Whoa - a jet of interstellar gas, expelled by a forming star system. More on the NASA Photo of the Day.
This post is part of a series I started after reading “Notice, Collect, Share” by Russell Davies. I’m more inspired than ever to get back into the habit of…noticing, collecting and sharing. As part of that return to habit, I’m going to try and find five things that interest me every week, and share them here on my blog. 5 things per week, for 20 weeks, equals 100 Interesting things. Maybe one of these things will inspire you. Maybe one of them will inspire me. We’ll all learn something along the way.
I’ve also been tracking all of the stuff I find in my “Deck Of Interesting” - it’s screenshots, links, and assorted notes of things that might make into one of these posts.
UPDATE: I’m a bit off my usual cadence of posting here. Vacation, changing jobs, and a 13-month old son will always get in the way of posting.
#56 The Importance Of Framing If we’ve talked about pitching and presentations before, you’ve heard me talk about how much I love the pure theatre aspect of it. Pitches might be inefficient and an archaic part of the business. But to me, they are fun as hell, and part of the fun is figuring out how to make my presentations stronger outside of the slides.
That’s why I love a study from Magic Magazine that wanted to look at how the framing of a magician’s performance affected how it was perceived.
In the 2016 study, researchers told an audience that they were about to watch a video of a magic performance. In some cases, the audience was told nothing about the performer. In other cases, they were told that the performer had great skill, was expensive, or had performed for celebrities.
Not surprisingly, the shift in framing drastically improved the perception of the (recorded) performance, in some cases by as much as 10 percentage points.
So what does this mean for our presentations? Choose someone from the group (ideally the most senior) to introduce the rest of the team, and give context on them:
“This is Parker, our strategist, who has worked on award-winning campaigns for some of the world’s biggest brands.”
#57 AI is making you stupid Based on this fairly thorough study, the more you use AI tools like ChatGPT to help you with mundane tasks the more you lose your critical thinking skills.
“The findings revealed a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading. Younger participants exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants. “
AI Tools In Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking
Note: I actually tried to use ChatGPT to write this blog post for me, and hated myself for it. I enjoy the act of writing, and flexing the brain-to-typing finger connection that it brings with it.
The actual blog post ChatGPT created wasn’t very good. Stylistically, it was similar to what I would have written. But It missed the main or most interesting points of the articles I briefed it on, to the point that the whole thing was useless.
#58 Strategy Is Singular I like a lot of what Roger Martin has to say about strategy. I don’t know if I understand all of it…but I like it. His cascading set of interconnected choices for strategy is a really interesting framework that I’ve worked into a few projects recently.
In one of his most recent blog posts he goes into the idea that strategy needs to be singular (otherwise you just have. plan):
Strategy is not a list. It is a singular thing — an integrated set of choices that identifies a place to play and a theory for how to win there, that is backed by capabilities that pass the can’t/won’t test and management systems that build and maintain those capabilities.
#59 70s Sci-Fi Did you know that I like Science-Fiction? (If you’re new here, that’s a joke: I blog regularly about my love for nearly all things sci-fi).
Sometimes good sci-fi is about a really deep book that makes you question
Sometimes it’s just some seriously out-there images that get you imagining.
The “70’s Sci-Fi Art” blog and associated email newsletter is the latter, and an absolute delight to dive in to. Every post is curated and categorized so that you can easily browse things like Sci-Fi Vikings, Trains Of The Future, or even Medieval Computers. I’m definitely going to be making a return visit here to snag some of these for decks.
#60 Obsess About Craft In a recent post on LinkedIn giving some advice to account people, Taleah Mona-Lusky suggests that they should be as excited about the work as the creative team. I love the line “obsess about the craft.” From her post:
Better late than never. Join For a real miscellany of presentation advice and sci-fi.