The Message and The Rickety Bridge

Crossing The Raging River

I want you to imagine this scene.

You’re on a walk through the forest.

The light is failing and you know you have to get home before darkness.

In the gloom ahead you notice a rickety rope bridge across a dangerous river.

Cross this bridge and you will cut an hour off your walk.

You approach the bridge and you notice three things.

1. The river is raging and if you end up in there you will be finished.
2. The planks on the bridge are rotting and look like they will barely take your weight.
3. But there are three really solid pylons where you know you’ll find safety.

You take a deep breath and run across the planks to the first pylon.

You rest.

Then you repeat this three more times until you arrive safely at your objective on the other side.

Find Your Pylons — Show, Don’t Tell

Anyone who has ever taken a creative writing class will have heard the advice ‘show, don’t tell’ within the first week.

‘Showing’ is a way of letting your reader experience your idea through action, dialogue, feeling and senses rather than just the ‘telling’ of description and exposition.

To quote my colleague Neil Bearden at INSEAD, it puts Netflix into the audience’s mind for free. It turns you into Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Inception.’

And ‘showing’ is the pylons in any communication.

It’s solid. It’s safe. It’s where your listener wants to be.

‘Telling’ is the rotting planks. You need them to get to the pylons but you want to spend as little time there as possible.

And you should be thinking this way every time you give a lecture, attend an interview, go to a networking event, pitch to an investor…basically every time you open your mouth to speak.

Because showing through story has the highest ROI of any form of communication.

It lands. It sticks. It inspires.

It speaks to the brain in the way the brain works.

But Choose Those Pylons Wisely

The thriller writer and college professor James Scott Bell has a word of warning though.

‘If you try to [show] constantly, the parts that are supposed to stand out won’t, and your readers will get exhausted.’

Any message will need some telling to move your listener quickly to the meaty parts where you really enjoy taking them into the showing.

You could see the planks as your facts and the pylons as the stories that put those facts into relevant technicolour context.

Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It.

So here’s the deal.

Every time you open your mouth you are leading your audience across a rickety bridge.

Get it right and they will thank you forever with their attention and memories.

Get it wrong and a raging river of boredom and indifference lies in wait.

All you have to do is know where you are starting from, where you will finish and then decide what pylons you will give them to rest on as you cross the river in safety.

Good luck.