Communicating The New: Methods to Shape and Accelerate Innovation

4

Introduce new thinking

EXPLORATORY EXPERIENCES

IMMERSION EXPERIENCES

INTERACTION EXPERIENCES

APPLICATION EXPERIENCES

EXTENSION EXPERIENCES

OBJECTIVES AT THIS STAGE:

Create emotional and intellectual engagement with the work.

Incubate new thinking in others.

Build belief, conviction, and ownership.

Establish relevance, potential of The New.

It's never enough just to tell people about some new insight. Rather, you have to get them to experience it in a way that evokes its power and possibility. Instead of pouring knowledge into people's heads, you need to help them grind a new set of eyeglasses so they can see the world in a new way.

—John Seeley Brown

It's time to step away from the projector. Slide presentations are standard operating procedure in most organizations, and their ubiquity is one of several reasons we should strive to limit their role in communicating The New. To wrap new thinking in conventional communication practices diminishes the novelty of the work because the experience model is too familiar and overused. It invites others to slip into a correspondingly conventional mindset, and it encourages them to engage in their conventional behaviors around presentations, including managing their e-mail instead of paying attention to you. It's time, instead, to get people out of their seats and into an experience of the work—an experience that reveals detail, showcases novelty, and earns their attention.

Our mission at this stage of communicating The New is both ...