Why Conversation Becomes A Game

Photo Courtesy of Analogicus on Pixabay

You’re walking through a dark forest with a torch and a sword. You’ve heard a rumor of an inn ‘The Lamplight’ somewhere nearby that can provide sanctuary for the night but have no way to find it. Eventually you stumble upon another traveller and begin to talk. Your options are:

• Who are you?

• What are you doing?

• Do you know where the Lamplight Inn is?

• Stop right there!

He responds “Is that how you typically introduce yourself? I’m a courier for a group of traders and would prefer it if you stepped aside. I can’t be wasting time at this hour.”

• Is that a threat?

• You must be carrying something valuable then. Hand it over.

• Do you know where the Lamplight Inn is?

• I could accompany you if you desire some extra security.

Even though you see yourself as a hero, you can’t resist seeing what the repercussions are. The trader draws his own sword. You fight. You win. And the 400 gold he’s carrying really wasn’t worth the effort so you reloaded the game and try the conversation again.

• Is that a threat?

• You must be carrying something valuable then. Hand it over.

• Do you know where the Lamplight Inn is?

• I could accompany you if you desire some extra security.

“Never heard of it.” He scoffs back at you “But there is a tavern of some sort on this trail, I passed it an hour ago.” And he walks off into the dark.

— 

This style of interaction common throughout most narrative videogames is a call and response between the player (you) and the NPCs (non-player characters) that populate the world. The past decade of playing games has shown me that a premium is being placed on creating quality interactions, writing, and voice acting in games, anything that can be done to make these conversations sound and feel more ‘human’ and less robotically scripted.

If you could ask anything to any person in a game, the developers would have to write, record, and implement millions of possible lines. The Gold Standard for this and ‘Game of the Year 2023’ is Baulder’s Gate 3. It took nearly seven years to finish the whopping 174 hours of voice-acted dialogue possible to discover in the game. This is an immense amount of effort and time needed to even approach the naturally playful feeling of a real-world conversation. Yet it would be inaccurate to say that you can have a real ‘conversation’ with any of its characters.

As the conversational realism of games has increased I’ve developed a growing concern about our own real-world conversational abilities. Have you noticed yourself having the same conversation a dozen times at a social event? “Hey good to see you, yes I’ve been good, work is good, my next project is X.” The point of this article is not to imply that people are literally ‘pre-programmed’ like an NPC to engage in conversation in a rigid structured way. Rather it’s to highlight the undeniable convenience of picking an opinion you like and echoing it to those you talk with again and again. 

Forming our own opinions is mentally taxing, so be it from more traditional news channels, influencers, or podcasters, our opinions are shaped by the analysis we consume. This is the reason ‘NPC dialogue’ has been growing in popularity as an online insult. Users are attempting to describe this feeling that no matter who they talk to, or about what topic, everyone’s arguments and opinions are becoming perceived as more homogenous. I’ve found myself having discussions with friends that contain waves of deja-vu as I remember discussing the same topic with someone else while using not just the same line, but the same phrasing to make a point.

When we start to treat our real communications like we’re playing a game with one optimized ‘route’ to get us through every conversation, we chip away at what makes conversation interesting. In a game ‘winning’ is getting to the end of the interaction and claiming whatever the reward is. In the real world, conversation is the reward. The point of human conversation isn’t to just reach the end but to enjoy the dance of ideas, perspectives, tangents, and insights that bubble up along the way. 

Quality conversations get their magic from the nervous energy of not precisely knowing the direction they’re heading in. There is no ‘re-loading’ real-world interactions. The volume of conversations we engage in has increased dramatically in the digital age, from group chats and social media pages, to email chains covering everything from summer plans to political debates. We need to pick our battles when dedicating our mental effort to conversation. Digital conversation is inherently ‘structured’ differently than face-to-face conversation, like a videogame there’s more of a call-and-response than a cooperative chatter. We are all becoming more robotic and ‘NPC-like’ in our communications. It's not only that the NPC is scripted and has limited responses, but in order to interact on their level, you too have limited questions and prompts you can ask.

Perhaps we have begun skipping a step in our information processing pipeline, jumping directly from event to opinion while side-stepping the mental load of doing any analysis ourselves. We hear a good argument or perspective from a trusted source, and because we like the reasoning, we adopt it as our own opinion on the matter. 

While it’s almost impossible for everyone to hold a purely unique opinion on any topic, I'd like to suggest some strategies to help you break out of this ‘NPC dialogue’ and begin forming new and unique ideas. 

“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”

1. Approach conversations you disagree with more like an interview. Spend the time diving into why someone believes what they believe. Figure out what their sources are, what they may have misremembered, what their values and biases may be. In other words, you are digging for the context. You don’t have to agree with what they’re saying but you can at least get more to the core of WHY they’re saying it. 

2. Don’t treat conversations like a debate. I find myself often falling into the dialogue tree when I assume I know what direction the conversation is heading. A good way to tell if you’ve entered ‘debate mode’ is to spot when you’re repeating yourself, or are readying yourself to respond to a point that the other person hasn't even made yet. One conversation won’t change someone’s mind, nor should that be your goal to ‘win’ them over.

3. Have the confidence to defend what you believe by backing it up with compelling arguments. Opinions are iterative, so take the time to interrogate and refine your own beliefs. Understanding why you were compelled to believe something will keep your ideas fresh and adaptive. I think the only reason a person should ever need to support universal healthcare is “it’s good when the parents of sick children don’t go into debt helping their child.” Other people will have different rationals. C’est la vie. 

4. Think of how your perspective is valuable to THEM. Forget about yourself for a moment and be willing to go down a conversational path to find common ground and highlight mutual interests. Learn where their mind is at and what things they aren’t willing to compromise on. If you obsessively try to ‘sell’ your idea at every opportunity you’ll scare away a potential customer. If someone gets uncomfortable while exploring their reasonings, understand that the discomfort is crucial. Discomfort causes a moment of reflection, reorientation, and a reevaluation of one's beliefs.

5. Lastly, talk about something else, anything else. Give your brain the chance to reapproach a discussion from a new angle. When you feel a conversation has hit a dead end and is spinning its wheels it’s a good time to switch to something new or low-stakes. Switching up the topic can refresh conversations because we begin to in real time analyze what we know, make new arguments, and consider alternative perspectives before our opinion has solidified. These tangential discussions let you feel out which elements of a topic a person puts value in, or even where you might share common ground.

Humans are highly social creatures and we crave real human connection even if it can sometimes feel easier to talk like a Non-player Character with a shortlist of dialogue options. Communication is an imperfect art that can’t be simplified down to a flow-chart no matter how complex. The reason this increasingly structured conversational format feels strange to us is because we’re not NPC’s. We’re all players who have the agency to think complex thoughts, to communicate our opinions, and to hold a conversation without a predetermined dialogue tree. Communication should not be treated as a game, it’s a dance we practice with each and every conversation.

The Subtext of Context

Photo Courtesy of T Leish on Pexels

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

Communications is steeped in a galaxy of cultural context that we automatically invoke every time we speak. Our ability to communicate ideas, emotions, and situations to each other often relies on our ability to draw from a shared set of cultural reference points. From narratives like Shakespeare and the Bible to catchphrases from television shows, military jargon, and moments in pop culture, words and phrases are steeped in context and cultural double-entendre.  So what happens when that context is ignored?

I've heard from both comedians and public figures a common complaint that something they did or said is being taken ‘out of context’ to make them look bad. While it’s true that you can cut or ‘clip’ a video or statement to make someone's words or actions appear different from their intent, there’s equally numerous instances where the added ‘context’ (i.e. the moments preceding and following the segment we initially saw) are in fact more damning when included. 

Something innocent in one circumstance can take on an oppositional meaning if used in the wrong company or at the wrong time. This is partially due to the ongoing evolution of language and how the definitions of terms describe ‘usage’ rather than ‘meaning’. It’s why the dictionary is updated every year and new words continue to be added (shout-out to 2024’s word of the year ‘Brain-rot’). A drastic example can be seen with the evolution of ‘Queer’ from being used to mean strange or weird, to its use as a slur for gay people, to the modern reclamation of the term as a community identifier. The word remained the same, but the context of the times and culture that surrounded it changed.

Invoking a desire for ‘context’ is similar to the practices cigarette companies started employing in the 1970s when awareness of their products’ devastating ill-health effects began to be more broadly known. Their response? Begin finding the very research looking into the health effects of their products. While this might sound like tobacco companies taking accountability and responsibility for the effects of cigarettes, it’s not that simple. It turns out that if you never finalize your research, and never publish your findings, you can weaponize contextual ambiguity. The strategy isn’t to prove that cigarettes don’t cause cancer, but instead to claim that the research is ongoing, inconclusive, and incomplete. Without the finished research, who’s to say what the truth really is? All the while these products remain on store shelves continuing to cause the damage their owners' research apparently struggles to find.

As someone who watches debate content online, it can be entertaining to see two people hash out a disagreement. That said, debate content can quickly get to a point when the actual discussion of substance is side-lined by an extended disagreement about the semantic use of a term or phrase. A debate on ‘what’s better Cats or Dogs’ can quickly become exhausting when the interlocutors dedicate time to what amounts to a difference of phrasing. Substantial discussions around the costs of each, hygiene, life-span, emotional benefits, or otherwise are delayed as they instead argue about what the meaning of a word is. This shift from discussing concepts to discussing words can even be deployed as a tactic by some debaters to stall a debate and ‘win’ points from an opponent who is willing to concede a word's semantic meaning under the hope that it will get the debate back to the topic at hand.

For businesses, the benefits that come from establishing a shared base of context are most obvious when it comes to negotiations. While negotiations don’t typically end in a perfect compromise, a shared foundation of understanding regarding the circumstance of the negotiation, shared interests, and leverage, means both sides can establish some shared ‘truths’ on the matter. Negotiation styles are also highly culturally influenced by values like pride, entitlement, strategy, collaboration, and national identity just to name a few. 

The Trump/Zelenskyy meeting on US aid to Ukraine is a great example of context being lost (and I would argue deliberately being ignored). The meeting between the US and Ukraine was quickly seen as a textbook case of negotiations gone wrong. Ignoring for a moment how antagonism and power plays have become the go-to strategy of American foreign policy, we can notice a few instances of missing context which definitely worsened the fiasco. 

1. The context of language in that Zelenskyy was not speaking his first language meant he would respond to English sayings like “You don’t have the cards” with “We are not playing cards.” which seemed to annoy Trump.

2. The context of diplomacy was undermined when a discussion that was ostensibly between two state’s leaders was not respected by a peanut gallery of aides and associates who sought to insert themselves into the news cycle with outbursts designed to instigate Zelenskyy. 

3. The context of respectable state-wear was brought up when some in attendance began berating Zelenskyy for his military clothing choice. One person asked him “do you even own a suit?”, implying that maintaining a presidential appearance was more important that Zelenskyy’s promise to his people that as the Ukrainian commander in chief he will appear in military fatigues during the ongoing war. 

4. The Vice President also asked if Zelenskyy had “said ‘Thank You’ once.” deliberately ignoring the context of the hundreds of on camera appearances where Zelenskyy had said just that.

5. Lastly, the context of understanding the American negotiation style.

Zelenskyy was clearly aware of the context (missing or ignored) that kept coming up throughout the conversation and even highlighted this by inviting the Vice-President to come to Ukraine and see for himself the devastation of the war. His attempts to describe the greater threats that both Ukraine and the US would benefit from defending against unfortunately fell on deaf ears. His suggestion that the effects of conflict abroad would eventually make their way back to the US mainland was then intentionally misconstrued by the Vice President who feigned taking it as some sort of threat by Ukraine against the security of America, bringing us into the. The American style of negotiation is often a zero-sum fight with winners and losers (and Trump is not a loser, you are). 

Turning to a Canadian context. While it wasn’t badgered on as excessively, there was a similar communication slip up during the French debate for the Liberal Party leadership when Mark Carney mistakenly said he “Agrees with Hamas” en francais. Now regardless of his almost immediate correction by other candidates it was a concern that this would be capitalized on by the opposition to suggest Carney was somehow in favor of the group. Carney had meant to say that he agreed ‘on’ Hamas which was the topic at hand, but a single change of word (avec v. sur) completely altered his intended meaning.

Of course with the added context of who Carney is, his past stances, the discussion at the time, and his immediate self-correction, we know this was a grammatical misspeak and nothing else. The context exonerated him. However the context that this was a relatively basic grammatical error highlighted an issue with his French proficiency. This could be capitalized on as a wedge between him and the French-Canadian population who value a politician’s ability to equally communicate in both of the nation's official languages. 

Context is a powerful tool in both the right and wrong hands. The ability to use context that is true and beneficial to your side of a negotiation can be the turning point that results in compromise or concession. That said, ‘context’ is never a complete set of facts, it’s highly amorphous and flexible. A skilled debater, or a disingenuous individual, can selectively choose what context they think is ‘relevant’ (or discard context you have brought a ‘irrelevant’) if they feel it strengthens their angle. 

When considering how to approach a decision or negotiation on behalf of your business, establishing a shared contextual foundation with the other party is the best way to have a productive meeting with them. If it starts becoming obvious that the other party is fleeing towards semantics, attempting to undermine the already agreed upon foundational context, or simply trying to start a fight, it may just be best to disengage. 

Productive negotiation requires two parties interested in mutual benefit, if one side starts being rude and obtuse as a negotiating tactic then frankly it’s just a waste of your time.

The Power of Presentations: A Talk with Mike and Craig

Giving presentations requires the performance skills to stand before an audience and keep them engaged no matter the topic. This comes with the same nervous energy as delivering any theatrical monologue or performance. Whether you thrive or fear the spotlight, it’s a practiced skill to balance the development of clear visuals and your own delivery. Like any good performance, presentations seek to tell a story, they just tend to be more information and data driven. 

Blast helps clients produce better communications through an understanding of presentation design, audience analysis, and visual language. This means first and foremost understanding who your audience is and what they’re seeking to get out of your time with them. A meandering and overstuffed presentation will not only produce a muddled message, but as Thomas Jefferson observed “Speeches measured by the hour die with the hour.” Keeping an audience engaged means being economical with your time, because there is no getting it back.

Some major business figures like Jeff Bezos have pushed back against the use of presentations in Amazon’s meetings, along with the rise of AI tools automating how we communicate, are effective presentation skills becoming irrelevant? I sat down with Mike to discuss why he places such a focus on effective presentations, his tips for understanding your audience, and to learn what key factors will make or break your next presentation.

---  

Craig: Ever since I started working with you on Blast projects, presentations skills and their importance has been a pretty consistent theme. What is it about presentations for you that makes them so important to get right?

Mike: When I think of a presentation it’s like a stage in the sense that success or failure always comes down to how the person performs the presentation. If we don’t get the story right, then it’s a failure. As early as I can imagine, human communication has always been about telling a story, which is why we consume information and data in a much more profound way than just looking at charts and graphs. We don’t just listen to the words and numbers and mathematics of it all, we really need to appreciate it as a living breathing thing. Beyond the word of the meeting, that’s what a presentation offers, an entirely different level at which we can experience the story that the presenter is telling us.

Craig: Presentations have a notoriety for being aggressively dull or dragging on for longer than they’re welcome. Are there any strategies that you employ to keep presentations engaging for audiences, be those visual elements or other ways to break up the pacing?

Mike: The general experience people have with the form of presentations is that there’s always too much information. By contrast, there’s rarely a case where people have too much time. We almost invariably condition and prepare ourselves to fill every second of time we have with an audience. But I think something that helps with structuring your presentation is what I call ‘The Diamond Principal’. It starts with declaring upfront what that singular focus is. This is really important to do before branching out into subtopics and finally narrowing back down to the closing ‘action’ we want to happen after the presentation is finished. You help our audience by closing with a focused set of ‘next steps' which lets them apply the information you’ve just conveyed.

The question is then, what do you put in the middle? The struggle with the middle is figuring out ‘How do I get it down to the most important content?’ I always suggest you should go ‘deeper’ rather than ‘wider’. If we walk away from a presentation after spending an hour with a presenter who stays on one topic, unpacking it around three key fundamentals, then you’re always better off. Part of it is memory and pattern recognition. People just don’t have the capacity, especially today, to remember ten different things rapidly touched on. 

Craig: You’ve mentioned before how at Amazon specifically there’s a rule about “no presentations in meetings.” I hear this comes down directly from Bezos. What do you think would make someone so hostile to presentations?

Mike: I think for Jeff Bezos, a key decision maker who owns the company, one must look at how he absorbs information. What are his preferences? Few of us have ever met him in person but I’d have to classify him as an ‘Inductive’ audience that wants to get to the point, be very thorough, and is very logical in how a case is made. His preference is to have it in the memo form. Everyone reads it in the first half of the meeting and then talks in the second half. That’s how he designed it, that's the standard he set, that’s right for him. But what I worry about with that kind of prescription is that it misses so many of the things that make for good communication. Good communication being meaning, and resonance, and memorability.

In the presentation design methodology that we use we start by working out our audience’s values which involves identifying what's important to them. What’s the core of their work, what are they hoping to achieve, and where do they find the most pain? We spend time looking at how they communicate and receive information. The reason we do that is to leave ourselves in a state where we’re anchoring everything we’re trying to accomplish to the audience.

Bezos’ remedy is to have everyone sit in silence and read this story. That’s not a visual presentation problem; that’s a management discipline problem. I work with lots of companies that solve that by saying presentations must go out two days before a meeting, and at the start the CEO asks, “Did everybody read it, yes or no?” You get into trouble if you say you did but it becomes clear that you didn’t even open the document. 

Craig: Is there ever a risk in trying to strip a presentation down to the point it becomes too minimalistic or begins to rely heavily on having one specifically effective presenter tie all the content together?

Mike: One of the things in the workshop we do is get people's views on what makes a great presentation, or where they’ve seen a great presentation, and every time people talk about Steve Jobs and his keynote speeches. His presentations had a single image of a product or piece of technology with no other information on the screen. Jobs was an exceptional storyteller and there’s a lot of information he conveyed, but by virtue of being the uber-creator of all things Apple he’s very captivating in his knowledge and he has all of the answers. 

Most presentations are live collaborative engagements where multiple people are being led through a story. What audiences usually complain about is “I can’t understand this slide”. I’ve gone into meetings to build powerful presentations, and they can be immensely data-rich but if it's structured well and tells a powerful visual story then it becomes clear. If the question then becomes ‘what is the right amount of information?’ then it depends on what you’re trying to do. If you have a singular goal you want people to focus on, like an opening ‘why are we here’ message, it’s probably best to have a single thing or visual on the slide about what the goal is, to reinforce the spoken word. 

Craig: When people put time into crafting a presentation that ‘does that legwork for them’, would you say a presentation fails if it can’t be understood without the presenter in the room?

Mike: I think the right way is to always design the presentation for that specific event or experience. You should formulate it for that purpose. If it's being built to survive on its own and become a record, then it begins taking on multiple purposes. A presentation should give a platform for the audience and presenter to engage across. If we try to build something that lasts beyond that purpose, then it starts to get confused and difficult. You stop building it just for the audience and what they need to know. 

Looking at AI enabled presentation services, I’ve found they always come across as very generic, cold, and impersonal. Communication is a fundamentally human thing, and it’s one thing we should focus on preserving as something we care about. If we let go of that control and start becoming ok with having technology do something that’s inherently human and designed to create a human-to-human connection for us, then we’re kind of lost. 

Craig: What are some of the dangers of going down that path further? Do you see a similar issue there with the “A.I.-ing” of corporate messaging and presentations?

Mike: I think it's understandable human behavior, but I see us always choosing to take the path of least resistance. I really worry about this ‘laziness factor’, and that AI has an inherent passiveness built into it. You would assume that you can work with AI in a protege or assistant role, but even with some guidance, it often drifts away from an agreed upon direction and outcome that you’re asking for. That happens when you give it too much to do all at once, or you don’t calibrate tightly enough on what its job is. The reason for that is that AI is all about figuring out within a body of knowledge something that ‘fits’ your request. So, if its orders are too wide it’s lazy in the sense that it knows to just grab something between these specified endpoints. You get answers that are maybe correlated but not the cause you’re searching for. When it comes to communication I worry because we humans have a desire to get easy answers and AI seems very ‘easy’.

Craig: Thinking back to your earlier days of presentations, was there any point you got really interested in presentations? Was there a specific one that made you think “Wow these have a lot of power to them”?

Mike: The first year of my career I was doing benchmarking where we try to figure out how to improve a company's performance. At that time there was usually one computer in the office so I was the go-to person to manually draw and edit the slides on graph paper as the basis for these meetings. I liked the subject matter then, but when it really shifted was when an executive I was working with came and said, “My god all of you have to see this presentation!” She flipped through the hardcopy and explained the incredible singular story so as you journeyed through it. Though it was very complex, nothing was disconnected or left floating on its own. They were incredibly detailed slides but because they were well designed with the use of visual elements and care of language each slide could tell its story as part of the whole. 

Later in my career, the best presentation I felt that I’d ever worked on was when we had an hour with the senior officer of a global company. We went into that meeting for one hour with a single double-sided piece of paper. On one side was the problem, and on the backside was the solution we were bringing. We spent almost exactly half the time on each and at the end they had said “That’s the best meeting I've ever had in my life”. In my view, the longer a slide can hold the conversation and enable it, the more valuable it is. To do those two slides we probably spent two weeks on them, deriving and refining information from other slides and trying to get the details just right. In the end the presentation was a prop, a platform for conversation.

---  

To our readers, we hope you’ve gained a deeper understanding of the role of presentations as a stage and setting for communication. Presentations are created for specific contexts and audiences which requires you to consider their information processing style. While two great presentations might look completely different from structure to information density, in the hands of a skilled presenter they are equally as effective in communicating their information story. As auto-generated presentations enter the market it will be tempting to throw all of your key messaging into a system that promises to figure out the structuring for you. 

Resist this urge. 

Great presentations come from intimately considering the relationship between the presenter, audience, and information, something that for now still requires your complex understanding of human communications. 

Storytelling Strategies : A Talk with Mike and Craig

Cover image from Shaun Tan’s The Arrival

Steve Jobs famously described how “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”

“Storytelling” sounds juvenile, but a good storyteller doesn’t have to tell fictitious or embellished stories to capture and sustain the audience’s interest. Effective storytelling is a universally useful tool since telling your story uses the same kind of narrative structure as any book. As preferences of story form and length change with the rise of short-form digital media, knowing how to tell your unique story has never been more valuable. 

Recently, Mike and I sat down to discuss effective storytelling techniques by using The Arrival by Shaun Tan. A unique choice for discussion because it’s a book that's telling a purely visual story. So what storytelling lessons can be learned even without any words?  

Below are a few excerpts from our talk.

--- 

Mike: What are your thoughts on the visual aspect of storytelling because you picked a story that’s almost entirely visual? What’s the power you think in the story that comes through because of that visual element? 

 Craig: Something very visceral about it just being visual is how there’s an emotional level that gets added to the characters. Nuance and detail in everyone's expressions and features. You can follow the story beat for beat even without the words and understand what characters are talking about.  

The world of The Arrival and the things in it are drawn in that hyper realistic graphite pencil style, all the people very much look like people, the locations and the vehicles also look very tangible. There’s even a few that are adaptations of old photographs that give this book a very historic yet current feeling.

You’ll have a very close-up image of the character and then it will take a step back, and another step back, and another step back and you realize you’re seeing him through a window, a window on the side of a boat, a boat in an ocean, an ocean eclipsed by this massive cloud they’re approaching.  

It makes it a very intimate human story, but it contextualizes it as only one story amidst a sea of other people that are going through the same thing.  

Mike: History is always a matter of something we’ve experienced right? Something that’s happening now vs something that might in the future. What did you mean when you talked about it being deep history but at the same time current? 

 Craig: I’d probably define history a little bit differently in some ways. While I know that ‘History’ is all that’s preceded the current moment, my history started in 2001 when I was born. Everything that occurred before I existed is my history insofar as I wasn’t there, I didn’t exist yet so it’s ALL stories to me. While I’m sure you have very distinct memories of the 90s and 80s I can't have those. There’s this weird part of me that can’t grapple with the fact that that world existed without me in it.

So this story, because it emulates that old photobook look of our great grandfather making the crossing in 1910, it’s kind of timeless. It does a good job removing itself from the real world while still being inhabited by people with different histories and cultures.

The New Country, 2004-5, graphite pencil, digitally coloured, 60 x 40cm

So currently debates around immigration and nationality and who deserves or belongs to be where they are becoming increasingly relevant. It’s a story that stuck with me so much because as a kid reading through it ... it definitely instilled a new level of empathy in me in that I’d never had to go through something like that. So I’ve always wanted to protect and spread that message.

Mike: Shifting a bit, I’m curious about analogous storytelling. Is there a shortlist of different storytelling methods analogous being one of them? 

Craig: Well there's definitely Fiction and Nonfiction, but you also hear about ‘Creative Nonfiction’ in things like journalism and reporting when people are writing a factual account of a story but try to make it more interesting by drawing attention to certain elements.

Analogous storytelling is more of an overarching universal theory that I like to invoke because I think that most storytelling comes from a desire to tell fables to each other, to give people an example to learn from or have take-aways from. You can try to create a meaningless movie but no one’s going to watch it. You can create a sequence of flashing colours and images but even that people will try to analyze and draw meaning out of. It’s not just one way to make a story but it’s an inescapable element of storytelling that people will put a bit of themselves and their beliefs into it. Suggestions about how they wish the world was, or observations about how they see the world is.

Mike: And do you think that as a model for storytelling, is there a way you'd describe the beginning, the middle, and the end? Is there a special flow to The Arrival that all of that visualization hangs on?

Craig: There’s a lot in the book that doesn’t strictly speaking ‘advance the plot’. A lot of it is in service of building these emotions and relationships. There’s some pretty mundane things that you may not think are a very impactful part of the immigrant experience necessarily. But he goes shopping at one point and doesn’t recognize any of the food. It’s a very mundane moment but it’s in being stuck with all of these options that you don’t know how to evaluate against each other that you get this understanding.

There's a start in any good story of being very out of your element and being thrown into something where you don’t really know what’s going on. That middle being the learning experience and finding ways to connect with people and find those who are willing to help him. And the ending becomes the integration of these learnings and the comfortability with bringing his family because now he can pass those learnings on to them as well. Having that beginning, middle, and ending, the inexperience, learning, and integration is a pretty universal arc you see in a lot of stories.

Mike: Was it clear to you that on one hand, these are clear and deliberate things the author is trying to tell you through the story almost verbatim, and the other is a tableau of many different textured notes you have to look for? 

Craig: Like any good story there’s going to be topical clear themes, and I’m sure a major one Shaun wants to get across is a feeling of human empathy. 

Here’s something that readers can try for themselves: There’s a theory of communications that I like from Stuart Hall who talks about the Dominant reading of a piece of media, the Negotiated reading, and the Oppositional reading. If I took this book for example the intended reading would be ‘This book was written about an immigrant story to make readers empathise with immigrants in the real world and understand that they are people fleeing from things outside of their control to seek a better life.’ That could be a dominant reading.

An oppositional reading is often deliberately counter to what the intended message is. I do oppositional readings all the time with advertising (and I recommend that readers try this as well), with the oppositional reading you’re deliberately being a bit obtuse to get insight into how messaging can be changed through interpretation. The same thing happens with stories where we sometimes work with them and take away the authors intended but we also sometimes read into it and take away something they didn’t intend or even completely contrary to what they want us to learn from it.

When it comes to a negotiated reading we meet in the middle. Two people can read a book or view and ad and debate about its meaning or what a character's motivation is. The author might have a definitive idea in their mind so it’s not a failure of communication that everybody doesn’t get the same experience from the media, as much as debating is an inherent part of interpretation. Everyone's take-away will be slightly different. 

Mike: What’s your opinion on people’s capacity to absorb a story? I think a story is a more interesting way to consume and retain information, but what’s your sense of human capacity? People are extraordinarily overloaded with information so are we losing our capacity to even follow a story?

Craig: I don’t think we’re having trouble with visual storytelling because they are to an extent more passive than active reading. This is partially why I loved graphic novels as a kid because they could focus more on the dialogue, people, and they felt more like watching an animated film one frame at a time. With short-form video content it’s so easy to fall into because we’ve gotten so good at refining down these single interesting moments that are just captivating enough to keep us watching. It never feels like a big commitment, while reading a book takes extended dedication to finish it and get that satisfying feeling of accomplishment. There’s no worse feeling than abandoning a book halfway through, not because it lost my interest or was bad, but because something else grabbed the limited time and attention we have to dedicate to it. Movies go on without you but books you have to actively engage with the whole way through. 

Mike: So as we gravitate towards sixty interesting short stories is it more satisfying than one single story well told over sixty minutes? Where do you think the balance of the world is now leaning?

Craig: I’ve seen both. As a child of YouTube, there was an algorithm, and its dictates determined what types of videos it would prioritize and incentivize to be made. For a while people realised the most profitable were exactly 10 minutes long because they were long enough to go into the next ad tier, but short enough to keep people engaged. Over time there’s been a division between the two camps of micro-content and the rise of the video essayist. On YouTube there’s creators that go away for months. Any time they come back they drop a three, four, five-hour video longer than most movies. I’ve seen an eighteen hour long video retrospective on a nickelodeon television show that’s not really designed to be watched in one sitting. They're designed to be engaged like reading a book with chapters, because the speed you can convey information through video and audio is just so much faster than words in a document. So, while there is a tension between people willing to engage with this longform educational content, it’s more that the delivery system itself is updating. 

—

To our readers, we hope you took away some new ways to integrate storytelling into your own lives. The Dominant, Oppositional, Negotiated readings of Stuart Hall are a highly useful tool for media analysis and a great way for writers and readers to stress-test any public messaging. These excerpts are from an upcoming series of Blast interviews that will continue to delve further into powerful communications. Come back each week and learn how to boost your communication skills with Blast.

Dropping Your Stopping Points

Photo by Photo Yaroslav Shuraev on Pexels

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

Let’s play a quick game. There are no wrong answers, only more information and more complexity. I’ll present you with a list of choices followed by some sentences of added context. Before reading each section of context consider at what point you’d be comfortable not reading any further and making a definitive decision with the limited information. Let’s get started. 

The Game: Buying Your First Electric Car 

After each paragraph you can:  

A) Repair your current car to pristine condition.  

B) Buy a new electric car. 

C) Buy a used electric car. 

D) Continue reading. 

Your “ol’ reliable” has finally kicked the bucket with an impressive 300,000 km on the odometer. It was your first car out of university and took you everywhere, but it recently began making ‘the noise’ again and seeing that flashing yellow symbol on the dashboard probably shouldn’t have become the norm. You have many great memories with the car and suspect investing in some repairs could keep it going for another ten years. 

--- 

You’re in a stable spot financially but you can’t help but mull over how much gas was burned over all those kilometers. Everyone seems to be getting a new car anyways but as a future minded person you want to feel like you’re doing SOMETHING to offset those record-breaking temperatures. You’ve heard that buying a new electric car is a good option, but you’ve also heard that the carbon produced from the construction alone would take decades to truly drive off. 

--- 

While a new electric car sounds good a used one would mean that the carbon offset would be a bit easier to achieve since a brand-new car doesn’t have to be manufactured for you. Your current car’s resale value is basically just scrap anyways. There’s an electric car dealership that’s just opened near to you and you remember reading they’ve announced a ‘grand opening deal’ to the first 100 people that order a car from them. 

--- 

While looking into used electric cars online you come across the same model listed for $40,000. You message the seller, but it takes a few messages for them to respond to you. They ask if you are willing to pay for the car in cash because they live about an hour's drive away from you. They don’t have much social media presence but do have generally good reviews on the other things they’ve sold before. Your old car is really starting to struggle now and making noises you can only describe as “expensive”. Calling the dealership about the deal you also learn that it was only on the first 100 pre-sales of the newest model which have already sold out. 

--- 

The used seller has stopped responding to you online and appears to have deleted their account and all their listings. A recent media story has broken about the CEO of the electric car company making some comments about gay people’s right to marry and if it’s “necessary to legally enshrine those rights”. Your wife is highly displeased with their statements and is strongly against you buying any of their cars. You are also offput by the CEO’s statements because you are also a woman.  

So, did you make your decision? 

This game was inspired by something I heard Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad recently discuss. In a podcast segment discussing ‘Stopping Strategies’ he asks, “When is it that a person has acquired enough information to stop and make a choice?”  

Sadd explains that “Every decision that we make every day; we don’t sample all of the relevant and available information before we make a choice. We sample until we have sufficiently differentiated between the choices that you can say ‘There’s no point in sampling more information, I now have enough information to vote for Trump’”. 

Now regardless of whether you find his concluding example... compelling ... finding your decision threshold is important. When have we reached our own thresholds to make a conclusive decision and to take a stance that we will stand by? Be they in a professional context or our own personal beliefs, our thresholds are typically invoked faster than we’re even aware they’re there. Basic things like deciding what to have for lunch or when to go for a break, to decisions with more gravity like purchasing a house or committing to a business plan. In all cases we eventually have to take the leap and commit to a choice. 

For myself, different decisions have different ‘decision thresholds’ largely depending on their level of impact, things like weighing their repercussions or consequences. Considering their permanence can also weigh heavily on me, because there’s comfort in the ability to retry or undo things if they don’t work out in our favor. Our thresholds are a largely personal metric that fluctuates from person to person. 

The game you played took some inspiration from my childhood fascination with choose-your-own ending books (notably Goosebumps: Deep in the Jungle of Doom which can’t possibly hold up to my memories of it). This was a little game to test your own stopping points. There were no wrong answers with your decisions, only things to recognize about your process of decision rationalization. Did you have a gut instinct just by seeing the initial options? Was it a practical, social, or economic element that swung you one way or the other? Did your decision change with the more context you read through? 

While you’re in this mindset I’d also highly recommend you check out Welcome To Vanguard Estates a phenomenal choose-your-own adventure I came across at university where you navigate the ethical decisions of putting your aging father into a retirement home completely run and operated by AI assistants.  

Understanding our stopping strategies and decision thresholds can help us not only make decisions but prioritize our search for the information we value. Out of 100+ elements of a car like mileage, colour, price, social image, speed, brand, size, etc. our decision likely boils down to less than 10 key attributes that carry much of the decision's weight.  

For Ontarians provincially, and Canadians federally, one of the most important decisions we all must make is the upcoming Provincial/Federal elections. Again, it’s a choice with hundreds of factors and variables that may influence our ultimate decision but take a moment to ask yourself what the key variables are for you. Do you like the candidate but not their party? Do you like their policies but not the person? Are you not convinced by any of the options and think you may sit this election out? Political campaigns are floods of compelling information and attempts to undermine competing candidates, but all of the facts and figures aren’t equally influential in your decision.  

Don’t get overwhelmed and swept away by the flood of information. Find the anchor points that you value and hold on tight. Everything else has sway but will rush past you if you let it. There are calmer waters coming. 

If you want your friends to try this game for themselves, send them the link to this article or download the attachment here for a longer version of the game. 

What’s in A Name?

Photo by Andre Benz on Unsplash

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

Shakespeare was right when Juliette asked “What's in a name?” because, as it turns out, it’s quite a lot. 

Everything we interact with has a name. People, places, items, brands, they’re all referred to with words so entwined with their being that we often neglect the fact they could have just as easily been called anything else. Without getting too semiotic about how the word “Tree” and the signified Tree that we talk about are not inherently linked outside of linguistics, today my reader I want you to interrogate the meaning found in some of the names you interact with every day. 

In the professional world one of the most obvious examples of a ‘name’ is a brand name or a company name. Take your own for example, you might be intimately familiar with its background, its meaning, its reference, heck you may have been present when it was first scrawled out on a napkin. However it was manifested, have you ever considered what the name alone communicates to its potential customers? 

Granted, with some brands their names have grown to instill security, reliability, profitability solely by the nature of them already being a major player in their field for decades. Nothing about Apple necessarily communicates that it’s the world's most valuable technology brand other than the fact that we’re all aware it has been dominating the field and that roughly 2.2 billion people on the planet own one of its products. The cache of the name came from its accomplishments, but it could have just as easily been named ‘Tree’ and maintained a similar market cap. 

That said, for the brands that don’t quite make the Fortune 500, a good name serves both to communicate things to ourselves and our audience. A name should ideally give a gist of its purpose, values, goals, and identity. Sometimes this can be quite literal like Canadian Pacific Railway. For small-scale cottage industry projects a pun or play on words is a tried-and-true way to endear yourself to clients. A personal favorite of mine comes from a hair salon I spotted in the UK dubbed Curl Up And Dye which expertly deploys both methods at once. 

There should be a level of uniqueness to your name that distinguishes you from direct competition. Memorable, pronounceable, and able to pass the phone test (i.e. can you hear and accurately write the name down if told it over the phone) these are all great metrics to aim for, but understanding what your name communicates to someone that’s never heard of you is crucial to making a powerful first impression. 

Begin by considering the values and purposes of your organization. A bank might value security, stability, and trust, which can be seen in The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce which conveys an old-money colonial sentiment, while a name like Chase has always confused me. Even though the name comes from Salmon P. Chase, the US Treasury Secretary under Lincoln, and remains a wildly successful bank throughout The States, I’m personally not that comforted by the idea of needing to ‘chase’ my money from place to place if I ever wanted to withdraw it. 

When it comes to tech-startups the ‘drop a few vowels from a noun’ strategy, delightfully dubbed ‘disemvoweling’, demonstrates that brands begun spending less time considering the actual “meaning” of their names than they did their memorability and if they could be used as a vehicle to capture the traffic of a common word. This was largely in response to the cornering of single words during the .com goldrush which quickly led to the ownership of nearly every word in the English Dictionary followed by .com. This accumulation forced many tech founders to focus more on pronunciation than on grammar. David Karp the founder of Tumblr.com put this succinctly saying, “At the end of the day… it all comes down to one simple, absolute truth: Tumbler.com (with an ‘e’) looks f---- stupid.” 

A clear instance of the emotional bond an audience can form with your name can be seen in Twitter which started its life as Twttr when the domain name Twitter.com was owned by a bird enthusiast that the Twitter founders eventually agreed to buy the domain from at a massive markup. Though it’s recent transition to the much maligned ‘X’ might just be the ultimate example of the gutting of meaning from company names. X is everything and nothing all at once, it’s a mathematical symbol, a sexual symbol, a mark, a cross, a negative, an unnamable ‘factor’, and of course was chosen as “the ‘coolest’ letter of the alphabet” when polling both Elon Musk and 12-year-olds worldwide. With a name like X there was certainly buzz generated about the drastic rebranding of an internet staple, but despite the ongoing skirmishes between the Xvangelists and the Orthodox Twitterites, the adoption of the new name has broadly been integrated and moved past. The attention it once grabbed was drawn more by temporary novelty than anything else. 

There has been some recent reversal of the brand disemvowelment trend to full, grammatically correct words being used by companies to be both literal and explicit with their business, while continuing to corner entire concepts like the clothing store Wardrobe. Take Blast as an example. Mike explained his reasoning behind the name as an origin story. “When I began working as an independent company, I wanted to create a brand that encapsulated what was unique and different about the way I work. I would just say that it conveys speed, simplicity, clarity and high impact. When I thought about words that were short and conveyed this “Blast” surfaced right away.” 

When thinking of what name represents your brand, remember that the name will always be secondary to the content of the service. Your identity as a brand can feel concrete and unchangeable. Shaking up your identity can be costly, labor intensive, and unintuitive to users that have gotten used to the precedent. For Mike, the brand name arose by primarily grounding it in the values and goals of the company. 

Deciding on a good name is a highly personal decision that will fundamentally shape how your company or organization is seen. But, before you indulge in the temptation to emulate what you see other successful brands doing by following trends like disemvowelment, literal names, or joining the X-ify X-ly family of brands, heed this warning:  

“You don’t want your business name to be part of a trend. Trends have short life cycles.” -Mariana Glazman, Founder of Suitely 

If you don’t know who Mariana is or what Suitely was, take this as proof enough that she’s speaking from experience. 

The Funny Little Power of the Understatement

Photo from RDNE Stock project on Pexels

Writer: Craig Meerkamper.

Now I'm not one to brag but I’ve recently been offered the opportunity to pursue my Master of Journalism at Carleton University which is widely recognized as the most prestigious journalism school in Canada. It’s incredibly difficult to get into this elite school and it might just be the most significant achievement of my life (or anyone's life for that matter). 

To be real, I feel myself cringing when I talk about my accomplishments in a self-congratulatory way. Even just while writing that opening sentence, I often find that when I'm talking about this accomplishment, it feels really arrogant to put the opportunity into those terms. And despite what I see and hear from influential figures daily, I doubt that I’m the only person that feels a sense of embarrassment to talk about myself this way.  

In the social media era, every accomplishment is expected to be recorded, posted, and promoted to help build your own identity ‘brand’ online, and this leads to an uncomfortable pressure to constantly compare my resume of experiences, achievements, and accomplishments to those of my peers. But to counter this practice, I feel like we all need to develop the confidence to allow our audience to ascribe their own level of importance to our achievements without a bunch of hyperbolic posturing.  

There’s a narrative concept usually found in action or sci-fi stories called ’power-creep’, where the protagonists need to keep beating bigger and badder villains at a rate that leaves little time for the narrative stakes to be appropriately raised. The latest Star Wars trilogy had to make everything a bit bigger for it to have an impact with audiences. The Death Star is no longer the size of a moon that can destroy planets, now it's called ‘Starkiller’ and it’s the size of an entire planet and can destroy solar systems. Marvel superhero movies suffered the same issue since defeating the decade-long threat of Thanos who sought to kill “half of all life in the universe”. After his defeat the next major villain is presumably going to be a threat because they plan to destroy... all of life in the universe? What happens after that? Where does it end? 

Protagonists run out of ‘tangible’ threats, so oftentimes they end up fighting ‘concepts’ like ‘Reality’ or ‘Alternate Universes’ or ‘The collective negative consciousness of all living things’ or ‘the darkness’ etc. Etc. I sense a similar power-creep problem has entered the professional world as well. 

The reason I bring this up is to highlight how excessive hyperbole causes companies (much like narrative writers) to quickly run up against a limiting wall of their own creation. Ever-greater problems, stakes, and metrics have to be manufactured to justify why the latest achievement is any more substantially remarkable than the previous. In short, people get tired and bored of the extremes because if every announcement is equally ‘world-changing’ and ‘unprecedented’ then they eventually become just as predictable as if nothing significant happened at all. 

To work around this, I often find myself strategically employing my favorite conversational tag-team of understatement and humor.  

When describing the admission offer to my dream program to friends and colleagues, I'll often say that it’s “pretty good” or how I was “glad my writing samples did the trick”. I’m intentionally leaving the (wrong) implication hanging in the open that I could have possibly been admitted to a better program, or that the carefully curated portfolio of my best work samples somehow ‘tricked’ the experienced admin team into offering me admission. Both of these implications are of course false, so why even make them? An effective understatement isn’t usually false itself, as much as the implication it leaves open is so obviously wrong that it becomes humorous. 

Understatements aren’t strictly inaccurate; rather they highlight the obvious by brazenly avoiding its direct acknowledgement. Getting a promotion becomes “moving offices and getting a better chair”. Having a child is “having a new roommate”. Officially launching a product after years of development is “looking for public feedback on a new prototype”. Simplifying situations intentionally draws attention to the thing being understated while avoiding getting caught up in extreme hyperbole. 

It might sound a bit self-deprecating to undersell massive achievements, but when using understatement, the point isn’t to deny yourself the ability to feel pride in what you’ve achieved, or to downplay a truly significant accomplishment, but to remain realistic in the scope of your accomplishments. In a professional context, when you have nowhere in your field or career to go but up it's a good idea to leave yourself a bit of space for perceivable growth. 

When it comes to professional communications with your coworkers or staff, I don’t advocate that you use understatements that come off as being dissatisfied or underappreciative of your/their successes, so this usually works best when talking with people that you’ve built background with and are already familiar your personality.  

Say we have a stern professor who delivers all of his lectures at an excruciatingly slow pace. Talking with someone after I might say “I wonder what the good news is, did you notice he had some energy today?” While this isn’t factually ‘wrong’ it’s subjective enough that it becomes funny to acknowledge that there even was a remark-worthy difference between two comparably dull lectures. I am intentionally drawing attention to how dull the lectures are without directly saying “well that was another slow one.” From my perspective a good understatement appears to “miss the most obvious” but in doing so actually draws attention to the obvious, which is often so unavoidable or integral that its acknowledgement is usually deemed unnecessary.  

I feel that there’s also a need to use understatements to counterbalance the prolific hyperbole we often hear in the professional world. When every achievement is announced as the biggest, the greatest, the most profitable, the first in history, they often become indistinguishable and exhausting. A company’s goals fail to stand out from each other when the bar can’t go any higher than where it’s been set. 

Say Company X has recently been purchased by Apple and they put out one of the two following statements. Think about which statement (over vs understated) engages you more and makes you interested in following the company's future developments.  

1. “Our company has just made start-up history by becoming the highest value asset Apple has ever paid to acquire.”  

   vs.  

2. “The team slept well last night. Apple offered to acquire us for only double our market value.” 

A good understatement has the miraculous power to engage people’s critical thinking faculties by forcing them to ‘read between the lines’ of a statement. There’s something satisfying about the feeling that you’ve been let in on a secret or picked up on a hidden message even if there’s nothing truly being withheld. I find that acknowledging an open-secret indirectly often causes a little ‘game’ to begin between me and my friends where we all know ‘what’ it is we’re talking around but continue feigning ignorance with a wink and a nudge. Forming in-jokes and understanding subtext is highly useful in the professional sphere where teams of coworkers can learn how to better understand each other's communication styles and subtleties. 

Mastering the use of understatement in your communications isn’t for everyone nor for every scenario since we do have to take formal professional communications seriously. But knowing when to relax on the hyperbole and leave your work the room to rise to new heights will make anyone that is interested hungry for the next big update. 

At least in my case understatements have opened a door or two, one just happens to be the doors into a major University. 

How Analogy Cuts Both Ways

Photo from Artem Kulinych on Pexels

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

Analogy is easily one of my favorite tools in the writer's toolkit because it’s relatively easy to deploy -- but difficult to effectively use. It provides your audience with a recognizeable and easy way to understand everything from the organizational structure of a business to the utility of a new product. The central power of analogy is the way it turns comparisons into ‘frameworks’ that can significantly ease your audience’s comprehension when strategically applied.

The barrier to entry when using analogies is so low that most people end up unintentionally using them every day without even realizing it. This article is riddled with a bunch that I didn’t even mean to put into it, they’re just that integral to the English language.  

Here’s a very familiar example: 

We talk about housing markets as “a bubble ready to burst”. Housing markets are really complex. They have so many variables, it’s almost impossible to describe them to the public without an analogy. A framework that can be visualized makes this much easier. The bubble is clear and simple. The notion of it bursting is quite powerful too. We see the bubble getting bigger. We know it can’t continue forever, but we don’t know exactly when it will pop. We can only sense it’s about to happen. 

Analogy is not the same as Metaphor and Simile, but they are often used together. Metaphor is calling one thing something else entirely. Think “my math teacher is the devil”, sorry to all the math teachers reading this but today you are my scapegoat (oh look a metaphor!). Simile is the next step up; think “my math teacher is like the devil”. Simile recognizes a single comparison, letting readers draw their own assumptions of exactly how the teacher is comparable to the devil. Maybe they’re a tyrant who rules their domain and enjoys inflicting torment through brutally difficult tests. I for one would assume a math teacher is like the devil because they both enjoy ‘sin’ (that joke's an apology to all the math teachers because only you guys will get it).  

Analogy takes a like-comparison and runs with it, exploring its limits by demonstrating a number of similarities. Take a mental note when you feel this following analogy stops working for you and you’ll get what I mean.  

Although analogy is the most powerful of the three tools, using it is a lot like running with scissors. It's flashy, attention grabbing, and can quickly turn into a bad idea if you don’t know when to slow down and question your choices. You need to make sure it’s the right pair of scissors to run with for your intended purpose. Running with a bad pair of scissors means that the longer you try to force them to meet your needs the more likely you are to misapply them. You might want to continue running with the scissors because you’ve already committed this far. So, you double down and now you’re running with two pairs of scissors at the same time, which is twice as dangerous, and (at around this point) the analogous comparison has gone far past credulity and entered the world of the absurd. 

As a thought experiment, there is a lot of potential value in getting to that absurdist point because depending on the two elements of the analogy, it may take a shockingly long time to get through all the appropriately correlative comparisons. A comparison with a high level of parallel elements can mean the analogy is actually quite strong. Pushing past that point to increasingly tenuous comparisons (i.e. airplanes are like monarch butterflies because they have wings, migrate to Florida every winter by the thousands, and are interested in... flowers?) enters the territory of ‘forcing’ an analogy when you begin assuming that every element of framework must cleanly correlate with something you’re trying to describe. However, doing this exercise can help you to consider your problems in a nonconventional way and even help reframe them.  

On the other hand, forcing an analogy can make you overconfident in your understanding of your problem and can cause you to make ill-informed decisions. A good analogy should help you think outside of the box, instead of just providing you another box to graft your problem/idea onto. You might feel that your business compares well to how a pirate ship is run with its ruthless Captain, First Mate, and keeping all of its treasure hidden in the Caymen Islands, but if you force the analogy and try to literally run it like a ship by barking captain’s orders to your crew and throwing the dissenters overboard you’re going to end up with a mutiny on your hands. 

Entire industries use analogy to make themselves sound less intimidating and more comprehensible to newcomers. If you try to explain to me how blockchain technology is a distributed ledger system within a decentralized network of users, my eyes will glaze over. However, we can understand why it became popular to discuss cryptocurrency as “digital gold” that you “mine” and keep in a “wallet”. A similar thing is happening in the AI space where we describe the “training” process of large language models like that of a pet where they are given digital “treats/rewards” and “punishments” based on their outputs to get them closer to desired behaviors. Simple, visual concepts that we’re all familiar with make the new and obtuse more approachable. 

When it comes to your own use of analogy in the workspace consider a complex problem you’re currently facing and the ways analogy can help you provide an approachable framework to explain the situation. Say a member of staff is making a workspace intolerable because they are disruptive and insert themselves into projects or discussions where they aren’t needed. Or an investor would be interested in supporting your project but isn’t convinced of its feasibility without a test or prototype. Draw out a diagram of the parties involved and their relationships before asking yourself if there’s power dynamics at play, emotional factors, functional relationships, procedural stages, and anything else that defines how these elements relate to each other.  

Is your problem like a boardgame, a sporting team, a Greek myth, a movie, an illness? Inspiration for the appropriate analogy can come from anywhere, but when you’ve found one that seems to have a high level of parallels, begin mapping your problem onto that framework while highlighting the points it’s different. These differences are crucial to personalizing your deployment of the framework and explaining the problem to others. If there’s a “rock in your shoe”, then would it be better if the “rock” was “smoothed out” or just “removed” entirely? If the “team is resentful of a star player” getting the most “field time”, then could you “increase the frequency you rotate the bench?”  

Analogies don’t usually produce hard answers or decisive recommendations, but they assist you in focusing on the questions you should ask to effectively tackle your problems and communicate your proposed solutions. Real problems are never as simple or easily addressed as we would like them to be, but a solution can often become more obvious with a bit of strategic reframing. Like a hot knife through butter, you’ll be cutting through your problems and clarifying confusion before you know it. 

Building a Skeleton: How Writing Comes Together From the Inside-Out.

Image by DangrafArt

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

Whenever I write I like to imagine I’m building a person. Everyone has their own unique voice, personality, perspective, shape, attitude, flaws, and a multitude of other elements too long to comprehensively list (nor would you want to read). Writing is much the same, with a little bit of ourselves, our quirks, our voice put into everything we produce. We are all Doctor Frankenstein trying to bring our work to life.  

When I say ‘building a person’ what I mean is starting from the inside. The place I always start is constructing a skeleton -- literally the bare bones of what points I want to make or broader arguments I want to convey -- in the order I’m planning it to appear in the final draft. Laying out the ‘bones’ of your sections including title, topic, and themes gives you a clear framework you can quickly reference to get a sense for the flow of the completed piece. Instead of writing a bunch of disparate points and spending hours reorganizing at the end, think of the paragraphs as buckets of like-information that you can use as a roadmap to quickly visualize your completed piece early on. One page of structured information with keynotes is a far more manageable way to review and restructure a piece from head-to-toe than a 10-page semi-finalized draft. Now, a skeleton of a piece can’t stand on its own because even with the foundation in place it’s far from complete. It’s dull, disconnected, and not very ‘fleshed-out’ (you see where I’m going with this?)  

The next layer is the guts and arteries, the major points of connection that ‘flow’ throughout the piece. I’m talking about the points that bridge the gaps between the separate bones so the transition from one to the other is much smoother. This is the layer that starts to hold everything together and brings some cohesion by clarifying the connections between your key points. It’s also where you can start planning out any overarching themes that you want to reinforce across the piece. If you were writing about sales and wanted to have a section summarizing an industry success story followed by a section discussing a brief history of mercantilism, they aren’t unrelated, but it’s at these leaps that you’re most likely to lose some readers. Smoothing out the transition with an overarching theme like ‘evergreen sales tactics across history’ gives your readers an informational bridge to cross. 

Next comes the muscle; the references, the evidence, the expert quotes and sources that strengthen and back up what you’ve said. You might have been collecting these already to guide your direction, but building muscle is often the most exhausting and labor-intensive part of writing. No one ever said building muscle was easy and if you want your piece to be its strongest it’s where much of the ‘work’ really lies. Have a coffee, or a protein shake if that helps you get into the mindset better, and strap in for five more reps (or refs?). At this point your piece should be looking pretty functional but still a little raw. Time to wrap it up with the last layer.  

Skin! Skin is the layer where you can start really adding personality, character, and voice to your work. It’s the asides and the notes that make your work feel more human and less robotic (note: remind me to renew my subscription for ChatGPT). While I personally try to avoid using AI as much as possible in my writing it does help me find specific words that sound more professional, or a it suggested: it helps me "endeavor, to the utmost extent feasible, to employ terminology and verbiage that exudes an elevated level of sophistication, intellectual refinement, and professional gravitas.” Your mileage may vary. Skin is the refining and accessorizing of your piece. To me it’s the most enjoyable part of the writing process because it’s the stage when detail and nuance can be added. The danger with the Skin stage being that it’s also the point when you must determine your work is finished. A quote from Céline Sciamma’s phenomenal film Portrait of a Lady on Fire always comes to mind.  

HÉLOÏSE: When do you know when it's finished? 

MARIANNE: At some point you stop. 

Skin wraps everything up and gives one final pass to what was once a jumbled bag of ideas, points, and references, turning them into a cohesive unit of information that’s ready to send out.  

So, congratulations doctor, you’ve completed your piece and with the help of a handy framework to structure your approach you didn’t go mad in the process (hopefully). The last, very crucial, step before hitting ‘publish’ is to take a deep breath and declare: 

“IT’S ALIVE!” 

Raising Trust Raises Dollars

Photo by Jessica Alves on Unsplash

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

Fundraisers believe in the power of community. They believe in the charity of the individual and the power that can come from harnessing many individual donations to cause large-scale social impact. But it’s in proving and communicating the impact of contributions that many fundraisers struggle.

When you make a donation you aren’t buying a service or a product, you’re buying a promise. The promise is that your contribution will have a bigger impact when pooled than it could have individually. Fundraisers attract donations from large and diverse audiences of donors, each with differing levels of investment in the cause and familiarity with the structure of pooled funds. Getting too analytical risks alienating donors who are focused on the big picture impact from those who want to know how their personal contribution specifically had impact.

It’s extremely difficult to quantify how much impact each individual brings to the project, and the danger arising from this is donors becoming apathetic to the necessity of their individual donations. When discussing your successes, bring clear and honest examples that can be understood by anyone. Leave your audience feeling that their donations are well cared for and have made the difference they hoped.

When hosting presentations for donors, a fundraiser’s job is to demonstrate success. Nothing convinces people that their money is being used effectively more than tangible results. This is of course easier said than done when a fundraiser is tasked with conveying complex data in an accessible and engaging way. If your presentation is long-winded or caught up in the nuanced details of research, the data itself may indeed be crucial to explaining how you arrived at the breakthrough, but to avoid risking donor disengagement you must focus first and foremost on the breakthrough itself. 

The magic of keeping donors engaged and willing to continue contributing lies in an effective balance between factual reporting and understandable success stories. Exploring how an individual was affected by your research, or how their life specifically changed due to the funding, is a great way to give a face and name to donors. It provides a case-study of how your organization seeks to help other similarly struggling individuals, and can remind donors of where they would be if the organization was not able to help them due to a lack of funding.

Fundraising must carefully balance its messaging between emotional calls to action, and the factual results of their research. So be strategic with your presentations, charts, and graphs. Make the most crucial takeaways the most memorable, and don’t spend all of your time getting caught in the specifics. Broad change happens thanks to a broad base of support, and that requires building a longstanding trust in your organizations purported goals, and in proving your efficacy at achieving them.

With these struggles and tips in mind, Blast is excited to offer a new course, “How to Build Powerful Presentations”. The program is designed for professionals facing diverse audiences, looking to improve the clarity and impact of their presentations. By taking the course, participants learn how to structure a clear, powerful story. They also learn proven methods to build impactful slides that reassure and inspire audiences very time.

Upcoming Fundraiser Sessions: January 20 & January 22 2025 4pm-7pm EST.

Taking Centre Stage

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

How bad is your stage fright? When making public appearances in front of a crowd, there’s a fine line between those who crave the spotlight and those who feel safer behind the scenes or in the audience. This is doubly so for those working in promotions who have the added pressure of not just representing themselves, but representing an entire brand identity. 

From video games, to industry conventions and fast food, promotional presentations are unique in the dynamic they create between presenter and audience. At most promotional presentations, the audience is self-selected. They’re there looking to get a sneak peek at what their favorite IP has planned for the future. They’re there for more than just data and sales metrics. The audience wants to be the first to hear the inside scoop. More than anything, they want to be entertained.

Thinking of promotional presentations in this way, as a show and performance, rather than a strictly corporate affair, is a crucial way to build audience engagement. Wowing an audience doesn’t mean flashy spectacle and pyrotechnics (though if there’s the budget for some flamethrowers I don’t see how it could hurt), it requires an engaging confidence in your information delivery. 

This is to say, you need to impress them. The least impressive thing is reading every word verbatim off of presentation slides, adding nothing more. When hosting a promotional presentation, you’re performing, you’re a one person show. So you really have to learn your lines. An overly constructed presentation that’s long, complex, and writing heavy is like putting your entire annotated script up on the screen. Sure, all the content is technically there, but does the audience really gain much from seeing that?

Instead, think of your presentation as your cheat sheet. You’re the star and your presentation is the backdrop. It’s there to support and bolster your performance — to give the audience something big to think about. Making a point more impactful, making a crucial statistic memorable — these are the moments you change the slide, or bring up a visual that creates a special, lasting impact.

With these struggles and tips in mind, Blast is launching an exciting new course, “How to Build Powerful Presentations.” It’s designed for professionals who want to take their presentations to the next level. By taking the course you’ll learn proven methods to tell a powerful story and design impactful slides that help your presentation leaving the audience saying “wow!”.

Upcoming Promoter Sessions: January 15 & January 16 2025 4pm-7pm EST.

How to Face the Dragon

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

I’m a big fan of the mythology behind Dragon’s Den. The lone entrepreneur charges into battle against a panel of five hungry beasts, trying their best to gain the dragons’ favor (and capital) without sacrificing too much of their company in the process. Despite the more ‘fantastical’ elements of the show it’s still the image that comes to mind for many aspiring entrepreneurs who wish to see their own venture succeed. While the reality of ‘reality’ television is always questionable, there are some major lessons that entrepreneurs can take when building their own pitch presentations. 

1. Time is Money: Wasting an investors time is an incredible way to lose their interest and their funding. You have roughly five minutes to pitch, explain, and establish trust in your venture before an investor even begins considering your offer. Instead of burning valuable minutes building up your backstory, struggles, and future goals, focus on what you have to offer here and now. Lead with value and follow with context. 

2. Be engaging and clear: No one knows the nuanced details of your project like you do so it can be easy to forget that no one is where you are when it comes to your venture. It’s so easy to lose investors and customers explaining the niche and specific elements of your product. What may very well be an impressive stat, or innovative change to a classic design, will fall flat if not communicated clearly and concisely. Your presentation should be engaging, easily understandable, and focused on the things that really count. You can always elaborate more if an investor is interested in specifics, but if they can’t understand the broad strokes of your presentation then they can’t understand the value you want to bring.

3. Leave a lasting impact: Bad presentations are notorious for being long slogs of dull information, so learn how to defy that expectation. Add personality to your presentations by delivering it with a conversational confidence. Don’t rely on your presentation to do the pitch for you, use them strategically to deliver the most important information in an impactful and memorable way. Keep focused on success stories and ongoing plans that show you’ve planned the future of your venture and can execute it with investor support. You want your venture to be seen as a sure investment, so even if you leave without a deal, you’re sure they’ll remember your project. If your presentation feels like every other presentation the investor has seen before, then you’ve given them nothing new to consider.

With these struggles and tips in mind, Blast is launching an exciting new course “How to Build Powerful Presentations”, designed for professionals who want to improve the way they build presentations that shine in front of investors and customers. By taking the course you’ll learn proven methods to structure a clear, compelling story, build clean, impactful slides and bring it all together in a way that gives you the platform to communicate your pitch with confidence every time.

Upcoming Entrepreneur Sessions: January 6 & January 8 2025 4pm-7pm EST.

The Art of Impact

Photo by George Desipris on Pexels

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

Presentations aren’t just about sharing information; they’re about creating a connection, building trust, and inspiring action. For many professionals, particularly those offering a vision or sharing results, presentations can be the bridge between innovation and investment, concept and commitment. Yet, even the most compelling insights can lose their power if not delivered with care. The challenge lies in balancing clarity with depth, and impact with simplicity.

When we present, we’re not just informing—we’re inviting. We’re asking our audience to see what we see and believe in our vision. This requires a careful, thoughtful approach that avoids overwhelming the audience with too many details or complex data. While every insight may feel essential, too much information can obscure the core message, making it hard for audiences to walk away with a clear understanding of what truly matters.

To create impactful presentations, start by focusing on the heart of your message. What do you most want your audience to remember? Then, consider how best to convey that core idea in a way that resonates. This might mean sacrificing some data points in favor of clarity or crafting a narrative that helps your audience see themselves in the story you’re telling.

Another essential element is visual simplicity. Slides brimming with text or dense with graphics hinder comprehension. Instead, aim for slides that deliver the message cleanly, conscisely - rather than give every possible point. Each element—whether a graphic, chart, or piece of text—should reinforce the main point, not distract from it.

And never underestimate the power of sharing real life examples. At the end of the day, it’s often the stories we tell that stick. An anecdote about a customer, a case study, or an example can humanize data, giving the audience a natural way to care about your message in a way that facts and figures alone cannot.

Presentations, like any act of communication, are about building a relationship. You’re not just presenting a series of facts; you’re building trust, nurturing interest, and inspiring action.

With these struggles and tips in mind, Blast is excited to offer a new course, “How to Build Powerful Presentations”, designed for professionals looking to improve their communications skills. By taking the course, participants learn how to tell a powerful story. They also learn proven methods to build high-impact slides that deliver the most value for audiences.

Upcoming Sessions for Everyone: January 27 & January 29 2025 4pm-7pm EST.