權勢相對論的心得【蘇筠】

Author: Millie Yun Su- Assistant Professor (Education) in Singapore Management University.  Research topics on innovation management, qualitative research, knowledge boundaries.

My lesson learned from presenting “Relativity of power: How a low-power actor transforms constraints into opportunity”

Presenting “Relativity of power effect” comes with 3 challenges.  First, the audience came from different backgrounds, from psychology, social work, human resource management, to finance and engineering.  The audience did not have much understanding of business strategy, bricolage, and innovation.  Second, the paper consists of three stories where each story has subtle dynamics between high-power and low-power actors.  The challenge is not only to highlight the subtle dynamics, but also to keep the audience’s interests without losing their attention.  Third, the concept behind the paper has a rich Chinese zen-like philosophy, where a high-power actor’s dominance is also its vulnerability, and thus brings forth the opportunity for the low-power actor to respond.  

When LS, Sue and I discuss, we discuss the concepts in Chinese.  I often have to translate our discussion into English for my own note-taking, and my understanding of the framework is mixed in Chinese and English.   Now the challenge is how do I smoothly interpret and convey the nuance of Chinese philosophy in English for a 45-minute presentation?         

These challenges force me to adopt a presentation strategy that I will share as followed. 

Draw in your audience with storytelling

Develop your script as if you are telling the story to a three-year old.  When I first started to rehearse for the presentation, I had a tendency to follow the slides, but I realized that following what is written on the slides makes me feel unnatural.  I found myself more natural when I am telling the story and use the story to illustrate our theory of power relativity.    

Guide your audience on what to tune in for in research findings.  If you don’t tell your audience the key points of your finding, they tend to “zoon out” in listening to your research findings.  Therefore, in the transition from “Analytical analysis” and “Research finding,” I tell the audience that our findings consist of 3 stories and each stories consist of 2 parts of our framework, opportunity recognition and resource reconfiguration.  That way, your audience knows what they should pay attention to when you go through the finding.      

Use analogy that allows your audience to make the connection with your concept      

Imprint an analogy to your audience early on.  In the very beginning of my presentation, I described “Relativity of power” as a story of David and Goliath, so that my audience can quickly have the imagery and make connections with it when I was describing the concept. I also referred to this analogy throughout my talk. 

Draw parallel between the analogy and the concept.  Throughout the presentation, I used the David and Goliath analogy to help my audience appreciate the subtlety of “opportunity embedded in high-power actor’s vulnerability” and “role shifting to change power dynamics”.  For example, I described how David had to kneel and climb up a rock to find ways to kill Goliath to illustrate how the low-power actor had to shift its role to respond to high-power actor.  Draw parallel between the analogy and the concept to help audience understand and appreciate the subtlety of a complex concept.      

Preempt the questions and answer them in your talk   

A few days before my talk, LS asked me “why do we need ‘relativity of power effect’, why can’t we just use SWOT analysis?”  I was already thinking about this question for days and worried that my audience would also have the very same question.  When LS asked me the question, I realized that I should actively and preemptively cover the question in my talk rather than waiting for the audience to raise the question.  I explained why we used “vulnerability” rather than “weakness” in the SWOT analysis, and helped the audience to connect how “vulnerability” is relevant to our framework. 

In short, presentation is an act of art and there is no short cut around it but rehearse 500 times (figuratively speaking), so that the audience believes that you own the material.  Being confidence and comfortable in the material is the key to presentation.