I’ve been thinking about and reading the Heath brothers again lately. Dan and Chip have just released a new book, Switch, which I fortunately was given an advance read of. (A short review is below.) You might recall that their book Made to Stick is in my top three of presentation books. One of the techniques promoted in Made to Stick is the use of a “schema” to simplify and make a concept accessible. A schema is a term from psychology, but for our purposes, think of a schema as simply an analogy.
The Heaths give a few examples of schemas such as Hollywood movie pitches…
- Alien = Jaws on a spaceship
- Speed = Die Hard on a bus
And how do science teachers usually teach the construct of an atom, they ask? By using the schema of the orbits of planets in the solar system. Even though this analogy is not really accurate, it’s accurate enough to get the basic concept across. Similarly, even though there was no shark in Alien, saying “Jaws on a spaceship” is accurate enough to get across the feeling and style of the movie.
You probably have to communicate difficult concepts all the time. Doing so effectively doesn’t always mean being literal and 100% accurate for your given audience. A graduate level physics professor should not describe the makeup of an atom as similar to planetary orbits. But that professor’s students probably first found their love of physics by imagining atoms orbiting a sun-like nucleus. Similarly, “Jaws on a spaceship” probably got the studio exec to the point of wanting to read the script which led to a green light.
My Recent Schema
At work, it’s a continual challenge convincing our account teams to let us design lengthy reports and documents in Adobe InDesign—the professional layout and desktop publishing program. They always want to use Microsoft Word which, while fine for certain projects, is the utterly wrong tool when you want a professional result. We’ve become quite adept at using Word to create professional-looking results, but it’s always a struggle, filled with headaches and too many overtime hours. (We recently gave a client two budgets: one for a document built in InDesign and a more expensive one for the same document done in Word as it would have meant more labor.)And so, I was working on a pro-con list to convince account teams to let us work in InDesign more. My title was originally…
“Pros & Cons of Using Microsoft Word vs. Adobe Indesign”
Then I tried this, hoping to persuade…
vs. Microsoft Word (Buggy, Slow and Problematic)
Okay, no ambiguity there. Like a hammer to the head. I love being direct, but sometimes being direct with words doesn’t always mean the most effective framing.
I googled and found a discussion thread on Word vs. InDesign in which one commenter spoke up for Word’s advantages. “Word is a bicycle and InDesign is an airplane. You don’t take an airplane to pick something up at the grocery store.” Bingo. And so I stole the schema and turned it into a visual title for my document…
