Last week, DVL Smith had the opportunity to see Malcolm Gladwell give an excellent speech as part of his lecture tour of Britain. More impressive than his delivery or composition was the structure of his speech: an unfolding story built out of a simple metaphor.
Gladwell opened the evening by offering to explain his perspective on the causes of the credit crunch – not perhaps the most illuminating or exciting of prospects, and one which, judging by the collective sigh across the stalls, certainly did not captivate the audience. What did grab the attention of the audience was his next line: ‘I’m going to try to tell the story of the credit crunch, without saying one word about finance or banking. Instead, I’m going to talk about the American Civil War.’
By using the story of the Civil War as a metaphor for the banking crisis, Gladwell was able to expose and explain some of the key causes of the credit crunch without losing his audience in the minutiae and tedium of financial particulars. This, perhaps, is the skill of great speakers: knowing how to engage both the emotions and the thoughts of the audience. Or as Daniel Goleman put it: great teachers have always ‘touched their disciples’ hearts by speaking in the language of emotion, teaching in parables, fables and stories.’
And so instead of a laborious sermon about sub-prime mortgages, double entry book keeping, and Wall Street, we were treated to a re-telling of the Battle of Chancellorsville; the battle of wits between the Confederate hero Robert E. Lee and the Yankee General Joseph Hooker, and the struggle for either side to capture the vital Rappahannock River. Only towards his closing was our story wrapped up with an insightful conclusion that a perfect storm of over-confidence, erroneous expert knowledge, and cognitive mis-calibration led to the defeat of Hooker and – this is where the stories converged – the collapse of the American, and soon after global, banking system.
This skill of analogy and metaphor – of seeing one thing in terms of another – is a powerful tool, and one that researchers should add to their presenting repertoire. Clearly ours is a different speech to that of Gladwell’s: we are commissioned to deliver insights, present findings, and offer grounded solutions to problems. Yet what Gladwell brought home was the fact that ‘we know more than we can tell’.
At some point we will need to reach for something more powerful and impactful than a statistic or vox pop or quote. We will need to find an emotional hook to our presentation, and tell the story of the evidence through its lens. As Goleman suggested, ‘what something reminds us of can be far more important than what it ‘is’.’
This does not mean throwing away the data, but rather being aware of the value of metaphors and the power they can play in gaining audience ‘buy-in’ to the point you want to make, before descending into statistical differences and grounded theory. Nor does this mean searching aimlessly for similes and parallels. There are a number of ways to think creatively and develop your own metaphors, not least a flick the excellent book The Magic of Metaphor.
So before we prepare any presentation, we should think like Gladwell, and remember that human thought processes are largely metaphorical. In the words of Daniel Pink, ‘if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures.’
Patrick Young
Tags: American Civil War, Daniel Goleman, Daniel Pink, DVL Smith, Malcolm Gladwell, metaphor, Patrick Young
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