Teach Best Practice

Produce audience-tailored talking points, briefs, or slide outlines for sharing a practice with others.

Why This Is Best Practice

Adopted by: The Kirkpatrick model (1959) — the dominant training evaluation framework — identifies audience alignment as the primary predictor of learning transfer: content that maps to what the audience already cares about is retained and applied; content framed around the presenter's priorities is forgotten. "Made to Stick" (Heath & Heath, 2007) synthesizes decades of communication research into the SUCCESs framework — and audience-first framing is its first principle. Professional communications training at McKinsey, BCG, and major law firms teaches "lead with the client's problem, not your solution." Impact: Kahneman & Tversky (1979) establish that loss aversion is 2× more persuasive than equivalent gain framing — "without this, you risk X" outperforms "with this, you get X" for the same information. Presentations that lead with the audience's risk rather than the practice's features generate higher adoption intent (Heath & Heath, 2007). Why best: The alternative — explaining a practice in the terms that matter to you — produces the "curse of knowledge" failure: you know why the practice is good, but your audience evaluates it against their own priorities, which you haven't addressed. Audience analysis before content creation is the difference between sharing information and changing behavior.

Sources: Kirkpatrick (1959) training evaluation model; Heath & Heath (2007) "Made to Stick"; Kahneman & Tversky (1979) prospect theory; McKinsey communication training principles

Steps

Step 1: Identify the practice and audience

From user input: "explain X to my team", "convince my manager to adopt Y", "help me present Z to a client", "how do I get my org to start doing W?"