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Relatability In Technical Presentations and Pitches: How To Connect Your Audience With Difficult Ideas

Tom Hayton
6 min readJul 29, 2024

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Why do some technical presentations and pitches get a great reception, and some fall flat?

There are many reasons for this, but one of the biggest reasons for failure is a lack of relatability.

In this post, I’ll explain what relatability is, and how you can use it to bring your ideas to more people.

Peas And Potatoes: The Theory Of Everything

Jane Hawking explains the conflict between Quantum Theory and General Relativity by comparing peas with potatoes in a scene from the film, The Theory of Everything (Universal Pictures)
Jane Hawking explains the conflict between Quantum Theory and General Relativity by comparing peas with potatoes in a scene from the film, The Theory of Everything (Universal Pictures)

There’s a brilliant scene in the film The Theory of Everything, where Steven Hawking’s wife, Jane, explains the conflict between the two main pillars of physics: General Relativity and Quantum Theory.

Rather than diving into technicalities, she makes use of props on the dinner table. She explains that quantum theory governs the world of peas (the very small-scale things like electrons and so on), whereas General Relativity governs the world of potatoes (the larger-scale stuff, like planets).

When you try to get them to play together, it all goes “tits up”!

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Tom Hayton

I write about storytelling for technically-minded professionals. Founder, Storytelling for Techies.