I got so angry at that book that I threw it across the room.
Multiple times.
And at over 700 pages, it was a big book, so it’s a good thing I wasn’t throwing it at a window or at anything else breakable.
The book was Naomi Klein’s 2007 book “The Shock Doctrine.”
Why was it making me so angry? She was ragging on my alma mater (The University of Chicago) and “Chicago School” economists like Milton Friedman.
But many of the events she was talking about took place before I was even born, and besides, at Chicago I majored in Chinese history. I was about a million miles from the economics department.
So eventually I would calm down, grudgingly admit to myself that it was a good book, walk across the room, pick it up, dust it off, and go back to reading it.
One of the central points of The Shock Doctrine, later expanded on in Klein’s 2023 book “Doppelganger,” is that after a major event, there is a chronological gap between that event and the default story most of us humans will settle on to explain that event. During this gap, Klein says, there is a period of opportunity to create new explanatory stories which may end up outperforming the others, even outperforming the previous default, so that they become the new way of explaining the event. Society might even reorganize around this new story.
In Doppelganger, Klein uses Covid as an example of that shock event.
What does this have to do with your presentations?
I talk a lot on here about breaking patterns, and its importance in holding your audience’s attention. In fact, I think I even talked about it, yet again, in the email the other day.
In her books, Klein is talking about major geopolitical events, not quarterly sales presentations at the office. But the same dynamic she describes on a global scale works on your hyper-local scale, too.
So in other words, remember, the human brain is a pattern-creation machine, and the single best guaranteed way to hold its attention is to break a pattern and then let it watch you put the pieces back together in a new pattern.