Category: My Talks

This is my favorite way of constructing new talks now. Stickies that you can move around, just like manipulatives from grade school.

I came across an interesting idea in my recent reading, that your office should have 2 desks: one that has NO COMPUTER and only lots of paper, pens, stickies, glue, and other manipulatives. This is your CREATIVITY desk, where ideas come together, and the joy of using your hands, your mind, your physical space helps build connections, thoughtfulness, foster good ideas. Thanks to Austin Kleon and Steal Like an Artist.

Then, across the room, you set up a second desk. This is your PUBLISHING desk, and has a computer, a printer, and all the tools you need to electronify a finished set of ideas into a Presentation, a Blog post, a Manuscript.

And, never the ‘twain should meet! For computers, although great at publishing and formatting, can be DEATH to idea creation. Yes, I type faster and more legibly than I can write. Yes, pictures drawn in Powerpoint can be sharper and with straighter lines. But, can any tablet, laptop, desktop equal the ease with which we can sketch, scratch out, tape over, scribble, dog-ear, lay out a dozen books, cut out pictures from magazines, mash-up ideas quickly, reshuffle?

And, isn’t an idea “under the glass” (see book review: The Glass Cage) an anesthetizing soporific?

Don’t we want to “feel” something in our fingers? Run our fingers through the dirt? the sand? the snow? OK, I don’t miss paper cuts, sure. But, scribbling, taping, retaping, scribbling, drawing connecting lines, scribbling, erasing and blowing away the eraser-crud, isn’t that the stuff of imagination?

CMIO’s Take? When I say all this, I’m not sure if I’m a digital immigrant losing ground to digital natives (Mark Prensky, thanks), or if I’m rediscovering a general principle that the younger Boomers, the Millenials, Gen Y, Gen Z have all lost. What do you think?

Doodling. I recently gave a talk at the Health Evolution Summit conference in Dana point California. It was a humbling experience, as I was expecting to give the standard PowerPoint presentation, and was told: “no,” that instead, I would be out on the lawn in front of the wind and surf and be giving a talk on a flip-chart.

This provoked a great deal of anxiety, and prompted ego- and personality-rebuilding. Then I thought of my sister’s book recommendation “The Doodle Revolution.” And so I took my story, boiled it down into symbols, and give a talk, which was not unsuccessful.

Turns out, googling any concept attached to the word “symbol” allows you to see what other people have used for symbols, such as for “strategy” or “manager” or “project manager” or “consensus”. Try, for example, googling “consensus symbol.” Well, at least it starts the creative juices flowing.

I challenge any of you to understand my chicken scratch doodles and interpret them into a coherent narrative. The good news is, I’m no longer afraid that my terrible chicken scratch will be criticized. I know that it will, and it’s still helpful to me and to my audience. I’m learning to get over myself.

For those of you interested:

• The “upside down spaceship” in the corner is really a handshake symbolizing “partnership”
• “…and…but…therefore” comes from a previous blog post on storytelling*
• The elephant is a reference to slow moving, large academic medical centers
• The drowning man refers to Healthcare organizations in the age of acceleration
• The USB symbol refers to technology companies

CMIO’s take:  What are you waiting for? Get out and doodle! OR, if you’ve doodled successfully (or even unsuccessfully), let me know in your comments!