How to Change the World

November 23, 2010 at 12:49 pm (communication, transformation, world changing)

If you only ask, “What’s possible?” you’ll only get what’s incremental. If you start with the impossible yet compellingly imperative, you’ll get the radically evolutionary. You’ll get what we need.

Many people say, “To change the world we have to start at the top. We must convince the politicians and captains of industry to join and champion our cause, that only by leveraging their influence, power, connections, and economics can we make big changes happen.”

Other people say, “To change the world we have to start with the grassroots. We must inspire a groundswell of local, organic support so can we move the world where it needs to go.”

I say, “To change the world we have to start at the edges.”

Ask the poets, dreamers, odd-balls, queers and shamans to imagine, envision, and divine an impossible yet irresistible future – that’s what they love to do. And they come from all walks of life – they are everywhere and nowhere.

Ask the artists, painters, musicians, writers to make the impossible tangible, visible, palpable by creating stories, images, and ballads that infuse the collective consciousness and unconsciousness – that’s what they love to do.

Ask the trend watchers and marketers to pitch these visions to the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists: the wild, untamed future always has the greatest profit potential – that’s what they love to pursue.

Ask the designers, architects and engineers to prototype the now nearly possible (but as yet still unreachable). Ask them to do this for as many scenarios as they can. It’s what they love most.

Ask the teachers, the scientists, economists, psychologists, sociologists to study these futures – that’s what they love to do. Listen to what they find.

Ask the people, those at the top and those at the grassroots, “Which future do you want to live in? Which ones do you love the best?”

Ask the politicians, the captains of industry to champion these worlds to be, these supported ideas to lead – that’s what they love to do.

Ask everyone to construct livable prototypes of all of the most popular and many of the least – the world is made of niches not normals. Better yet, build them all, experiment, play, fail, play some more – it’s what humans love all the more.

Ask the bloggers, journalists and historians to document these emerging realties with their particular spin – that’s what they love to do.

Ask the artists, sculptures, actors, and producers to capture these new worlds in the ways only they can – that’s what they love to do.

Plant the seeds and let them grow – its what life loves most.

Finally, ask the grandchildren, “How did we do?”

1 Comment

We’re all in the fashion business now

November 24, 2009 at 12:32 am (communication, fashion, sales, transformation)

You might be thinking “What do graphs and presentations have to do with Green Living?!” Good question.

Short answer:

We’re all salespeople – selling ideas, visions for the future, designs, systems, legislation, programs, you name it. How you say it matters. Make it interesting, make it remarkable and memorable – or no one will care.

Longer answer, a story: “The greatest thing since sliced bread.”

Otto Frederick Rohwedder invented the bread slicing machine in 1912. The first loaf of sliced bread was sold 15 years later. This wasn’t a technological issue, it was a marketing issue – no one cared about his invention, no one saw the value of pre-sliced bread. They were content to do what they’d always done. That’s the way we’re wired.

And that was a relatively insignificant change in thought and behavior. Green Living strives to change the whole game, crafting yet-unseen means to our ends, putting humans in a position of living gracefully and abundantly on Earth – a total system makeover.

The old adage “If you make a better mousetrap, they’ll beat a path to your door” tells only a part of the truth. How will they find your door if you never tell anyone?! Will they bother to try if what you have to say isn’t vitally interesting TO THEM? Ya gotta sell it.

That’s where great graphs and presentations come in – they should tell stories that touch people’s hearts, not just transfer data. They should convey what’s important effortlessly for your audience. Put these tools to best use!

The world of fashion knows this trick, it knows how to make a statement, tap into the audience’s self-interest, and amplify that interest. It knows that for most people, the number one person is ME.

In a world of increasing information and expanding choices with decreasing time, the natural tendency is to tune it all out – unless a new sensation is rich and fascinating, and especially if it connects to genuine needs. No one really wants to despoil the planet. The key to behavior change is removing barriers to action. Communication, the transfer of emotion coupled with great facts and logic, connecting with your tribe – these are first steps in that journey.


Leave a Comment

Your Presentation Needs Help!

October 14, 2009 at 9:27 am (communication, powerpoint, presentation)

Your Presentations Need Help!

Yes – I mean YOU.

Maybe you’re just getting started.

Maybe you’re thinking “I’m an expert. I do 10+ presentations a year. I’ve spoken before hundreds at a time.” Fair enough.

Your presentations still need help!

I know, because I’ve been to your talk.

You’re using PowerPoint as a teleprompter, driving me crazy as you repeat out loud the headings I’ve already read. Your graphs and tables confuse more than enlighten. Your graphics are too dense and so is your text. You’re distracting me from your message and most of all from YOU – the person I came to see!

It’s not really your fault – PowerPoint made you do it.

The solution? Take a cue from these masters.

Edward Tufte, “The Leonardo da Vinci of data”, offers these remedies in “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”:

PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector for low-resolution materials. And that’s about it. Never use PP templates for arraying words or numbers. Avoid elaborate hierarchies of bullet lists. Never read aloud from slides. Never use PP templates to format paper reports or web screens. Use PP as a projector for showing low-resolution color images, graphics, and videos that cannot be reproduced as printed handouts at a presentation.

Paper handouts at a talk can effectively show text, numbers, data, graphics, images. Printed materials, which should largely replace PP, bring information transfer rates in presentations up to that of everyday material in newspapers, magazines, books and internet screens. Thoughtfully planned handouts at your talk tell the audience that you are serious and precise; that you seek to leave traces and have consequences. And that you respect the audience.

Seth Godin, marketing guru, has this advice in “Really Bad PowerPoint”:

Communication is the transfer of emotion.

If all you want to do is create a file of facts and figures, then cancel the meeting and send in a report. Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you’re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever else you are.) Unless you’re an amazing writer, it’s awfully hard to do that in a report.

Our brains have two sides. The right side is emotional, musical and moody. The left side is focused on dexterity, facts and hard data.

When you show up to give a presentation, people want to use both parts of their brain. So they use the right side to judge the way you talk, the way you dress and your body language. Often, people come to a conclusion about your presentation by the time you’re on the second slide. After that, it’s often too late for your bullet points to do you much good.

You can wreck a communication process with lousy logic or unsupported facts, but you can’t complete it without emotion. Logic is not enough. If all it took was logic, no one would smoke cigarettes. No one would be afraid to fly on airplanes. And every smart proposal would be adopted. No, you don’t win with logic. Logic is essential, but without emotion, you’re not playing with a full deck.

PowerPoint presents an amazing opportunity. You can use the screen to talk emotionally to the audience’s right brain (through their eyes), and your words can go through the audience’s ears to talk to their left brain.

That’s what Stephen Spielberg does. It seems to work for him.

Four Components To A Great Presentation

First, make yourself cue cards. [You can do this using Notes Mode.] You should be able to see your cue cards on your laptop’s screen while your audience sees your slides on the wall. [You can also] resort to writing them down the old-fashioned way.

Now, you can use the cue cards you made to make sure you’re saying what you came to say.

Second, make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them. Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you’re saying is true not just accurate.

Talking about pollution in Houston? Instead of giving me four bullet points of EPA data, why not show me a photo of a bunch of dead birds, some smog and even a diseased lung? Amazingly, it’s more fun than doing it the old way. But it’s effective communication.

Third, create a written document. A leave-behind. Put in as many footnotes or details as you like. Then, when you start your presentation, tell the audience that you’re going to give them all the details of your presentation after it’s over, and they don’t have to write down everything you say.

IMPORTANT: Don’t hand out the written stuff at the beginning. Don’t! If you do, people will read the whole thing while you’re talking and ignore you. Instead, your goal is to get them to sit back, trust you and take in the emotional and intellectual points of your presentation.

Fourth, create a feedback cycle. If your presentation is for a project approval, hand people a project approval form and get them to approve it, so there’s no ambiguity at all about what you’ve just agreed to.

So What’s On Your Slides?

Here are the five rules you need to remember to create amazing PowerPoint presentations:

1. No more than six words on a slide. EVER.

2. No cheesy images. Use professional images from corbis.com instead. They cost $3 each, or a little more if they’re for ‘professional use’.

3. No dissolves, spins or other transitions. None.

4. Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never (ever) use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have.

5. Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They’re emotional, and they won’t work without you there. If someone wants your slides to show “the boss,” tell them that the slides go if you go.

The home run is easy to describe: You put up a slide. It triggers an emotional reaction in the audience. They sit up and want to know what you’re going to say that fits in with that image. Then, if you do it right, every time they think of what you said, they’ll see the image (and vice versa).

1 Comment