My writing teacher in university, Guy Giudici, wrote with a red pen on my first exam: “Why do you make me wait until the end of the paragraph to tell me what it’s about?” That one line changed forever the way I write by changing the way I think about writing.
I think about it every time I watch a team present.
Professionals have rarely been taught how to think about presenting. They follow a model that works for delivering information, but miss the more subtle art of inviting curiosity through storytelling. They tell us the what, but miss pulling the red thread of why.
I saw it up close a few months ago, in a 1:1 with a participant prepping for her capstone. She was part of a six-week program I ran for rePurpose Global’s Impact Team: engineers and project leads doing plastic pollution recovery work across Colombia, India, Indonesia, and Cameroon.
Her opening line was, “Here’s how this program gets rid of waste in a Colombian island paradise.” If I lived in a Colombian island paradise, I’d be interested. But I don’t.
I asked her a different question: who’s actually in that room, and what do they care about? We rebuilt the opening. “Have you ever thought about where your trash goes when you’re on holiday?”
We got into the story by getting in touch with the person listening, not with her spreadsheet.
That’s thinking from the outside in: starting with what your audience cares about before you get anywhere near your data.
That shift is the whole program, really. Vinay Sharma, the internal lead who runs the Impact Team, told me afterward: “It indirectly makes my team hone their critical thinking beyond immediate problem solving.”
I used to call this communication training. I don’t think that’s the right word for it anymore. It’s thinking training. The talking just happens to get better along the way.
I wrote what happened over those six weeks with the rePurpose team. Read the full case study here.
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