How do you keep people on board with your new ideas?

Ewan McIntosh
notosh
Published in
2 min readSep 8, 2022

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The Shinkansen is the famous Japanese bullet train. It is phenomenal. At 320kph, it’s gone through the station before you’ve even heard it coming.

Most decent ideas are like those Japanese express trains.

Dreaming up a big idea for your class or your school is really hard. But see putting into action: that’s where the hard work really starts.

Imagine your idea is the train. You get onto the idea train before it’s started moving — before it even knows which way it’s headed. That’s easy. You even have time to choose the seat.

Once you pick up speed with an idea, you need to bring other people along for the ride.

You need to explain the idea.

You need to get people ‘on board’. But those people are comfortable with sitting on the platform, doing other stuff, while your train whizzes past.

And your idea whizzes past them before they’ve even realised it’s there.

So many great ideas never get people on board because we don’t know how to talk to each other.

Why do we invest so much in our strategic planning, curriculum design and technology purchasing, and then fudge the implementation because we’ve not thought about how we communicate throughout the whole journey?

You want to create ideas that pick up speed, and have the confidence to put the brakes on to let new folk jump aboard. That’s nothing to do with planning. It’s all to do with telling your story better, and listening better to other people.

It’s important to learn how to talk, how to deal with the other side and how to prepare for the inevitable challengers to your ideas in the months and years to come.

My team has designed Mastering Communication to teach the skills to achieve all of this. Yes: it’s all completely learnable. And to write this course we partnered with one of the world’s best communication experts from the world of education: Jennifer Abrams. Find out more and join us for an amazing course.

This was originally shared in our weekly email newsletter, The Provocation. Sign up for your weekly dose: https://mailchi.mp/notosh.com/the-provocation

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Ewan McIntosh
notosh

I help people find their place in a team to achieve something bigger than they are. NoTosh.com