My favourite shop is in the high street of the nearby town of Crabbs Cross. Teague’s Televisions doesn’t sell televisions, it repairs them.

Repairs them? But no one repairs things any more, surely. And a television? Actually, Mr Teague has also overhauled for me a favourite 25-year old Kenwood mixer and a Raclette machine that used to make all the lights go out when you switched it on. Teague’s Televisions is a small shop, full of used and occasionally decrepit electrical goods waiting for careful repair or collection by a grateful owner. The smell of dust and solder flux hangs in the air – it’s the smell of effort and of careful repairs.

All this in stark contrast to the constant upgrades and improvements, the throw-away-and-replace mentality which we practise, and are exposed to, in every sphere of our lives. Every time I buy a toothbrush it has more bristles, of more colours and of more textures than the one I was able to buy 2 months before (I have a soft spot for new toothbrushes). And try buying a bar of normal, uncomplicated chocolate, in a hurry. You’ll be faced with myriad bars of all shapes that involve chocolate mixed with 20 other ingredients. Somewhere in there you may see a bar that has only been mixed with chocolate – if you’re lucky.

Children at school now have something called Forest School. About 3 years ago someone in Westminster decided that school subjects were just too boring to be taught as they were or that our children were just too lacking in attention spans to be able to cope with didactic teaching methods that had worked well for 250 years. So now our children are taught in a draughty canvas shelter in a field, 100 metres from the school building. Something about team work has been mentioned… Neither of my children, or any of the teachers, has ever been able to explain how teaching maths and English in the middle of a field works better that teaching it in the classroom.

It seems that we just can’t leave things alone or at least that we are allergic to the thought of keeping it simple and applying a little more effort. If you believe in the ideas around Maslow’s hierarchy of needs you could be forgiven for thinking that we have recently shot out of the top of the pyramid, zooming past the self-actualisation zone without a pause, onwards and higher, to the hitherto unknown: fiddle-about-and-make-things-complicated-so-that-we-don’t-have-to-deal-with-what-we-don’t-like zone.

Well, I suppose we solution-providers have played our part in feeding this hunger for the effortless solution. We have been furnishing a seemingly endless stream of ever more intriguing and comprehensive ideas, models, theories and solutions to whoever shouted for help. Solutions to things that may not have needed a new solution at all but just the original one re-applied, more consistently, more carefully, for longer. I suspect that sayings such as ’persistence pays off’ and ’if it sounds too good to be true, it is’ have a greater potential to nudge us in a constructive direction than have many serious books by clever business authors and assorted gurus.

But whilst tiny gems of wisdom such as these are quick to bring to mind, they are even easier to dismiss. And although simple they require an amount of personal investment to make them real. And it can be at this stage of personal investment that we fall. We are frail creatures, we want things to be fixed so that we can get on – with as little effort as possible. We like our solutions on a plate, not in a recipe book.

Going for the big, complicated, branded solution is the ideal meal on a plate. It looks fresh, it looks substantial and it costs enough to be good. There is little room in this thinking for the simple solution. The fact is, the simple solution is a bit embarrassing, at least in part, because it negates all that time and money that we wasted on the complicated stuff that we’ve just tried. But worse, it takes away the hiding places; no complexity and learning curve to shelter behind. Simple solutions are a tough sell not only because they lack the ‘wow’ factor but because they require immediate action which entails personal effort and even individual discomfort. And yet, self-generated improvements are like toys that don’t need batteries. There’s nothing to run out and there’s nothing to say that you can’t fix them when one of the little wheels falls off. It’s the solution you’ve always wanted and it was in your pocket all along. You know what you need to do: think ‘simple’.

What are you waiting for? Close your laptop and fix something.

The complex made simple

…what am I doing and is it helping?

I unearthed this short article yesterday – I wrote this some time ago.

Here is the updated version…

Most people know that at some point in their professional lives they will have to deliver a presentation. Whether the material is as dry as a tinderbox or whether it is just plain controversial, observing certain guidelines can really cut down on preparation time (and those nerves) as well as vastly improve the final effect that you create with the audience. Here are six simple things to consider before you start:

1. A clear objective. Most people start with a load of content and try to shoe-horn it into a PowerPoint show – instead start with the question: “What effect am I trying to achieve with their opinions and with their emotions?

2. Involvement. Plan to get your audience involved in the first 30 seconds – or less. They have to understand what is in it for them – why they should pay attention to you rather than their Blackberry or their own head noise?

3. Simplicity. Keep things as simple as you dare. Regardless of the IQ level of the audience, people are so poor at keeping things in their heads whilst trying to pay attention that most of what ends up on the screen or in a script might as well be in a handout for all the audience is able to retain. You will also be avoiding Murphy’s Law: ‘If it can go wrong it will go wrong’.

4. Relevance. Think carefully about what you keep in the presentation. Be brave about culling the material until you can cut out no more without the whole thing not making sense. It is great to watch a presentation that sticks to the point and it makes the content so much more memorable too.

5. Humour. Don’t feel pressured into having to be funny. Starting with a joke is not compulsory. Instead, consider beginning your presentation with a relevant observation about something that has happened to you on that very day. e.g. In a presentation about sales figures or targets you might start out with: “On my way here today I stopped off to buy a chocolate bar – I found they were on special offer. It made me wonder why the sales director for that company had done that…”

6. Personality. Something happens to people during the walk from their chair to the podium. They are transformed into people that their own families wouldn’t recognise. Since most people’s ultimate presentation need is to be believed, it is important to allow the authentic, real you to peep through the numbers and words.

Spending a few minutes thinking about each of those six tips will not only make preparing your next presentation quicker and more fun but it will also probably mean that you enjoy the experience of presenting so much more. Good luck.