I just finished the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, which caused me to think about the immediate reactions one gets when the phone rings, and a client is on the other end with an idea for a DVD, live meeting or video. He says, “What do you think of our idea?” The first clue is ‘our’ idea. The first response is usually “Sure, that could work.”
But the ‘blink’ is the immediate reaction that either the idea is brilliant, or that the idea will not work. Let me share a story.
A client came to me to write a live presentation script for singing actors and executive management. The event was a live sales meeting, held in July, to prepare the retail sales force for the holiday season. The retail chain sold leather goods. Their creative concept was ‘Explode the Opportunities’ (bad grammar idea but picked up on the meeting date of the 4th of July weekend) with a Scrooge storyline to reveal their holiday tactics. One of the Executive VPs, dressed as Santa, would deliver gifts to the audience from a sled drawn by a live reindeer.
I blinked. Everything about it was bad. Sure – any of those concepts will work, but there are too many of them. Pick one concept, not three I said. I tried to talk them out of it – to no avail.
In the end, Scrooge and the three ghosts sang their way through the sales meeting. When Scrooge had his epiphany at the end, he whipped off his nightgown, revealing an all leather outfit. He sang like Elvis with gusto as the fireworks went off on stage. The crowd went wild as the Executive VP dressed as Santa passed out gifts as he came down the center aisle on his sleigh.
The reindeer pooped in the aisle.
That was my last project for this client. Perhaps I should have walked away from the project. Perhaps worked harder at persuading them to go with a single concept rather than three. Perhaps presented a newer, better concept of my own.
The moral of the story: If something causes you to blink, trust your intuition.
