PromotingIdeas

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How to promote ideas

AlanCameronWills

If you're a researcher, it would be nice to see your ideas used. If you're a product developer with a fantastic new tool, you'd like to sell it. If you're a politician, you'd like people to agree with your point of view. If you're a lead architect, you'd like to get your team to understand and follow your way of doing things.

How to you get your ideas across? Here are some patterns I've formulated after years of trying to talk people into things.


Understand where they're coming from

You need to understand where people are in order to construct an argument that will take them to where you'd like them to be.


Don't Break the Elastic

People don't usually take too much (to them) revolutionary stuff all in one go. You have to work slowly from what they are familiary with, to the position you want.

Brains Work Bottom Up

Start from concrete examples and then abstract the principles.

(But see "Sound bites and slogans".)


Doing : Seeing : Hearing

Tools promote ideas better than papers.

You can't take people very far just by argument -- they have to get relevant experience.


Solve the problem they can see

You can't sell a solution to a problem people don't know they have.

With Eiffel, it was not that they didn't have the problem; it was just that they didn't know they had it. Perhaps by 2008 (= twenty years after Eiffel) there will be sufficient experience out there with testing, to appreciate the value of postconditions built into the programming language.


Mass = inertia

A large community can only absorb one idea at a time --- it has to be discussed and agreed, and the individuals have to have the common experience that brings them to agreement.

Buzz phrases

Use current buzzwords to capture the attention. Best-selling techie books have lots of these in their titles: e.g. "Objects, Components and Frameworks with UML" did quite well in 1999.


Sound bites and slogans

Capture the idea with a memorable title or subtitle, that helps people recall the essential point (or even know roughly what it's about even if they've never bothered to read the details). Descartes observed that once a concept has been given a name, it is much easier to think about, and of course discuss.


Don't try to look clever

These days, references to Descartes don't usually add credibility just by themselves.

Be funny

Or at least snappy and entertaining.

Be brief

Triples and Counterpoints; Alliterations and Allegories

Gurus get Listened To