It's great when your reading takes you full circle. About a year ago I discovered Garr Reynolds' blog and book Presentation Zen, and then about half a year later I discovered Sato Kashiwa's great book, Creative Thinking. I found the two really reinforced each other, and the connection is most apparent when Sato addresses presentation in his seventh guideline for creative thinking:
7. Capture the heart through presentation. Moving from persuasion to empathy.
If creative thinking in design is about coming up with great solutions to business problems, well, at some point you need to present your solutions. Garr Reynolds talks a lot about "presenting naked" and he's even turned that theme into yet another great book, The Naked Presenter. No, he doesn't mean you need to take your clothes off to get attention. (In fact, that would probably distract your audience from what you're trying to present - well, depending on what you're presenting.) On a basic level, he's talking about not hiding behind PowerPoint slides and simply being comfortable with what you have to say and just focusing on making your point. "The naked presenter approaches the presentation task embracing the ideas of simplicity, clarity, honesty, integrity, and passion." Yes, you're exposing yourself. You're stripping away the unnecessary props of over-decorated slides and excessive bullet points we tend to use to as a kind of defensive mechanism, anticipating questions, doubts, and arguments. Connected to Garr's Zen aesthetic, it can simply mean preparing and delivering your presentations with restraint, simplicity, and naturalness.
In Sato's way of thinking, it's also about moving away from the idea that you need to persuade or convince your audience, or in other words to force your point of view on them. Sato writes about how, when he first started in advertising, he concentrated too much performance and technique, he focused more on surface than substance. Since then, he's adopted what he calls an "extremely simple" presentation style, which is to simply explain to his client the process he went through to solve their problem.
"However skillful you are with words," he writes, "if you make too much of an effort to lead your audience, you inevitably stir up resistance." For Sato, presentation "is not the place for persuasion. It's the place for connecting with the people you are working with together." You and your client are working on a problem together. Your presentation is about getting them to understand your way of thinking about their problem.
The most important thing, Sato writes, is to present your feelings. I think this is a very good point, and it's similar to something an agency creative director once told me about how account people can best critique creative work. Rather than argue a point, he told me, it's best to simply say how the work makes you feel, because no one can argue with a feeling.
This dovetails neatly with the work I'm doing; in fact I've attended a couple of workshops where the Reynolds book sat squarely at the center of the learning. The irony here is that despite studying, and supposedly understanding, the ideas in Presentation Zen, we break its rules constantly!
Just finished reading Influencer: The Power to Change Anything by Patterson, Grenny et al. You made me think of it in your title: It talks about the importance of connecting with those whose behavior you want to affect. If you haven't already read it, I'd recommend it.
Posted by: Dan | February 03, 2011 at 07:03 AM