Critical Distance – part one

Flickr: 2 chevrons apart!

Over at “What She Said” my friend Lydia is blogging about her new project, here. She came up with the phrase in a conversation there (about copywriting): “Critical Distance”.  I love it.  In her terms she was talking about how to find the necessary distance between yourself and your (possible/potential) audience to figure out what they don’t know. Why is it important? So that you can address their issues in your Copy.

The same is true, oh so very true, in presentations!

It’s something I’ve banged on about from time to time in the past, but the idea of Critical Distance is a useful one to explore. So what is it – in a bit more detail? (By the way, If you’re not convinced it’s important, ask yourself this question – would you rather learn to ski/dance/whatever from someone who was so naturally talented they did everything instinctively or by someone who was simply very good, having learned how to do things in a structured way?)

I recently saw an expert in networking make a presentation about networking (naturally enough) and had to stifle a smile when he said that the key to good networking was simply to remember to do X, Y and Z.

He may have been right, but what the audience needed to know was, brutally, how they should do X, Y and Z. To him these things were so easy he’d forgotten that other people struggle to do them. A choreographer once told one of my children, a dancer, that the key to jumping higher was to “spend more time in the air”. He was right, of course, but what he should have told her was how to spend more time in the air.

The key to jumping higher is to spend more time in the air.

If you’re making a presentation you know more than your (audience about the topic in hand at least). If you don’t, why are you making a presentation? And while that’s obviously a necessity, it doesn’t bring with it what I’m going to term ‘the blindness of the expert’. Let’s shorten that to BotE… And BotE has several corollaries.

Corollary one – experts don’t know what other people don’t know, precisely because they do know it.

Corollary two – experts don’t appreciate how hard it is to learn what they know, because they’ve already learned it. You get a different view of a hill looking down from the top than from the bottom of the path, looking up.

Corollary three – experts don’t know what’s critical, because they know lots about the topic and so have lost the ability to see the wood for the trees. After all, their subconscious goes, they’d not have invested time learning a fact if it wasn’t important, right…?

And if you don’t believe me, try asking a wine expert to recommend a nice white. You’ll get the inevitable answer starting with “It depends…” followed by a thirty minute lecture about different types of grape and climates! ;)    (Does this sound like the voice of experience?)

Dealing with BotE isn’t as easy as it sounds – trying to ‘guess’ what the audience doesn’t know can be a frustrating business. It’s one of those annoying things where it’s own existence makes it hard to adjust to. Think of it as being a bit like being fat and unhealthy – you know you need to get fit but the very fact that you’re out of condition makes it hard to work hard at the gym. (Again, does this sound like the voice of experience?)

So what can we do? Well, I’d argue that the first step, like a recovering alcoholic is simply to acknowledge that there’s a problem which needs addressing – a lot of self-reflection will flow out of that. I’ll talk about other things we can do in other blogs, but for now, what do you think?  How often have you sat through a presentation where the expert on stage hadn’t managed to overcome their BotE and gave a worse presentation as a result?

See part two: http://www.awareplus.co.uk/presentation-skills-blog/critical-distance-part-two/