The idea is that the link between communication and action can be measured and reported. We do this for financial and product flows: Why not do it for our communication?

These ideas map to my concept of a new kind of email tool. Part of the idea requires that the sender classify every message as one of the following types: Information, Request, Order or Confirmation.

Rule 1: IROC. Classify all communications as one of the following:

• Information: No reply required.
• Request: Reply options are “Yes” or “No” (System asks “why?”). No response is considered “No”
• Order: Reply options are “Accepted” or “Rejected” (System asks “why?”). System follows up aggressively when it gets no response.
• Confirmation: Reply options are “Yes” and “No” (System asks “Why?)

Rule 2: Passive approval. “Yes” is assumed for all intra-company requests unless you hear “no” within 48 hours. “No” requires a rationale.

Rule 3: Brevity. Use short words. Use short sentences. Use short paragraphs. Be clear.

Rule 4: If it wasn’t said by email, it wasn’t said. “I told you on the phone last week,” “I told you in the hall” etc., are unacceptable.

If you have questions or ideas please post them in the comments section.

In many organizations, the beginning and end of any business activity is marked by the PowerPoint presentation. In the early stages of an initiative, PowerPoint is used in strategy sessions, to present proposals and put forth plans. Later, it’s used for updates and progress reports. In the final stages, it’s used to report back and to present findings and conclusions. PowerPoint is everywhere, and it shows no signs of going away anytime soon.

Why is it used so broadly? And how did this simple tool become so entrenched in business? Here are a few thoughts:

1. PowerPoint is accessible. For the novice, it’s easy to learn and use.
2. PowerPoint is everywhere. Pretty much everyone has it, or has the ability to view a file. This makes it easy to share ideas and generally move meaning around. Slides can be borrowed, stolen, recycled and re-used.
3. PowerPoint is flexible. The same document that is used to present information in a meeting or conference, can, with little or no modification, be emailed as a document or shared online, retaining much of its meaning.
4. PowerPoint is easy to read. PowerPoint documents can be scanned and understood more rapidly than text documents. Because they are primarily visual they tend to be more easily understood and remembered.
5. PowerPoint is modular. It can be broken down into single slides, which can be arranged and rearranged into numerous different sequences. Over time you can build up a storehouse of slides that represent your – or your team’s – collective knowledge about any subject, which can be distributed, shared, discussed and modified as things evolve over time.
6. PowerPoint is powerful. For the more experienced user, it’s a powerful multimedia tool, with animation and other advanced effects. It’s easy to add information of any kind: Video, charts, photographs, maps – just about anything that can be digitized can be added to PowerPoint.

People use PowerPoint to represent knowledge, and the main element is relatively small and useful atomic unit we call the slide.

So what’s the problem?
“Death by PowerPoint” is the popular term for the much-dreaded meeting where a presenter subjects his audience to slide after slide, each one densely packed with bullet points or complex, confusing information, leaving the audience bored, frustrated confused.

But PowerPoint is not the enemy. When used appropriately, slides, and short sequences of slides, are excellent tools to represent knowledge. A good slide contains visual and verbal information in equal measure, and as an “information container,” a slide is just about the perfect size for memory and retention: big enough to hold meaningful information, but not so big that it’s likely to become overwhelming. A well-designed slide – one that’s comfortable to view and read – holds just about the same amount of information that you can hold in your short-term memory.

The problem is much, much deeper than PowerPoint. The issue is this: PowerPoint is a visual tool, and we are a visually illiterate society.

What do I mean by this?
In the modern world we are constantly confronted – you might say bombarded – with visual information: Television and film are the primary culprits, followed closely by billboards, brochures, and, yes, bullet points. Advertisers have long known that visualizing an idea is one of the quickest and most reliable ways to insert it into a human brain.

Due to this visual assault, we have, over time, become more sophisticated in our reading of visual information. In a world where information is digital, where photos can be altered in Photoshop and where films can show impossible things like dinosaurs and talking animals with a high degree of realism, we understand that seeing is no longer believing.

But this kind of visual sophistication is not literacy. Literacy is the ability to both read and write. If a child could read written language but not write it – if he could read a mathematical equation but not perform such operations himself – then we would not consider him prepared for success in the world.

In our school systems we teach our children the three R’s – reading, writing and arithmetic, because we believe them to be fundamental skills for successful integration in society. But the three R’s are no longer enough. Our world is changing fast – faster than we can keep up with our historical modes of thinking and communicating. Visual literacy – the ability to both read and write visual information; the ability to learn visually; to think and solve problems in the visual domain – will, as the information revolution evolves, become a requirement for success in business and in life.

PowerPoint has risen to its current position for two reasons:

1. We’re processing more information than ever before, at unprecedented volumes
2. We don’t have as much time to read anymore, and
3. Much of the information we need to share is non-linear in nature.

PowerPoint is a visual medium. If you want to convey information visually, it’s the most accessible and ubiquitous tool there is. The answer to bad PowerPoint is not to eliminate the tool, but to improve our visual literacy. We need to teach visual literacy in our schools, and to our business people. We need an ABC book of visual language (a project I am working on).

We’re leaving an industrial age and entering an information age, yet we continue to teach, and operate our schools, as if they were factories. In an information age, visually literate societies will succeed and thrive. Shouldn’t we be one of them?

I will be speaking on a panel at this day-long conference to be held in New York on 13 May 2008.

For more information and to register visit www.bdionline.com/globalcommunications and use promo code BDIEB to receive a discounted rate of $295 before April 15, 2008.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008
8:30 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.
The Graduate Center/CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue; New York, NY 10016

It has been reported that a substantial number of U.S. based multinational companies’ primary source of growth and profits are linked to global markets. New generations of consumers are growing at a rapid pace in China, India and many other emerging markets. However, it’s not business as usual when communicating, connecting and branding on world-wide basis. During this full day conference, we will examine case studies from leading multinational companies who will share their lessons learned from a communications and branding perspective. 350 communications and marketing professionals from both the corporate and agency communities are expected to attend the conference.

Case Studies:

Hewlett-Packard Communicates with Southeast Asia
Ryan Donovan, Director Media Relations, Hewlett-Packard Company

Xerox’s Global Rebranding Campaign
Michael Moeller, Director, Corporate Public Relations

HSBC’s Global Corporate Social Responsibility Program
Linda Recupero, EVP, Public Affairs, HSBC

Mars
Marlene Machut, Director of Health and Nutrition, Mars

SAP
Saswato Das, Global Media Relations, Global Communications, SAP AG

Additional Speakers include thought leaders from PR Newswire, Benbow International PR, High Context Consulting LLC, XPLANE, Burson-Marsteller, MON REVE Cultural Diversity, Felician College, rEvolution, Lifestyle International Productions, Snow Media, GTK Marketing Group, Global Media Relations

Topics covered:
- Understanding the communications landscape in China, Europe and emerging markets
- Lessons learned about understanding culturual differences when executing global communications campaigns
- Building community and collaboration with global customers
- Strategies for connecting with global media
- Global communications career trends

Sponsors: PR Newswire, LinkedIn, D S Simon Productions Inc., LatinVision

For more information and to register visit www.bdionline.com/globalcommunications and use promo code BDIEB to receive a discounted rate of $295 before April 15, 2008.

To do list:
1. Fix issue at left margin (PC, Firefox AND IE have this problem)
2. Three columns or five? I think one post
3. Photo on home page. How about a photo above each column?
4. Metatags for home page
5. Events calendar (Would prefer a list to a calendar format)
6. I prefer the square-cornered search box
7. Comment box extends into right-hand sidebar
8. Interface ideas from James: dgraydotinfo
9. Remove stuff “above the line” on post pages
10. No rule on main home page photo, to accommodate images with white backgrounds. Is it possible to do away with the hairline on ALL photos?
11. What about referrer logs and that kind of thing? Can we implement?
12. Visual editor for blog so I can see what I am doing
13. Threaded discussion forum like “ask et?”
?

Two million years ago, the first distinct and recognizably human cultures emerged. These early humans – known as Homo Erectus, or upright man – made and used complex tools, formed societies, migrated over long distances, used fire, and cooked food – and they did all that without words.

These early humans had 80% of the brain capacity of modern humans, and yet they were biologically incapable of speech. They communicated with each other visually, through gestures, observation and mimicry.

It wasn’t until much later – 25,000 years ago – that the first evidence of advanced drawing and painting skills appears, in cave paintings, such as the beautiful and famous examples at Altamira in northern Spain.

Then, 6,000 years ago, writing appears. Paper was invented by an administrator (anyone surprised by that?) about 4,000 years later.

The combination of writing and paper made it possible to share complex information over long distances. For example, explorers could make and share maps, sketches and detailed records of their discoveries.

In 1440 the publishing industry was born when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. For the first time, written works could be mass-produced. Books became cheaply available.

With the printing press, words were much easier to reproduce than images: roughly 100 alphanumeric characters can convey nearly any idea, whereas every visual image must be uniquely created. There were other restrictions as well: words must be carefully set in lines and columns. Occasionally images could be inset to illustrate the text but all had to be carefully positioned according to a grid.

The printing press gave birth to a powerful industry. Monarchies crumbled as the voice of the people, through pamphlets and tracts, could now compete with the voices of priests, kings and queens. The industrial age of publishing reached its peak with the massive, global entertainment industry in the late 20th century.

Today, entertainment giants such as Fox, Viacom, Disney and Sony dominate global culture because they control most of what the world sees and hears. This in turn gives them tremendous influence over what the world thinks and feels. But their days are numbered, and they know it. In the 21st century, and communication has entered a digital age. Publishing power, like computing power, gets cheaper and cheaper all the time. Eventually, both computing and publishing power will be as cheap and plentiful as paper is today.

It started in 1984, when Apple introduced the Macintosh computer and the first graphical user interface (GUI). For the first time, ordinary people could interact with a computer visually: with window, icons, folders, trash bins. People who had never considered themselves “computer people” now had access to a powerful tool for creative endeavors, which allowed them to do things they could never have done before.

Individuals could now become publishers. With very little investment they could design their own business cards, brochures, logos, even magazines. It was called desktop publishing, and professional publishers were horrified.

The world will never be the same, they said. Without professional training, people will abuse this power. And they were right. Bad design proliferated. Badly designed logos, badly designed brochures, badly designed newsletters, badly designed magazines, became the norm, when once they had been the exception.

Publishing involves both the creation and delivery of information. The desktop publishing revolution solved the creation problem, but in 1984, to deliver a magazine you still needed to print it and mail it, and to deliver a video you needed to broadcast it. And those things were expensive.

But in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee invented another revolution in visual communication: the web browser. Today, because of the web browser, you can publish your ideas to the world for the price of an internet connection.

The cost of creating and publishing information is plummeting inexorably towards zero.
The publishing industry has counted on people’s laziness, their willingness to be led, and their willingness to be fed information. This is the same mistake that established authorities have made since the beginning of time.

They fail to realize a critical fact: the ability to play with tools drives literacy, and the more literate people are, the more involved they become.

Children play with paper and pencils in order to learn how to draw and spell. And as people played with their computers they began to develop their visual communication skills. And playing with digital communication tools like the internet drives visual literacy.

Today, we are free once more. Paradoxically, now that everything has been reduced to zeros and ones, our only limit is our imagination. What’s interesting is that we continue to constrain ourselves to the grid, even when it is no longer necessary. The conventions of printing, which once liberated ideas by making them mass-producible, have now become a prison.

So what’s next? Watch the kids. In the 1970s we started playing video games, and although we didn’t know it at the time, we were learning how to interact with digital technologies. We were learning the hand-eye coordination skills we would need to operate the computers of the 1980s.
The toys of today are the tools of tomorrow: blogging, podcasting, photosharing, videoblogging – these are all early indicators. People are making their own movies and publishing their ideas to the world. With every passing year the technology gets cheaper and easier to use.

What we are seeing today on the internet is the emergence of a truly global culture, a culture that communicates visually. People around the world are playing with visual thinking toys, and their visual literacy is slowly rising.

We’re in the process of learning how to communicate visually – we’re witnessing the emergence of a global visual language. I am very happy to be a part of it.

Question: What is the purpose of the presentation?

The overt purpose is to educate and inform

The covert purpose is to reinforce the status of the expert and remind the audience that they are not competent to solve their own problems.

I submit that in the information age the traditional presentation model needs to change from

presenter>audience to

host<>guests.

Ideas don’t evolve in a vaccuum and they don’t generally flow in one direction.

Our current paradigm is based on a preacher model. An authority figure stands at the front of the room and lectures the class for forty minutes and then takes questions from the audience. Presentation styles vary but more or less they all follow this model.

Nearly every one of XPLANE’s customers already has the expertise they need to solve their problems. They don’t need more experts in the traditional sense — they need people who can help them find, develop and share the best practices and experts within their own organizations. They don’t need more wizards and consultants; they need to improve their communication flows.

We need fewer presentations and more conversations.

We need to develop new approaches that allow the group to take on a greater role in the knowledge-sharing experience. Approaches that turn the traditional presenter into the host of a knowledge-sharing event, rather than an expert spouting wisdom.

At XPLANE, we are working on some experiments in conversation, in an attempt to flesh out some new mechanisms for unleashing the knowledge and creativity of groups. We have already identified some interesting patterns and structures that have lead to powerful results. If your organization would like to host one, please let me know and we can try to design one together.

Please share your thoughts.