Info Age Meets P.T. Barnum
It happened abruptly. Well-prepared, knowledgeable speakers are no longer holding their audiences. The ponderous prose of THE NEW YORK TIMES doesn't get read. The corporate reserved, deliberative style is criticized as too professorial. Professors are criticized as too professorial.
Fortunately, in "A Whole New Mind," Daniel Pink gives us an explanation of this game-changer. Pink says that the Information Age has brought us to a point in which those analytic, left-brain mindsets, skills, styles are no longer enough for success, for growing a national economy, for getting to the next level.
What's got to be added is show biz, heart/soul, putting together concepts/categories/context in fresh takes (ditch lego-like predictable configurations).
Why else are the Apple Computers doing well and the GMs not so well?
Why is Open Source creating such passion versus Microsoft (a geek shirt reads "Friends don't let Friends Use Windows").
Why are formulaic films bombing at the box office as well as in critical reviews?
Why is the brilliant business brain Martha Stewart not able to come back (think "The Apprentice")?
And, why after 50-something years of being barely tolerated as a creative type, I'm hot?
But the most amazing question is: How come everyone doesn't realize this?
Could it be that they have too big a stake in the Info Age or are still taking home a decent paycheck?
For example, I enjoyed reading Simon Dumenco's "Media Guy" column in ADVERTISING AGE (October 10th). Dumenco talks about the "self-loathing in the media world." Yeah, I guess they're high on the list of those in denial. So are the presenters with 46 PowerPoint slides (glaze-over time), ministers who haven't come up with fresh metaphors for the emerging zeitgeist, career coaches who focus on tactics instead of the person, and parents whose notion of a trophy kid is left brain.
On the other hand, those not in denial are, in true P.T. Barnum-style, stealing the show. Come catch my talk titled "Loop-d-Loop. Just last Thursday, at the Connecticut Press club I explained the whole new mind about effortlessly getting media coverage for clients, brandnames for ourselves and networks to kill for.
It's possible that due to television and it's propensity for sound bites and a lessening of people's attention spans over the last 20 years due to television viewing that we have a whole generation or two that can't sit still and listen for more than 5 minutes. Not enough instant gratification, although it's been pointed out that people learn differently. A Stanford University Education professor showed that you can teach a class one way and get a distribution of As,Bs, Cs, Ds, etc. You can then teach the same class differently, say visually, and the distribution is the same, but the students who got the As,Bs,Cs, etc changed. Therefore, if you used a mixture of teaching techniques in your presentation, more people will get it, understand your message. So, it may be a combination of factors coming into play. Who knows? A good way to see what's going on is to carry out a set of experiments on your Toastmaster's club or on a college class you are teaching. Without doing a proper set of experiments though, all bets are off about what is going on because it would then just boil down to one person's opinion/perspective versus another. An extreme illustration of this is facilitated communication (FC), where a person helps an autistic child communicate. It turns out that the facilitator is unconsciously doing all the work and the autistic child isn't communicating at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication
There was an interesting Frontline where they did a double blind test. The facilatator saw one picture and the autistic child saw a different picture. The facilatator said that the autistic child saw the picture she saw, but the autistic child couldn't have seen that picture due to the constraints of the experiment. So, here you had a group of people comprised of psychologists and parents who felt that the FC technique was revolutionary, but they didn't do the proper studies to verify that the technique actually worked. They were basically fooling themselves.
Posted by: John Moore | October 16, 2005 at 01:28 AM