A member of the class of 2019, Josh Curtis is driven by the future of policy around the world. Curtis spread his knowledge far at Duke. From Duke Student Government (DSG) to the Center for Jewish Life to the Duke Association for the Middle East (DAME) he’s always found a way to extend his skills. Josh reflects on turning his unrealized strength of “explainer” into a highly powerful tool in his first position after Duke.
Josh Curtis, T’19 Economics
A key professional skill is to be able to concisely but effectively explain large amounts of information–be it data, research findings, or discussion–to your audience. There are three facets to doing this successfully: understanding a topic thoroughly yourself; understanding your audience and what they will want and need to know; and being willing and able to cut out extraneous information that may be interesting and significant, but not necessarily important for the explanation you are trying to provide. I think Duke students generally don’t have any issues understanding their topics of interest, or honestly any topic they may find themselves thrown into, but there are fewer opportunities to really practice understanding what your audience’s perspective is and even fewer still to learn to cut extraneous information based on that audience’s needs.
About a year into my job as Special Assistant for Policy & Strategy at the National Endowment for Democracy, I was working on recommendations to resolve certain widely identified pain-points in our thematic grantmaking process. I was perplexed at the unenthusiastic, confused response from the same senior stakeholders who had spurred the initiative, even as I had not received any feedback in disagreement with the painstakingly laid-out thought process behind the recommendations.
After discussing these problems with my supervisor–though perhaps more importantly with other senior staff in the organization I worked with who had had success in similar endeavors–it became clear that my recommendations were not clearly tailored to my audience, which created an overload of information upon which they were unable to either act or provide feedback. I was providing too much context, and “showing my work” too much. I realized I had been “over-briefing” or providing an overload of data in a few other contexts as well because I didn’t think consumers of information that I produced would trust my knowledge of the topic and of their perspective enough for me to properly distill information for them. But here’s the thing: over-briefing was exhausting, wasteful of my time and my colleagues’ time, and not conducive to getting clarity.
In academic settings like Duke, assignments are generally about showing your work and proving your knowledge of a subject–write a huge paper on some topic, provide an annotated bibliography, etc.–but in the professional world, in most scenarios, people just want relevant, reliable, actionable information they can easily fit into their work. As it turns out, understanding complex concepts and data to turn into simplified summaries and action steps has always been something I’ve enjoyed and been good at but never thought was acceptable for formal briefings or presentations. Once I realized it was not only acceptable but highly valuable, becoming an “explainer” and “translator” of information has become a core component of my job, and one that I look forward to utilizing throughout the rest of my career.
