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If you don’t have a sensation of apprehension when you set out to find a story and a swagger when you sit down to write it, you are in the wrong business. – A.M. Rosenthal
Spark! You have a great idea. Now what do you do?
While that can be a personal question, it really does depend on the individual. Everyone will do different things with their ideas. Some people are very introverted and will keep their ideas and thoughts to themselves at all costs. On the other extreme, some people will share their ideas, personal information, credit scores, and social security information with anyone within earshot.
If you are paid for your ideas, then it is a different story. While it is often prudent for your good ideas to find and make friends with other good ideas, building a more comprehensive good idea, you frequently do not have that luxury. Your ideas often have to mature quickly. More importantly, your ideas often need to be shared with others under a deadline, and in a manner that will drive behaviors. No small task.
The best way I have found to do this is to understand the needs of the audience you are sharing your ideas with, and how your idea meets these needs. From your perspective, you want to be clear about what behaviors you want to drive by sharing your idea. This often manifests itself in the form of selling. It doesn’t have to be selling a product or service. Selling of an idea or concept is equally important, possibly more so.
Table stakes for having your idea accepted is to have your idea received with complete clarity. While the science behind how this happens is beyond the scope of this blog, Brain Rules is an excellent book providing this information in layman’s terms.
In my world, presenting ideas comes down to a few simple concepts.
1. People remember stories (see Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath). Stories have natural sections beginning, middle, end. Stories in a corporate setting have scripts. These scripts are made of points (ideas, concepts, findings, observations, etc) which build upon and feed off of one another. Memorable stories have scripts which tie into the emotion of the audience and resonate with them at a level beyond logic and intellect.
2. People relate to concepts visually, far better than words or numbers. Visual depiction of the point you are trying to make will hit the mark in a way that a table of numbers never can. A decade ago this would have meant a nice pie chart. Today this may mean a picture of someone working in a rice patty with a message of “our profits funded her village’s food supply.” I’m a big fan of Nancy Duarte are her work in this area (see her book slide:ology to generate your own Spark!’s).
3. The combination of telling scripted stories of key points that you want to make and telling this story through graphics / images is a powerful combination.
What have you found works for you?
