This post is about one of my 45-second pitches at my BNI Chapter, BNI City Business. You can read the introduction to this collection here.

3 February, 2023. In addition to my 45-second pitch, I also gave a longer 5-minute presentation. Each member gives one of these longer presentations twice a year, and the content is not really prescribed – other than the rule of not competing with others in the room.

I went very left field. My 5 minutes was titled On the Articulation of Abstract Ideas. Drawing from Chip and Dan Heath’s 2008 book Made to Stick, I wanted to highlight how we too often fail to properly communicate with others because we know what we are talking about, but we don’t share that context with our audience. What we say makes sense in our head because we have that context.

To illustrate this concept, I used an exercise I had previously used in management development courses I had run: The Tapping Game. The set up is easy: two volunteers, one the tapper, the other the listener. I give the tapper a list of 10 – 20 popular songs (generally selected from the top 50 of Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Songs). I also include Happy Birthday as a very well-known song.

The tapper picks a song from the list, and then taps the song – single finger or fist – on a table. The listener (and the whole room) has to guess the song. In over 95% of cases, they do not. And neither do any of the others in the room. The tapper often expresses their amazement given how common the song they selected is.

What’s going on? The issue here is that the tapper isn’t imagining the taps, they are imaging the song. In all its glory, with full backing singers and band. I refer to this as they are hearing the full orchestra in their head. But when they ‘communicate’ the song to the listener, the orchestra – the context – is not there. It is stripped back to the base taps.

When we communicate – for example in a 45-second pitch – we know what we are talking about but too often fail to provide the context. The message is lost on the audience. We don’t clearly articulate the idea – we don’t make it stick. The more abstract the idea, the more likely you are to lose your audience.

I then used the tapping game set-up to launch a new series of 45-second pitches, which I titled Lost in Translation. The series was intended to highlight how communications disconnects can cause issues in business sale transactions. Each week, I coupled the message with an example of poor translation.

This first Lost in Translation featured a Japanese Elmo, coupled with a simple pitch to Ensure Understanding. This was a broad message, in the context of business sales, that so often gets missed. Elmo got a laugh.