NEWS EXTRA
NEWS EXTRA: NMBS CONFERENCE
SMART STORIES
Professor Damian Hughes looked at the art of compelling story-telling in building businesses and creating the right environments for growth.
SMART TECHNOLOGY IS making us stupid in many ways. That’s according to Professor Damien Hughes, at the NMBS Conference. “You are likely to be disturbed 37 times in the next hour,” he told delegates. “And it will be by that smart device sitting on the desk in front of you. It might be a missed phone call, a text, an email, a social media post but it will happen. So, what, you might say, Well, what we know is that if you allow yourself to be distracted by a little flashing light or a buzz, that is demanding your attention. It will disrupt and deplete your focus on average for the next 22 minutes. It will take nearly a third of the hour to get your focus back to where it was before you first responded.”
Hughes talked about Attention Deficit Trade. “This is a condition of when you’re rushing from one task to another: your phone’s ringing, your emails are pinging, someone’s demanding ‘just’ two minutes of your time your IQ levels deplete by on average 15 to 20 points.”
Hughes told delegates about a study by John Kotter at Harvard University into the lives of average employees in the western world. “This study found that that found in a three-month period we would receive over 2.3 million bits of data and information into our head ,and you’re expected to process and respond to them all. The question Kotter asked was how much of that information is centred around one single, simple coherent, consistent message? And the answer was around 13,400.”
So how do we overcome this over-supply of information?
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Hughes gave some examples of sports coaches that he has worked with, and said that one of the principles of great coaching is the ability to create an environment that will allow and encourage people to think for themselves.
“That’s ultimately easy to talk about. Why is it so difficult to do? You’re required to make an average of 10,000 decisions every single day. We know that out of the 10,000 decisions you’re going to have to make today, approximately 236 of them are going to be concerned with food and drink. Think about any visit that you go to a posh coffee shop and the number of decisions come your way. From the moment you arrive through those doors, to leaving with the hot drink in your hand. It’s not as simple as walking in and asking for a coffee.
He added: “When you create an environment for people to think, the research tells us people instantly engage a lot higher, and make smarter decisions as a consequence.”
He explained that some people are physically gifted, some were verbally gifted, some a socially gifted, so physically gifted. “So, we’re all gifted, but we all express those gifts in different ways,” he said, and then asked delegates to picture what the following words mean to them: Paris, the Mona Lisa, an orange, the first lines of Hey Jude and Justice. “Most of you will picture the same things for all of those, apart from Justice, because that is an abstract concept and we all have our own view of what it entails.” Hughes said that telling people
information in the form of a story, getting them to invest emotionally in the story you are trying to impart has them engage more fully because they are more likely to remember a story that gives them more information. “The novelist EM Forster used to use two sentences to illustrate this: Sentence number one, the King died, then the Queen died. Sentence two: The King died, and then the Queen died of a broken heart. That second sentence resonates deeper with us, not just because it has more information, but because we tell him a story that already features some kind of narrative. So, think about this: how do you tell your story?” Hughes finished with an example for the film world of Pixar, the most successful story- telling company in the world. All Pixar films follow the same narrative journey: Once upon a time; Every day, One day, Because of that, Because of that, Until finally.
”When you create an evironment for people to think... people instantly engage a lot higher, and make smarter decisions as a consequence.”
“Every day for the last two years, we’ve been battling the impacts of the pandemic that we’ve lived with, then one day, we decided to come along and just engage with each other, and understand the power of community, because we value reigniting those relationships that have gone into cold storage over the last two year. Because of that, you feel that you’ve got some ideas and tools you can take away until finally you’re back here again next year,” he pointed out. Hughes finished by asking five questions which delegates need to ask themselves: “Is your premise, your message, as simple as possible? Have you created a culture where people can ask questions or make suggestions? Have you demonstrated an environment where people feel that they are contained before they are explained as opposed to the other way around? Have you cleaned your language of jargon and made it accessible? Have you created a compelling narrative that explains what the next few years will be like for you and your business? Because if you can answer yes to as many of those questions, I hope you can walk away from here with a lot more confidence.” BMJ
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net August 2021
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net July 2022
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