Jeff Chausse
Digital Strategy + Design
Start with the Acceptance Speech
Last year I was asked to speak at an event called “Love@First Website” in Portland. It was quite an experience – my first ever professional public speaking “engagement”. I had been working at Harmonix for about 6 months and we were just about to do our big Rock Band 2 “relaunch” of RockBand.com.
The talk went over quite well, but building that presentation was quite an ordeal. I sweated over it for over a month, trying to take the huge pile of ideas that became the new RockBand.com and crunch it down into a coherent, usable message for the attendees.
The strategy behind the RockBand.com relaunch was a bit of a hodge-podge, because I joined the company mid-stream, and there were already ideas in the works from current and former employees, as well as from an agency that used to do work with us. So, instead of going in with a crystal clear strategy, the team and I mostly went with our gut, and did what felt right. The site came out great, but preparing the presentation became a real discovery process. Basically, I learned that we made a lot of good decisions and, in the end, there WAS a coherent strategy to what we did – we just didn’t know it at the time.
So now, I’m embarking on the biggest project I’ve been involved with since I started at Harmonix – the first project I’ve started from scratch as Web Director, with a fully functional, kick-ass team, and with the authority to build it as I see fit. It’s a pretty tall order, but very exciting.
I took a few different approaches to getting cracking on this project and failed each time. I tried writing a project vision up as a Word Doc, a wiki, an outline – nothing really worked for me. I’d get about three paragraphs in and lose momentum.
Then, I got to thinking about that presentation I did last year. My personal goal for this project is to deliver something that people are inspired by and want to learn from. I’d love to have created something worthy of another speaking engagement.
So I figured – what if I started with that presentation? What if I started by structuring my ideas in terms as a presentation about a successful strategy? Was that just some weird sort of ego-stroking? Regardless, that’s what I did. I fired up PowerPoint, made a cool looking layout, and then the ideas just started coming to me. Ideas started falling into place, and a coherent strategy quickly congealed.
Shortly after I started this, I tweeted: “Coming to terms with the fact that, when wrestling with big ideas, I ‘think in PowerPoint’”.
But recently, it dawned on me, all I was doing was exercising positive visualization. GTD and many other personal productivity strategies emphasize focusing on (and usually writing down) your goals. By being crystal clear on what you’re trying to achieve, your subconscious automatically works out the way to get there. As I assume is the case with many other people, I read about positive visualization many, many times, but never actually took it seriously enough to write things down.
I stumbled into performing real positive visualization accidentally. I decided I wanted to create a site strategy that people would be inspired by – and want to learn about – and the particulars of that project just sort of presented themselves to me.
So, my advice to everyone is this: don’t be shy about thinking about your amazing keynote talk before your project even starts – it’s a great way to illuminate the path to get there. Want to be a great actor? Why not start by writing your Oscar acceptance speech and work backward from there? And, hey, when you DO get that invite to the Kodak Theatre, you’ll have one less thing to worry about.