I spent yesterday afternoon writing the outlines for two presentations. On the face of it, they couldn’t be more different.

The first was:-

“Who Is Fred? – and why did twenty-six seven-year-olds make friends with him?”, which I delivered this morning, at 4Networking in Ware. It was all about the children’s book, featuring a bear, which I produced with the Year 2 kids at the school where I’m a governor and the charity I one day hope to launch, to help disadvantaged kids discover and develop their potential through creativity.

The second was:-

“Whatcasting? – an introduction to using audio as an effective communication tool”, for the Business Café in Colchester, on 1st April … hmm .. I am slightly nervous about the date …

So what do they have in common? In one word, innovation and in another, potential.

The book developed in part from the need to find innovative ways of encouraging the kids (particularly the boys) to write. Several were from homes where reading and writing didn’t feature very much, so to them it wasn’t “cool”. One of the things we aimed to achieve – and I think we did achieve –by getting them involved in the book was to make it “cool” first to put their ideas into words and then to put them down on paper. Sometimes that began with a picture, progressed to a caption and eventually evolved into full sentences. Then at other times, they went straight for the pen – unleashing potential neither they nor their teachers knew they had.

My first foray into podcasting was in an effort to talk en mass to the clients and prospective clients of the law practice which I was running at the time, about legal issues. If they were aware and planned ahead, I knew they could save themselves time, money and aggravation. My challenge was how to communicate that. The people I wanted to talk to were busy. Their time was at least as precious as their cash – because it was in equally short supply! They were already bombarded with information leaflets etc – and if they’d been given one with “law” visible anywhere on the front, they would probably have switched off. Audio allowed me to talk to them directly, rather than at them, while they were doing other things.

So in both cases, a bit of lateral thinking about communication helped get a difficult and sometimes unpopular message across in a way the target audience actually seemed to enjoy! Well, they kept coming back for more, anyway.

In my experience, one of the biggest challenges we all face in business is around getting the right message to the right people at the right time – and, all-importantly, in the right language. The right people, of course, are the ones we want to talk to; the right message is the one we want them to hear; the right time is when they want to hear it; and the right language is theirs. That is, as I say, my experience – but what do you think?