{"id":95,"date":"2022-08-26T10:44:18","date_gmt":"2022-08-26T10:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jonayre.uk\/blog\/?p=95"},"modified":"2022-09-09T09:32:21","modified_gmt":"2022-09-09T09:32:21","slug":"touch-it-live-it-believe-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jonayre.uk\/blog\/2022\/08\/26\/touch-it-live-it-believe-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Touch it, live it, believe it"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

You are \u2026 beyond my imagination. It\u2019s a wonder you can be touched at all.<\/p>Meredith Duran<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Presentations suck<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I’ve spent a large amount of my working life producing presentations. It’s a sad admission but it’s the truth. I’ve also spent a similarly large proportion of my time presenting my ideas to \u201cstakeholders\u201d to persuade them that an idea will fly. I’m proud to say that on the great majority of occasions I’ve been successful\u2026 eventually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So why am I so negative about presentations? The reason is simple; they just don\u2019t work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But didn\u2019t I just say that my presentations have been predominantly successful? I did, but I didn\u2019t say for how long. The problem with a presentation is that it’s purely cerebral. It’s an idea conveyed through images, words and presence and it can produce understanding in the audience, but it doesn\u2019t create belief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Understanding is nebulous. It fades with time, whilst belief is something fundamental that lasts. We’ve all experienced it. You come out of a presentation motivated and excited and try to pass that on to a colleague, but they just don’t get it. You can’t reproduce that moment that the presenter achieved. And then, as time passes, you also lose that initial excitement and struggle to remember why it made sense at the time. The reality is that you didn’t really believe it, any more than you believe Superman can fly. It’s an idea as ancient as Aristotle. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it “suspension of disbelief”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you fail to create lasting belief in your audience then you’ll lose them. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but eventually, and then you have to start again. But a message given the second time loses its impact and your audience has now started the journey back to where they were when you first met them. You need something more than just the message to keep them moving forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s all just words<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Belief is the key, and the only way you create real belief in a person by giving them something to engage with personally. Allowing them to gain lived experience, no matter how brief, of the thing you’re describing. Without a shared experience words lose their meaning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s take the Grand Canyon as an example. If you sit down with a friend and describe your experience of this natural wonder of the world, how they hear those words will differ depending on their own experiences. Words like “vast”, “breathtaking” and “awe inspiring” don’t have the same impact on someone who hasn’t been there themselves. Now take them to the Grand Canyon and let them see it for themselves, and they might exclaim “It’s so unbelievably vast and breathtaking! Why didn’t you say?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We often forget just how ambiguous language can be, despite the number of times we find ourselves misunderstood. Dictionaries define words in specific terms in an attempt to tie them down, and so we expect them to convey meaning, but that’s only true when both participants in a conversation have encountered the thing for which the word is merely a proxy. Until you’ve seen a car, and experienced what it can do, the word car is meaningless and any attempt to describe it only conveys a fraction of what it really means. Horseless carriage, for example, falls far short of the reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You only truly sell a new idea once it’s made real, and do that you have to knuckle down and make something. This is where the dilemma kicks in. How can you build a thing if you haven\u2019t persuaded your audience to let you build it? At this point I\u2019m sure you’re thinking of all those times you persuaded your audience to let you build something, but was it something truly new, or simply a variation on something built before. Something that they’d already \u201cseen, touched, and lived\u201d. Given a choice of ideas, how many groups vote for the unknown and how many choose the familiar, understandable path?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The path less travelled<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Great minds think alike, though fools seldom differ<\/p>Unknown<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I’ve conducted an informal experiment to test this concept. I took three groups of people from the same company and facilitated a “brainstorming” session to come up with new solutions for a known problem. I then asked them to vote on those ideas to select the top two, and an interesting result emerged. In each group there were ideas that were very different to those considered by the other groups. However, when it came to voting, the results were very similar, and all three groups selected the same top two. It then transpired that both of these ideas had been tried in the company before, several times, and failed at implementation stage. Things came to light each time that hadn’t been properly understood when considered as concepts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was easy for the group to persuade itself that the familiar ideas were the best, and reject the unfamiliar ones. When we went back into the rooms and looked at the rejected ideas, there was real variety, but no way to know if they were viable. No direct experience to justify committing to their implementation. This is the real key. To truly innovate we have to persuade people that something they have no experience of or belief in is worth doing. We have to find a way to try all the ideas. To create that direct shared experience and then choose which one to proceed with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is why, for true innovation to flourish, presentations are pointless. You have nothing concrete to present. Your audience won’t believe unless they see worked examples. You might be able to create excitement in the moment, but they’ll stop believing Superman can fly pretty quickly unless he whizzes past the window. You simply have to accept the truth of this and get on and build stuff, and you have to find a way to get on with the making in a way that doesn’t require you to persuade an audience to let you do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is what true innovators do, and if you\u2019re not doing it you\u2019re not innovating. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So if you have an idea, put down the pen, shut down powerpoint or whatever fancy new presentation tool you might have discovered. Presentations might impress your colleagues and they could even make you look cool, but unless your business model is based on earning money from presenting, they simply won’t work. Stop presenting and start making. Then once you’ve built something let people touch it, let them live it and make them believe in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this blog post is a complete waste of time! You can\u2019t touch it and you can\u2019t live it, so how can you possibly believe it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Presentations are a core tool in business. We use them to convey meaning, and we select the ideas we take forward based on their content. Presentations are everywhere, some great, some average and some just terrible. But regardless of quality, do they even work?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":96,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,21,29,28],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-change","tag-innovation","tag-persuasion","tag-presentations"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t