The Boeing Bust: A Fallacy of Thinking that Can Sink Your Presentations

August 25, 2010

Boeing has always been a company that has partnered with multiple sources to design and implement some of the best planes in the world. They have always assembled a crackerjack team of experts from multiple companies and venues and had these engineers tackle the problem of creating planes that can accomplish unique feats.

Yet their hottest newest plane suddenly ran in to huge problems and couldn’t be delivered. Matter-of-fact it had to be scrapped and started over. Why?

The problem came from an assumption that Boeing had at the start of the project. That assumption was “since we have a top notch team of experts here let’s give them each the specs for their part of the plane and it will all come back together perfectly in the end.” Because of this assumption they got rid of ONE COMPONENT they had always had up to this point- that component was a MASTER ENGINEER group from Boeing to make sure that each component being designed fit with the other components.

Now you may be thinking “well obviously they should have kept that” but I would bet that this erroneous thinking has crept in to presentations you have given as well.

Here is how this thinking plays out when you are presenting– If you are thinking that “your audience is highly intelligent individuals that will understand exactly what I am saying” then you are falling in to this erroneous thinking. What happens then is you build a presentation that shares your key component but never does the MASTER ENGINEER job of aligning it with all the other components so you end up with a plane that actually works.

When you are building your presentation, no matter how intelligent your audience is, you need to come from that MASTER ENGINEER perspective making sure you align what you say with what your audience needs to accomplish.