There are only two fields where it is legitimate to prove that something is true: law andmathematics. True scientific fields can legitimately prove that a categorical statement is not true, but should never attempt to prove a universal positive statement.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses this at great length in his new book The Black Swan.

What is the point of science if it cannot be used to prove things? In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argues that the entire concepts of proof and progress are problematic.

What is the point of thinking of things if we cannot prove that our ideas are true? Because ideas are useful. Science seeks not to prove things, but rather to build useful models.Models, such as the idea of the atom, are useful because they correctly predict observations. As we adopt new models and cast aside our old ones, the scope of observations we can predict increase. What matters is not the individual conclusions, but rather the method.

This is also true in the world of business. The received knowledge of market segments, product strategies, business models, etc can be limiting. If we apply some rigor to the problem, we may be able to tease out some insights that were not obvious before.

If we ignore our current assumptions and ask questions like:

• Why do we group customers together the way we do currently?
• Are there profitable segments hidden inside of submarkets or segment we have been serving more generically?
• Could a particular product offering be split or combined with other offering to better address needs?
• Is there a different distribution method that may be better suited to a submarket, promoting it to a full segment?

As a high tech marketer, I interact with a variety of different types of people. These can range from the very big-picture salesperson, to the most detail oriented engineer. There are also interesting hybrids such as the CEO or VP who was promoted up from an engineering position.
Many salespeople and outbound marketers think almost exclusively in generalities. These folks seem to be very comfortable with slides like this in a presentation:


The point of this slide is that the conventional approach of using more clock speed, memory, cache, and CPU cores to solve a problem cannot be sustained. Simple, huh? Many engineers I know have a mental breakdown when they see a slide like this. They ask "is that a bridge or a rollercoaster? is it already built or unfinished? why does it end?" The more abstract the relationship is between the image and the topic at hand, the more difficulty they seem to have. I have noticed this most among hardware engineers. Embedded software engineers seems to have slightly less of a problem, and PC/web programmers have the least problem with analogies.

Engineers have a tendency to be very concrete in their thinking.  Metaphors, analogies, sarcasm, and exageration are all abstract ideoms that are not comfortable for a concrete audience.  It may be more useful to take an approach of "just the facts".  Present concrete facts and ideas first, then extend the facts to conclusions and applications.  Try to avoid communicating ideas simply through abstract ideoms.

I think that the simplified, Zen approach to giving presentations is very effective. However, for an audience of engineers, I might modify the slide in the following manner:



I think that regular Powerpoint presentations can also cause cognitive impairments!
The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, Edward Tufte

In the past few months I've adopted a radically different approach to communication than my peers in high tech marketing...

By definition, the approach most people take yields average results. The most popular techniques for doing things are those that yield some useful result with a minimum of effort. We all tend to sing or take snapshots or cook in a similar manner and achieve similar results. We can refine those techniques, but that just makes us better at being average. This makes us first tenor in the choir, helps us make eggs in the morning, or keeps us from crashing into things on our drive into work.

To go beyond the norm, you must take a radically different approach to the same problem.

That is why Ansel Adams prints are different from our summer snapshots, Mario Andretti drives differently from us, and why Whitney Houston isn’t in our church choir.

There are several drawbacks to taking the ‘differentiated approach’. The first is that by doing things very differently, we will achieve results that are either vastly better or vastly worse than the average person.

A radically different approach will tend to achieve vastly better or far worse results (usually far worse).

Second, achieving excellence usually takes much more work than achieving mediocrity. Every photographer knows that they will have to take many shots to get ‘the one’. The corollary of this principle is:

If you take the differentiated approach, but you don’t do the extra work, you will likely only get below average results!

The reason why everyone does not use the differentiated approach is that it is more work! Especially if one has been using the standard approach for a long time, changing to another approach can be awkward and excruciating. Since the difference between the old and new approach is so dramatic, the results may actually be worse in the very short term.

Changing from an old to new approach can give even worse results in the very short term.

However, I believe that the ROI of learning the basics of the differentiated approach are extremely high. A person can take an afternoon photography course and achieve dramatically better results than their peers who have no training. This is true of drawing and many other fields. With these techniques, I can teach you how to make a *much* better drawing in 10 minutes. We may not have our photos hung alongside Ansel Adams, but at least we can get a few extra compliments after our vacation.

There is more than one way to achieve excellence.

Whitney Houston, Tori Amos, and Maria Callas are all great singers. They all have different techniques, but they all draw on the same basic ways that people experience emotion. Here is a great resource for refining one’s presentation style: www.presentationzen.com. If you look on the right under “Popular Posts”, you’ll see several different approaches to presenting including the Lessig, Godin, Kawasaki, and Takahashi Methods. These are all good in different ways, but good for the same fundamental reasons. Look around you at television commercials, great public speakers, stage plays, and you will see these principles at work:

Guidelines for Effective Presentations

1)Frame the ideas you want to communicate in a story or narrative. Human beings naturally think in terms of stories. Stories act as scaffolding for facts to hang onto. Stories also activate our emotional systems, which tell our brains to remember facts.

2) Punctuate the story with humor, quips, and puns. Humor requires a small amount of effort but has a large emotional payoff for the audience. It keeps the emotional content of a talk high, even if the topic itself is not as interesting.

3) Limit visual complexity! Our ability to absorb either visual or auditory information is a zero-sum game. In order to focus attention on the speaker, visual communication (except for body language) should be kept to a minimum. The exception is when verbal communication is not the best method to communicate an idea. This is when using diagrams or illustrations is appropriate.

4) Avoid weasel words and jargon at all costs! Weasel words obfuscate language to allow the speaker to escape responsibility for what is said. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_words

I have often been told in my high tech world that the conventional approach to presenting is necessary because the material is ‘technical’. This is a specious argument. We often flatter ourselves into thinking that our audience must absorb every detail of what we will say in order to be convinced of our argument. We use bulleted lists of details as a script to read from during our presentation. Then one day someone from Marketing comes by and adds animation to the bullet points and puts bad stock photos in where our bad clip art used to live.

The purpose of removing bulleted lists is not to make the presentation ‘higher level’ but to limit visual complexity and focus attention on the speaker. Fades and slide transitions should not be done for aesthetic reasons, but rather to make the flow of visual information follow what the speaker is talking about.

There is a danger that simplifying visuals and using fade transitions could lessen the speaker’s credibility with a technical audience. If this is the case, then the aesthetics of the visuals should be deliberately degraded without affecting the visual complexity or flow of information. A whiteboard for diagrams, black and white slides with abrupt transitions could be used to gain credibility without degrading the effectiveness of communication.

I admit that I am not a good programmer, and I likely never will become one. This limits my ability to immediately grasp the fine points of software development. However, at one time I was at least mediocre at Physics and Materials Science. I can say firsthand that some of my best professors used the principals above to effectively communicate complex ideas in a very esoteric field.

One of my role models is Richard Feynman. He was known not only as a great physicist, but also a great communicator. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his work in Quantum Electrodynamics. A famous story about him is that his resume said simply: “Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1965”. What more do you need to know about him? His acceptance speech is a great illustration of how to communicate ideas from a complex subject:

Feynman's Nobel Address

He taught undergraduate physics at Caltech. His lectures drew crowds of grad students, professors, and the general public. Many of these lectures were published and recorded in various forms. He talked about basic and advanced topics. Here is a video of one of the ‘easy ones’:

A Feynman Lecture on Physics

Feynman didn’t have access to PowerPoint (thank god). Just notice when he writes on the board and what information he gets across that way. He makes extensive use of humor, storytelling, metaphors, and diagrams. He invented Feynman Diagrams to express relationships in Quantum Mechanics that used to require gigantic Dirac or Shroedinger equations.

Here is another physicist, this time from CERN. He talks about how he had to give an explanation to the Queen of England on why she should give 100M pounds to him every year for 20 years to fund the collider.

CERN Pitch

To summarize, I am not claiming that my presentations are up there in the Pantheon of Steve Jobs or Richard Feynman. However, I do think that by recognizing some basic things about human nature and working a little harder, we can be much more successful in telling people our stories.

For the intrepid reader, here are some additional resources on business communication:

Multimedia Learning

Why Businesspeople Speak Like Idiots

Beyond Bullet Points