What language are you speaking to your clients?

I’m currently reading a book called “Shape” by a professor named Jordan Ellenberg. It’s taking a long time because I have to stop every few minutes to shout at the book, and physically restrain myself from hurling my Kindle across the room. It’s not a bad book — it’s just that it’s not in a language I understand.

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Or rather, it’s in a language I understand — English — but it’s about a language I don’t understand — math.

Ellenberg is a professor of mathematics with a Ph.D from Harvard, and he has a nice breezy style and an eye for interesting historical anecdotes. I’m sure he knows the math, and I’m sure he can explain it — he just forgets to most of the time. Worse yet, he’ll explain a complicated concept in eye-opening detail, but support his explanation with two or three other complicated concepts without explaining those in any detail.

(Now, you may be saying, “Maybe you’re just not smart enough to understand?” This is a reasonable question, but I’ll point out that, as an editor, I basically get paid to read for a living, and I’m pretty good at it; more important, when he takes the time to explain the concepts, I do understand them. It’s when he doesn’t that I’m in trouble, and so I feel it’s fair to lay the blame on him.)

Why am I sharing my reading comprehension problems with you? Because at one point, after shouting at my Kindle for a while, I paused for a minute and reflected that this is a problem experts often have: the inability to understand that not everyone understands what they understand — not everyone speaks their language. And because I’m the editor of an accounting publication, I immediately remembered the common lament of accountants who hand a business owner a beautifully executed financial statement, only for the client to put it on the shelf and never look at it, or if they do look at it, to not understand it, and maybe to question its value in the first place.

Accountants often say that accounting is the language of business, but it’s not most business owners’ first language, and for many of them it’s not their second or third, either. So when someone hands them a document they literally can’t read — and tells them that it’s crucial for their business — and charges them for it — it’s not hard to imagine how frustrating that might be.

Which is why it’s crucial for accountants to find ways to translate their expert jargon into layman’s terms, to offer data in meaningful dashboards rather than arcane statements, and to walk clients through conclusions that may seem obvious to someone with an accounting degree, but that are all Greek to the rest of us. The value isn’t in the financial statement; the value is in what the client can learn from it, and they can’t learn from it if they don’t understand it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go yell at a book some more.

Note: From a misguided sense of fairness, I feel compelled to say that if you like and understand math, it’s likely that you will enjoy “Shape.” If you don’t, stay away from it.