My professor asked the question, “**Whose fault was it? FDR’s for not understanding, or Keynes’s for not explaining it well?”** This was one of those moments in my education that changed my life. I’d always **shifted the burden of responsibility for understanding to the listener, not to the explainer. But now I saw that if Keynes’s genius was locked inside his head, it may as well not have existed**. It was his responsibility to make the ideas that seemed so obvious to him equally obvious to FDR. He failed. Far too often we assume that if somebody doesn’t understand what we’re telling them, it’s because they are “stupid” or “closed minded.” That is very rarely the case. **While we know our subject matter, we may fail to know the person to whom we are explaining the subject, and therefore may fail to get our idea across.** .. When you are listening to people on your team, **take on the responsibility to understand**—to actually listen—rather than putting the burden to communicate onto them. But when you are helping them prepare to explain their ideas to others—whether they are peers or cross-functional colleagues or executives—it’s your job to push your direct reports, and yourself, to do a better job than Keynes did. **You need to push them to communicate with such precision and clarity that it’s impossible not to grasp their argument.** --- **Tags** — [[quotes]], [[asking-questions]], [[John Maynard Keynes]] , [[Franklin D Roosevelt]] , [[communication-skills]], [[innovation]], [[not-speaking]] **Source** — [[202303281533 - B - Radical Candor]]