The Crayon Effect: Why Simplicity Is Your Greatest Competitive Advantage

Sarah turned to me as we walked back to the train station.

We'd just left a meeting with the CIO of the NSW Department of Education. I'd spent an hour explaining how Microsoft Teams could solve problems he didn't know he had. Security concerns, integration challenges, teacher workflows, the gap between what vendors promise and what schools actually need.

He'd gone from sceptical to interested to ready to move forward. Not because I'd dazzled him with features. Because I'd made something complex feel simple.

"You know that thing you do?" Sarah said. "Where you make complicated things simple? That's your superpower. That's what makes you different."

I didn't know what to say. I'd never thought of it as special.

It's just what teachers do.

The Curse of Knowledge

Here's what happens in most business conversations.

Someone who knows a lot about something tries to explain it to someone who doesn't. They use jargon because it's efficient. They skip steps because they seem obvious. They assume shared context that doesn't exist.

The listener nods politely. They don't want to seem stupid. They leave the conversation confused, and the explainer has no idea.

This is called the curse of knowledge. Once you know something, you can't remember what it was like not to know it. You forget which parts are confusing. You assume everyone sees what you see.

The tech industry is riddled with this. Brilliant engineers who can build anything but can't explain what they've built. Product managers who speak in acronyms. Executives who present strategy decks that nobody understands but everyone pretends to.

Teachers are trained to break this curse. Every single day.

You stand in front of people who don't know what you know, who didn't choose to be there, who have a hundred other things competing for their attention. And you have to make them understand anyway.

That's not a soft skill. That's a rare and valuable capability.

What I Learnt From Sam and His Crayons

The phrase "crayon effect" came from a bloke named Sam whom I worked with in the federal government.

Sam used crayons constantly in meetings. Not literally. But you could tell he wanted to. He'd grab a whiteboard marker and draw boxes and arrows whilst everyone else was fumbling through slide decks. He'd sketch the problem, sketch the solution, sketch the journey from one to the other.

It was unpolished. It was human. And it worked better than every PowerPoint in the building.

I'd been doing the same thing my whole career without naming it. Every teacher has. You draw diagrams on the board. You use analogies. You find the simplest possible way to represent an idea because you know that's how learning actually works.

The crayon effect is this: if you can't explain your idea with a crayon drawing to a Year 7 student, you don't understand it well enough yet.

This isn't about dumbing things down. It's about clarity.

The best explanations aren't simple because the audience is stupid. They're simple because the explainer has done the hard work of understanding deeply enough to distil. They've found the core. They've cut away everything that isn't essential.

Einstein supposedly said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Teachers live this every single day.

The Covid Mute Button

Let me tell you about a problem we solved during Covid.

When schools went online almost overnight, Microsoft Teams became a lifeline for education. Millions of teachers were suddenly running classes through video calls. And almost immediately, we started hearing about a problem.

Teachers couldn't mute students.

Think about that for a second. You're trying to teach thirty teenagers through a screen. Half of them have their mics on. Dogs are barking. Siblings are fighting. Someone's playing music. And you, the teacher, have no way to mute them.

Worse, you couldn't turn off their cameras either. Which meant if a student was in an unsafe environment, or was being inappropriate, or simply didn't want to be seen, the teacher had no control.

To anyone who's ever stood in front of a classroom, this was an obvious disaster. You need control of your environment to teach. That's not optional. It's foundational.

But to the engineers building Teams, it wasn't obvious at all. They'd designed for corporate meetings, where everyone is (mostly) a professional adult who can manage their own mute button. The idea that you'd need to forcibly mute someone else hadn't occurred to them.

My job was to translate.

Teachers were telling us they needed a mute button. But what they actually needed was classroom control. The mute button was just the most obvious symptom.

I had to explain this to engineers who'd never taught a class in their lives. I couldn't use education jargon. I couldn't assume they understood why a thirteen-year-old might not manage their own audio settings responsibly. I had to find the core of the problem and make it undeniable.

So I drew it. Boxes and arrows. The teacher here. Thirty students there. Audio chaos everywhere. The solution: give teachers the same control online that they have in a physical room.

Simple. Clear. Actionable.

The feature shipped. Millions of teachers got classroom control. And it happened because someone translated a messy, emotional, specific problem into something engineers could build from.

That's the crayon effect in action.

Why This Matters For You

Every pitch you'll ever give is a teaching moment.

Whether you're explaining a product to a customer, presenting a strategy to executives, or convincing someone to take a chance on your idea, you're doing what you've always done: taking something complex and making it land for an audience that doesn't share your context.

Most people are terrible at this. They've never been trained. They've never had to hold the attention of thirty teenagers on a Friday afternoon. They've never had to take a concept that's genuinely difficult and make it accessible to a twelve-year-old.

You have. Every day. For years.

This is your competitive advantage.

When you're in a room with engineers who can't explain what they've built, with consultants who hide behind jargon, with executives who confuse complexity with sophistication, you'll be the one who cuts through.

Not because you're smarter. Because you're clearer.

The Three Levels of Simplicity

Here's a practical framework I use before any important conversation.

If I can't explain my idea at all three levels, I'm not ready.

Level 1: The one-sentence problem statement

No jargon. No qualifications. Just the core.

Template: "[Audience] struggles with [problem] when they should be able to [desired outcome]."

Example: "Teachers spend hours every week on admin tasks when they should be able to focus on teaching."

If your sentence needs a comma and a clarifying clause and a "but also," you haven't found the core yet.

Level 2: The crayon drawing

Get a piece of paper. Actual paper. And a pen.

Draw the problem. Draw the solution. Draw the journey from one to the other.

Boxes and arrows. Before state and after state. Nothing fancy.

If you can't sketch it, you're probably hiding complexity you haven't resolved.

Level 3: The Year 7 pitch

Explain it out loud in thirty seconds to an imaginary twelve-year-old.

No jargon. No assumptions about what they already know. No "well, basically" followed by three minutes of rambling.

Thirty seconds. A twelve-year-old. If they'd be lost, so is your audience.

Why Crayons Beat PowerPoint

I've sat through thousands of presentations. The ones I remember had almost no slides.

They had someone at a whiteboard, drawing whilst they talked. Someone who knew their material well enough that they didn't need a script. Someone who could watch the room and adjust in real time.

This feels risky. It's unpolished. It looks unprepared.

It's actually the opposite. Drawing your idea live requires deeper understanding than clicking through slides. You can't hide behind bullet points. You can't skip past confusion. You have to actually know your stuff.

And your audience knows it.

When you stand at a whiteboard and sketch your idea whilst you explain it, you're proving something. You're showing that you understand it deeply enough to reconstruct it on the fly. That you're confident enough to work without a script. That you care more about being understood than looking polished.

Teachers do this every day. You don't read from slides when you're teaching. You draw on the board. You use analogies. You watch faces and adjust when you see confusion.

That's the skill. And it's worth more than most people realise.

The Gap Isn't Ability

Here's what I want you to understand.

When Sarah called my explanation style a "superpower," she wasn't being generous. She was stating a fact about her world.

At Microsoft, surrounded by brilliant technical people, the ability to make complex things simple was genuinely rare. People had PhDs and couldn't explain their work to a non-specialist. People had decades of experience and still couldn't hold a room.

I wasn't doing anything special. I was doing what teachers do. Understanding my audience. Meeting them where they were. Translating complex ideas into language they cared about. Watching their faces and adjusting when I saw confusion.

In the classroom, this is just Tuesday.

In business, it's a competitive advantage that most people will never develop.

The gap isn't in your ability. The gap is in recognising that what feels ordinary to you is extraordinary to everyone else. The skills you use to teach Year 9 maths or Year 11 English or Year 7 Japanese are the same skills that close deals, secure funding, and build products people actually understand.

You've been practising this your entire career.

Now use it.

An Exercise

Before you pitch anything, before you explain your idea to anyone, before you try to convince a customer or partner or investor, do the crayon test.

Step 1: Write your problem in one sentence. No jargon. No qualifications.

Step 2: Draw it. Paper and pen. Boxes and arrows. What's the problem? What's the solution? How does someone get from one to the other?

Step 3: Explain it out loud in thirty seconds to an imaginary Year 7 student.

If you can do all three, you're ready.

If you can't, you've found where your thinking is still muddy. That's valuable too. Go back. Think harder. Find the core.

The clarity you develop in this process isn't just for your audience. It's for you. The act of simplifying forces you to understand more deeply. It reveals the assumptions you're making. It exposes the complexity you haven't resolved.

Do this exercise before every important conversation, and you'll walk in clearer than anyone else in the room.

Because you've done the work they skipped.

The Real Superpower

Teachers can do something most professionals never learn.

You can take something genuinely difficult and make it accessible. You can read a room and adjust in real time. You can hold attention for an hour with nothing but your voice and a whiteboard marker.

You can do this with the toughest possible audience: teenagers who don't want to be there, who'll tell you to your face when you're boring, who'll put their heads on the desk if you lose them.

If you can hold that room, you can hold any room.

The crayon effect isn't a technique. It's a competitive advantage you've been building for years. It's the reason teachers make exceptional product managers, consultants, founders, and salespeople.

You already have the skill. You just need to point it at a different target.

The crayon effect is one of several frameworks in "Teach Yourself Out," which shows teachers how to translate classroom skills into products, income, and options.