Lost In Transition

[Music] all right this is about a Dean baffle because I am baffled by a confusion that for some reason I’m running into almost monthly which is people who don’t like the idea of putting chapters in their presentations they Buck the idea they push back against taking their presentation and chunking it out into topics I mean it’s so obvious to me right I don’t know okay so the reason I think behind this is the idea that things need to transition fluidly into things and you’re disrupting the flow but the point of a chapter is to break things up imagine reading the longest book you’ve ever read so let’s just say it’s a 600 page novel and it goes on and on and on with no chapters do you know how agonizing that would be no sense of progress no sense of accomplishment no oh gosh I can get to the end of this chapter chapters break things up and they do that on purpose so that you feel a sense of progress and that you feel that you have accomplished something you’re going somewhere you’re getting somewhere but that’s not the only reason the other thing behind chaptering something is not everything has to transition fluidly we lived in a world where media did always transition yeah like 1970 everything flowed carefully into the next scene we would see actors get in the car drive in the car get out of the car go into the building now we just cut to something else cut too remember Monty Python art I’ve just dated myself Monty Python would cut to a um John CLE saying and oh for something completely different we just switched to new things now we’re in a Tik Tock world where things move really fast we don’t need nor do we necessarily benefit from fluidity and transition assuming all the chapters relate to the same subject like take a project interview shortless presentation um orals Pitch where you’re taking uh a prospect through your approach and you’re looking at the different possibilities well we’re going to look at budget and schedule and approach and you know different things those don’t need to flow into each other they’re their own thing so Hollywood has learned very very easily the way to wake someone up is to switch cut to night oh broad daylight oh loud action oh quiet intimate scene switch switch switch loud soft action pause all of this stuff it wakes people up it keeps them um engaged but the human mind isn’t a linear process you didn’t start a thinking chain that flowed through your whole life you’re not a windup toy right we have we’re processing lots of possibilities at once we want to chapter eyesee so that we feel that forward movement that sense of progress and because the human brain can go to a lot of places and is tracking a lot of things we put in chapters into our presentation we break up our power points we switch gears without TR transition if they’re all related to each other because the point of the chapter is not to transition the point of the chapter is to break it up to help you cover more ground feel a sense of progress and better understand the multifaceted nature of the presentation or project you’re pitching [Music]