The moment researchers realise their explanation isn’t working

One moment appears in almost every interdisciplinary communication workshop I run. A researcher begins explaining their work in the way they normally would within their own field. After a minute or two, someone from another discipline asks a question. Not a difficult question. Often something quite simple.

But it reveals something important: the explanation relies on assumptions that only make sense inside the researcher’s own discipline.

You can see the moment when this becomes clear. The researcher pauses, rethinks the explanation, and starts again from a slightly different place.

Those moments are fascinating because they show that communication challenges in research are rarely about simplifying ideas. More often they are about recognising which parts of the explanation depend on shared background knowledge.

Once researchers see that, their explanations often change quite quickly.

In many ways, communication training is less about teaching new techniques, and more about helping researchers notice how their explanations sound to people outside their field.