Out of curiosity, what sort of topics require months of years of explanation? I find that most complex topics can be broken down to a point where an average adult could digest them if they're interested enough in learning them. I wouldn't necessarily say that a 5-10 min explanation means that they could apply it in the field, but enough to understand a specific scenario.
A question from a five-years-old: why is sky blue?
A correct answer: you need to learn how to read, then some mathematics, then quantum physics, then you can calculate how sunlight scatters on molecules of air. Understanding the physiology of color vision won't hurt, too.
This is not very useful. But at least you see some topics to learn more about, and a simplified picture may be built: sunlight contains some blue light, and it gets stuck in the air, while reds and greens pass in more easily. Hey, you just understood why sunsets are orange and red! Go on.
"Let's start with you reading (and demonstrating to me a core competence of) the basic texts of physics leading up to Rayleigh scattering--in this case, that would be Newton, Liebniz, Maxwell, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger. When you have those six down, I'd be happy to explain to you why the sky is blue."
And at the end of all that, it ends up boiling down to "It's the result of a superposition of states collapsing into a single state upon observation, and the mechanism by which that state gets selected is non-deterministic" and now you have a very confused five-year-old.
It is said of a lot of things in mathematics that you simply need to get used to them. This process does take months or years, and once you went through it you probably no longer understand how it feels to not understand those things.
The 5-10 minutes explanation is what you get in a lecture. You may even think that you understand afterwards. Years later, you're going to look back and realize that you really didn't understand much at all.
That is one learning style but not the only learning style. That style is reserved for kids, because often explanations are too abstract, so instead of fully understanding what they're doing, they're given tons of examples, turning the process into muscle memory.
If a topic is muscle memory, it becomes very hard to explain or teach to another. This is why it is important to learn topics beyond muscle memory. I had to go through this because I learned how to program before I was a teen. I found it difficult to explain what I was doing to others.
Today when people get stuck early on learning to program I show them decomposition, as it is the most common hold up people get stuck on. Decomposition is the opposite of abstraction, so it leads into a beneficial second lesson later on. (I don't explain decomposition, I show them.)
At the end of the day it comes down to personality and beliefs more than prerequisite experience when it comes to learning. If someone is afraid to stop and go out of their way to learn a prerequisite, because they're afraid to be seen as ignorant, they're going to struggle. Likewise, if someone is afraid to make a mistake / have a misunderstanding, it can cause too much anxiety to quickly pick up topics.
This is why with interns my primary focus is neutralizing anxiety. I try to show ignorance and misunderstanding are okay and acceptable. I lead by example. Little ducks copy unsaid behaviors well. Once that criteria is met, then and only then do I slowly switch into dumping terminology and lessons on them, only once they're ready for it.
Take Galois proof of the insolvablity of the quintic. To understand it you first need to understand group theory and then field theory and obviously how these relate to the rational numbers and the ring of polynomials over the rationals. Next you need to understand field extensions and then you can start to make sense of galois groups. Then you need to understand the concept of solvability for groups and prove it’s equivalence for galois groups to solutions to polynomials. Then finally you need to demonstrate a polynomial of degree five whose corresponding galois group is unsolvable.
Now you can hand wave this and get a basic idea of it. But this is also undergraduate mathematics. The abstractions keep building on each other as you go and soon the easy way to explain it is still in terms of other abstractions. This is for instance why research papers in mathematics are impenetrable, because the requisite knowledge takes years to acquire.
On the other hand, if you are VI Arnold, you can teach an honest version to motivated high school students in a relatively short timespan, https://amzn.com/1402021860
These bullet points are not for specific scenarios. They are broad general activities. Their specifics will change from situation to situation.
The first bullet point — listening to users, but not taking what they say at face value is fantastic advice for all businesses. Executing on it is a high-skill activity.
I can give examples of when this was neglected and things went poorly. I can give examples of it done very correctly. Only after practicing it for years can I get a smell for what a user really needs, or how to steer a corporate customer to the solution they need and not the one they want.
