Web 4.0: R U Ready?

I tend to title my jokes, and there’s one that I call “the one hour joke”. I call it that for the simple reason that it takes an hour to tell, and I feel that people need to be warned before I start. If they decide to listen to this joke, they need to know that they’re making a big time commitment. To hear a joke. You’d think that would be enough to scare anyone away.

But it isn’t.

You see, the really funny thing about this joke is this: people – people who barely know me – have asked me to tell it upon hearing of its existence. Usually this happens after a drink or two, and in almost every instance there’s been a campfire nearby. Somehow, long stories just seem right around a campfire.

As I start the joke, everyone becomes silent, and simply listens to my words coming out of the darkness as they imagine the adventure I’m narrating. There are scary bits, funny bits, stupid bits and bits that focus on clearly irrelevant details – yet people never hurry me along or cut in or leave. They just listen. And when the lame punch line finally comes, rather than beat me up, they usually ask for more.

Why?

Because people love hearing stories. It’s that simple. We’re hardwired to (but that’s another blog entry for another day).

More than that, I think that we humans are all pretty good storytellers. We tell our spouses about our days, make up tales for children, and tell friends about our vacations – and when we do those things, we display a sense of narrative. We know what to emphasize and what to leave out. We know where the story begins and ends. We know what elements of character need to be portrayed.

Yet when we do presentations for work … well … we forget all that – and despite the fact that humans have a long tradition of listening to (and enjoying) long tales, we somehow manage to put them to sleep.

Why?

I think it’s because we forget that we’re supposed to be telling stories. We think that presentations are about facts, and are under the illusion that facts speak for themselves. They don’t. We have to speak for them, and make them relevant and interesting … and that’s all about story.

I made the video below as a little reminder of things we all intuitively know about good stories, yet seem to forget when we’re asked to present. Frankly, it’s not as good as the one hour joke, but hopefully you’ll find it useful when planning that next presentation.

Despite the obvious impact of social media on the Internet and on how people interact, there is still a lot of resistance to the idea that these tools have any value in an enterprise context. When I do presentations on using web 2.0 tools inside the firewall, I am often met with skepticism. Some believe that these tools are inherently social, a waste of time,  and cannot be used for real work; others, who see the potential benefit of the broader collaboration these tools enable, feel that using them would lead to additional work… work that they simply don’t have time for.

The reality, however, is that well designed Web 2.0 tools are productivity enhancing, and allow people to interact more efficiently. This is the point I was trying to make in the following video (The man who should have used Lotus Connections 1), which I posted on IBM’s internal instance of Lotus Connections in late August: Read the rest of this entry »