A Simple Metaphor

Making something that is technical, simple, is a challenge. I said in my previous entry,  I would give an example. When I was hired at Sterling Commerce, my first assignment was to teach our managed file transfer solution to some sales new hires and managers. I was given a power point deck of 60 slides (including many technical ones) for a 1.5 hour presentation. I really struggled with this task. I was new, so I said to myself: " learn the material and use the deck provided." So I prepared for session with that as the game plan. Two days before the session I determined I could not deliver this as prepared. It was not me and as a trainer you must be yourself.

I thought about it and came up with the metaphor that file transfer was like playing catch, you know with a ball, like you did as a kid. The night before the class I went around the house gathering props. I borrowed a softball, basketball and baseball from my daughters and a huge Pilate's ball from my wife. I grabbed all the ping pong balls I could find, added a Frisbee and even added some toys from our dog to my collection. I then found a fishing net and a racquetball racket and a scoop like net used also to play a type of catch. I showed up at class the next day looking a lot like a person returning from a garage sale.

I told the class that I was going to do a demonstration of challenges of file transfer and I would need some help. So I got two volunteers up in front of the class and had them start tossing a soft rubber ball back and forth . And I said; "See isn't file transfer easy?" Then I asked; "Or is it?" as I turned one of the volunteers around, so he could no longer see the ball coming and it hit him softly in the back. So then I said it is easy if you know the file is coming. With some methods of file transfer you don't know a file is coming. That becomes challenge number one to know when a file transfer is coming.

I then had another volunteer come up and I gave him a bag of about 20 ping pong balls and asked him to toss them gently to the other volunteer. Obviously the person could not catch all of the ping pong ball thrown at once and some went on the floor. Managed file transfer challenge number 2 is many small files delivered at once.

I then asked another volunteer to roll the big Pilate's ball at the other volunteer. This was to illustrate the challenge of receiving a very large files (terabytes).

I then gave the one volunteer a baseball glove and started tossing the baseball and the softball but then added a basketball, and Frisbee and the glove was no longer adequate to catch all the different objects being thrown. This illustrated the challenge of receiving different, multiple file protocols.

Then while they were playing catch I asked another volunteer to take the fishing net and try to grab the ball in flight. This of course represented the challenge of hackers trying to intercept the file.

I then directed the volunteers to opposite ends of the room and asked them to toss the ball back and forth across the length of the room. I then turned the lights out in the middle of the toss and the ball fell to floor. This was to indicate the challenge of a loss of power in the middle of a file transfer.

After illustrating the challenges I then continued to illustrate in the demonstration how our products overcome these challenges.

I left the PowerPoint slides in their handouts as addendum's and in subsequent classes I eliminated them all together. PowerPoint has become a crutch for trainers and salespeople alike. Over the years I have seen the salespeople from this class and they have remarked how effective and memorable the file transfer session was. To simplify a technical topic there is nothing better than a good metaphor.

In our next entry I will talk about the challenge of taking product information and repackaging it a way salespeople can most effectively use it.