanation from becoming visible.
Oversimplifying into error
Plain language should remove unnecessary complexity without discarding facts essential to an accurate model.
Is it for you?
Best for
Writers, teachers, analysts, and professionals who must communicate technical subjects to general audiences.
Not ideal for
Pure memorization tasks or topics that cannot yet be disclosed to an outside test audience.
From the transcript
“that was a sobering moment for me because I realized that as well as I knew this industry and as many you know, hundreds if…”
“a lot of this stuff is not that complicated when you boil it down to its essence.”
From the episode
David Enrich Discusses the Libor Scandal
David Enrich