How to engage a disruptor: Shake the floor | As the Crowe Flies #8

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] You and I will let the room decide if they want me to keep going with my presentation or if they want to go straight into q and a. And if they want us to go straight into q and a, I'll even let you moderate it As the cold flies on the Van Scroll podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. On Fridays, I sit down to share some thoughts, philosophies, ideas that can help you become a tangibly better communicator. And this week I've been thinking about those experiences that all of us have. When you have a deep level of knowledge about something and you go to explain it to other people, sometimes you run into a person that it doesn't matter that you know dramatically more than they do. You can't get anywhere in the conversation because every time you start, they either ask a question that is really complicated and they're not really willing to stay there for the base level of information. Or if you start to answer that question, they do what the skeptics call a gish gallop where they change the subject and they ask another question and then they ask another question. And as you're trying to answer each of the questions, they keep piling more and more on, and eventually you just break down. You're so frustrated because you not feeling any kind of progress. All of us have felt these, sometimes you could feel them on a stage, you maybe feel them at a dinner party or on a plane where you're trying to talk about this thing that you know about, that you care about and you just can't move the conversation forward. So I wanted to give some thoughts on a tactic that I have named shaking the floor.

Vance Crowe [00:01:36] Now, the reason that I name these various tactics is because it gives us a chance to have a pattern language. If I can describe how to do something and we can name it, then once you have that meme, that idea, we can just start stacking that into the various skill sets that you have. And I think this concept of shaking the floor is a really important one because it will give you a mechanism for when you get into those conversations where you're not making any progress, how can you pause, take an action, and then move past where you are at in a way that not only you feel good about, but the person that is confronting you, that's asking you all these questions, that's not letting you pass. They will also feel good about the conversation because you shook the floor. So I'm gonna give a little bit of a story about how I really came to understand and know this tactic. I'm sure I had used some form of it before I'd probably seen other people do it, but it wasn't until I was at uc Davis a few years into my career at Monsanto, and I was giving a talk to about, I don't know, three or 400 vocational students that had been invited to the college to try and come up with what are various careers and paths that we as students could take that we might not know anything about. And I had been invited to come in and talk a little bit about agriculture, but also about the fear of agriculture, why people have have been made to feel afraid about how their food is growing despite the fact that it is more advanced than it ever has been before in the history of time.

Vance Crowe [00:03:13] And so I am at this talk, and it is a room completely filled from end to end, from front to back, side to side. The students are sitting in kind of cafeteria chairs and they're wedged in and there's no real order to it, it's just chaotic wherever they could get a seat and they're like leaning on each other and they're pressed in there. And so the room is filled all the way up to where I am standing to give a presentation, and the front row is no more than a foot or two away from me. So the person sitting in the front row could actually reach out and touch me as I'm going through my slides and giving the presentation. And this is a little bit different from most of the scenarios I'm in, but I liked it because there is an electricity in the room, right? There's, people are anticipating something when they're all packed into a small space like that. And so I, with all of the enthusiasm that I have for talking about the field that I care so much about, I start with the story of the man on the box. And for long time listeners, you've heard this story. And the point of it is the science is not enough. And that's meant to drive forward the idea that you have to both know the science and you have to be able to explain it in compelling ways. But as I get done with this and I feel the electricity of the room raise up even higher than it was when I began, I started thinking, Hey, this is gonna be one of the great talks that I've ever done. There's so much energy, the the wave has now brought me all the way up, and I am going to get to surf on this wave and it's gonna be huge and exciting, and I'm gonna be able to share things with these students that they're gonna love.

Vance Crowe [00:04:54] I'm gonna talk about how do we know that GMOs are something that are helping the world? How should people feel about how much better agriculture has gotten and how can you explain this to other people so that they feel it too? And so I'm just about to launch into the rest of the talk, just as the surfboard is starting to carene down that wave. I hear a murmur from just off to the side of the front of the room. And as soon as that murmur happens, you can tell that there's a portion of the room that heard it and they are now completely caught by whoever said it. But I didn't quite catch it. Or if I did, I didn't want to catch it, so I just ignored it. You know, sometimes when you give speeches, people say things out loud, maybe they're positive, maybe they're negative. But if you ignore it and you just keep walking past, you are the one with the microphone, you're the one in control. You can just keep moving. So I advance the slide and I start to talk about it only this time as I'm starting to give my next slide. I hear the murmur again, only this time, it's not a murmur, it's a voice at conversation volume saying maybe you're the man on the box. Now, he said it so loud that it was clear that I heard him. And now the radius of people around him in that room has gotten much wider that knew that he was being confrontational. So I, I'll admit, I I didn't know what to do here. This is one of my great fears being realized, which is you're giving a speech, you're having a good time, the audience likes you, and somebody decides they're gonna knock you down.

Vance Crowe [00:06:35] And he knocked me down with an insult that every single person in that room knew the insult because I had just explained who the man on the box was. And so now I'm forced to confront this, and I turn and I say, I hear that you have some questions or some comments, maybe we'll just wait until the q and a and and we'll get to that. And he doesn't really even look at me. He kind of looks around the room and he's sitting there as a 19-year-old kid with the posture of somebody that only a 19-year-old kid could have the level of confidence, and I don't even know how to say it, like a level of I belong here and I am doing what I should do. And so I try and just say, we're gonna come back to you in the q and a. And I keep moving on only now as I return to the presentation, he says, why don't you tell them how GMOs cause autism? And this time we're not talking about conversation volume. Now we're talking about a volume that is high enough to talk over a dump truck. And so I turn again to him and I think, what am I going to do here? This is somebody that is insulting me and now asking questions, and I'm gonna have to respond to these questions and I can respond to this one. But if I do, is he gonna change the subject and jump to another one? Or is this going to derail the whole conversation? Is there a way to have a conversation with somebody that has already made up their mind that what you're doing is bad?

Vance Crowe [00:08:07] What should I do here? And so I again, kind of turn to him and say, I'll answer any questions that you have during the q and a that that's no problem. Why don't we just get everybody a base level of knowledge here and then, and then we'll come back to it. And again, this time he doesn't really look at me. He's kind of looking around and he's got a smirk on his face, and he's looking around to get some support from his friends, which he has the people that are closest to him around him and the other people in the room are sitting there with bated breath, right? They are sitting there thinking, how is this going to play out? And I look up at the teachers in the room, the professors that had organized the conference, and they are looking just as shocked as I am feeling on the inside, but I realize they're not gonna do anything. It is now me and a 19-year-old kid that I have to say probably is not altogether different than I was at 19 years old. I can't say that it is exactly who I would've been at 19. I never did anything like this. But I can imagine myself having done something like this or being the type of person that would push back. And when I thought about it for even a split second, I realized that this 19-year-old was doing exactly what I could not do when I was confronted with the man on the box. He was looking at me and he was believing that I was spreading evil lies to the people in this room. And he had a different truth, and he was being strong where I had been weak, where I had let the man on the box do what he was going to do.

Vance Crowe [00:09:42] This kid was not going to do it. And so I again, tried to just move past this, and I try and go back to the presentation. And again, the kid shouts out an accusation. And so finally I turned to him and I look him straight in the eyes, and now he has developed enough courage that he is going to look me straight back in the eyes and I pause. Now, this pause was not some dramatic effect or me trying to make something happen. This is me saying, I really don't know what to do here. I don't know how to handle this. I am afraid that if I engage with this guy and I try and answer any one of his questions, he's gonna do a gish gallop and we're just gonna be hitting off questions all along. Or maybe he's going to ask me questions and he does know more than I know. Maybe he knows something that's going to embarrass me. And I will not only lose this crowd, but I'll be shamed in this room. What am I gonna do here? And so after I take my pause, I look straight at him and I decide I am going to address what he is doing exactly. I'm going to make sure that everybody in the room is on the same page about what is happening in that moment. So I said, it seems like you have questions and you want some answers right now, and I appreciate that you are clearly passionate enough that you are willing to interrupt the room and make sure that your questions are being heard. But see, there's a problem here because if we just jump straight into your questions, many of the people in the room are gonna be lost in this conversation because they don't have the base of knowledge that both you and I have.

Vance Crowe [00:11:26] Would you say that's true? That they don't have this base of knowledge? So he was absolutely shocked that I was addressing him directly. I don't know what he thought was going to happen, that I was going to try and hand it over to somebody else to solve the problem or that I was just gonna try and ignore him until he started shouting. But it, it became clear to me that he did not have a step two or a plan B after I went to address him. So he looks a little bit shocked, but he agrees and says, yeah, yeah, that's right. They don't know. And then he goes on to say, but you're just trying to trick them. You are the man on the box. And so again, as I was just starting to feel in control of this situation, I'm embarrassed, right? This is an accusation that makes my stomach twist and the crowd, maybe they were gonna start to agree with him. So I continued down the path that I had planned to go down and I said, well, that may be, but there is one difference between me and the man on the box. The community here invited me to their event and they asked me to talk about these things. But I'll take your point that you wanna make sure that people are not being told lies, but we also both agreed that you and I have a base of knowledge about these topics that the other people here don't have. So we need to respect their time and their attention as well. So what if you and I come to an agreement that I will tell you and everybody else in this room, an uncontroversial fact about farming, something that shocked me so much that when I learned it, I completely changed my view on agriculture and GMOs, and it really was something that helped me understand how the world works.

Vance Crowe [00:13:10] So what if I share that with the, with you and the rest of the room and when I'm done, you and I will let the room decide if they want me to keep going with my presentation, or if they want to go straight into q and a and if they want us to go straight into q and a, I'll even let you moderate it. The kid had no idea what was going on, and frankly, I didn't either. I'm just riding this wave as it was going. I didn't have a choice. I had to do something. And so this was the best that I could come up with. Now I've set the stakes pretty high, but I also didn't wait for him to respond. I just turned to the room and I said, does this sound like a fair idea to you? And now the crowd having been brought into the decision had a way to alleviate the stress and the tension that comes from having a heckler in the room. So they all agree, yes, yes, yes. And and you hear this sound of clapping and and people are kind of excited. And so now the gauntlet has been thrown down. So now I have to deliver on this promise. Otherwise, I have just handed this presentation over to this young man and who knows where it will go. So then I decide to tell the story of where broccoli came from. And this is the moment where I'm saying, you should shake the floor, because when I first heard it, it shook the floor in my world. See, I always thought that broccoli grew in the wild. What my imagination was was that there were wild broccoli plants kind of scattered about, and somebody had the good foresight to say, Hey, these broccoli plants are pretty good.

Vance Crowe [00:14:44] Why don't we gather up their seeds and put them in rows and then we'll have broccoli in the future? But that's not actually what happened. What happened was, it used to be about six or 7,000 years ago, hunters and gatherers would be looking for plants that they could eat, and they would come up upon this plant, a wild cabbage called brasco Lyrica. There are a lot of different pronunciations of that term, but we'll just call it brasko Lyrica. It's a form of wild cabbage. And the the reason that they loved this plant that would grow along river banks in the Italian peninsula was because it grew to be, I don't know, four or five, six feet tall, but the entire thing was edible. They loved it. There were these bushy seed pods and there were these lateral buds along the side. They had dark green leaves, and they even had this sort of flower that came up and you could eat the whole thing, even the roots. It was a wonderful plant, and people loved this plant until one day somebody said, Hey, wait a second. If we find these plants growing along riverbank, and we figure out which one out of all of them has the busiest seed pods, and we take those bushy seed pods and we go and plant them in the ground, then the next year, all of the plants that grow up are going to have those bushy seed pods, which are bushier than the last generation. And if then again, we go looking for which one has the bushes, seed pods on the next generation, then when we find it and put it in the ground, then the next generation has slightly bushier seed pods.

Vance Crowe [00:16:21] And eventually, if you do this enough times over and over and over again, eventually you get a plant that it expresses as bushy seed pods, which is broccoli. Now that's interesting, but it's not the most interesting part of this brasco Lyrica plant. You remember those dark green leaves that I mentioned? If you select for that plant and every time you see one with the darkest, biggest leaves and you plant that one over and over again, then eventually you get kale, those lateral buds that I was talking about. If you select for those with the larger and larger lateral buds, eventually those become brussel sprouts. The same thing with the flower becomes cauliflower, the root kohlrabi. This great plant gave us all of these different bitter brassica plants that we now know and love. And the reason that this fascinated me was because I had no idea that human beings created broccoli. Now, I've told that story several times before, but I'd never really told it with that much passion and that much conviction. But you could tell that everyone in that room is doing maybe what you felt like right there, right? They get their eyes get big, and they, they look around to see, did other people not know this? 'cause this is news to me. And so you can feel that electricity return to the room again, and you can even look down and see that 19-year-old kid being pretty impressed with that idea.

Vance Crowe [00:17:55] So rather than squirming or feeling bad or fighting, he had been handed an idea that was fascinating to him. It opened up his mind and it allowed him to see in a non-controversial way, in a way that didn't make him feel little or small or disrespected, that there were interesting things that he could learn from me. And so I didn't even have to push the issue. I didn't even have to ask him, who's right, who won here? And now can we keep going? I was able to just parlay it and move into the rest of my presentation. And now every time that I'm talking, I look over at him and I smile and I nod, and I see him warming up to me. And now that I've done this many, many, many times since then, I realize that this is always what's going to happen if you shake the floor properly because it gives people a way to walk away from their tightly held position. It allows them to take that grip that they had, that they were given because they're afraid or they're angry or they feel like they're defending something, and it allows them to set it down and then to take in new ideas and be open to what you have to say. And in fact, they will be grateful that you did it, because there's so few times in our lives when we get to hear these fascinating things. And so that's the skill that I want you to develop. It's not so much that you have it as a tactic, but that you have the skill in your repertoire so that when you find yourself in these situations, you can handle them with grace and with ease so that the other person is glad that they encountered you and got to run their ideas past them and then figured out a better way to move forward.

Vance Crowe [00:19:43] So hopefully, you're asking yourself right now, how do I find a shake the floor kind of idea? Well, the difficult part about this is that there's no easy answer here. The only way you are going to have a shake the floor answer is if you are introspective about your expertise. What is something you know about your field that when you learned it, it captured your imagination so completely that you stared off into space. Maybe your mouth was open, or there's the idea that when you heard it, you had to run home to tell your roommates or your parents or somebody about this amazing thing that you learned. This is the type of thing that you should be looking for. If you find something that fascinated you, then put in the right context, it will fascinate somebody else. And you don't have to find something that is deep, deep, deep in your knowledge. Let's say you're a mathematician and you're doing work that is so theoretical that it's essentially painting seascapes in mathematics. It doesn't have to be something way down deep in your knowledge span. It could just be something very, very simple. That concept about mathematics that you learned that when things were getting tough, you learned this and it helped you decide to keep going. It helped you decide, this is the field for me. I love this. I'm fascinated and captivated by it. And once you have that idea, you're gonna have to hone it. You're gonna have to practice it, you're gonna have to try it out. In fact, the way that I heard about this idea was that I read it in a textbook about plant breeding, and I took a photo of it and I shared it on Twitter and it went wild.

Vance Crowe [00:21:21] It got tens of thousands of retweets and I realized, Hey, I'm onto something here and now I need to hone my ability to tell this story. It wasn't that I just knew this idea and it came out. I had actually told the story many, many times before, but I wasn't telling it knowing that I would have it for this situation. But you can, you can get these fascinating ideas and figure out when are they going to be in the right context. And if you pound on them long enough and you figure out, how do I not only take this thing that fascinated me, but share it in a way that it will fascinate others? Then when you encounter one of these situations, you'll have it in your back pocket and you can use it. And even if it doesn't work while you're sitting there trying it, you're gonna see that the other person is watching you try. And just that act of trying to fascinate them with something, trying to get them to loosen their grip, it's gonna create better rapport. It's all the better if you can find a thing that will shake the floor to really change things up. But if it doesn't work the first time, you shouldn't feel too bad about it. This is something that you can build over time. If you're still wondering, what are other ideas that I can use besides broccoli? I can tell you about the idea that I thought of when I was paused in that moment with him. And it was that I had been on a farm tour with a farmer and a group of moms that were there. I think they were bloggers. I, I don't even really exactly remember what was going on, but, but there were a bunch of people that were really far away from farming and they're on this tour and there's a woman that is asking really aggressive questions of the farmer about pesticides safety.

Vance Crowe [00:22:56] And it's clear that she doesn't know the names of any pesticides, but she's very concerned that they are dangerous and chemicals and that she doesn't want them on her food. And so she asks him point blank, how should we know if the pesticides you're using are safe? And he paused and he said, well, let me tell you a little bit about how we get our drinking water here. And he points all the way around the farm and he says, all of the fields that you see here when rain hits them, they drain down for a few days, maybe a week, and eventually it goes into an aquifer that sits below us right here. And my family has a well that we've had for the last 60 years on this farm. And we drill down into that aquifer and we pull water out of there and drink it. And so there is not a single person on the face of the earth that cares more about the chemicals that I put on my fields because I am going to be giving it in glasses of water and everything that I cook to my three little girls and my beautiful wife. And you watch the group of people sit there and say, oh my God, I'd never really thought about that before. I'd never thought about the fact that the farmer drinks the water from the fields that he is growing crops on, including putting chemicals on. So it doesn't have to be some deep scientific thing. It can just be something that is true and natural in your way of life. And just open it up and reveal it to people.

Vance Crowe [00:24:27] And remember, if you have any level of expertise, they will know almost nothing at all about your life. So just try these things out. Alright, I am going to sign off for now. This has been a fun story for me to tell. It's, it was an experience that went well very fortunately. In fact, after the presentation was over, the kids stayed after, we probably talked for about 30 to 45 minutes about some of his issues that he was worried about. And I gave him a new way to think about it and new material to look up. But he was glad to come up to me because I hadn't embarrassed him. I'd fascinated him. And he wanted to build a relationship. And in fact, one of the questions he asked me after we were done is, how can I have conversations with people that are like the one you had with me? And I said, all you gotta do is find the things that fascinate you and share them instead of trying to club people with them. And now, even though I'm not at Monsanto, I still go out and give talks. In fact, I probably give more talks now and I'm traveling all over the country and I give keynotes and workshops to help people become tangibly better communicators, to articulate their ideas in ways that help other people understand what you're trying to say, what message you're trying to get across. So if you're interested or you have a group that you think I might be good to speak with, you can check out my website, Vance Crowe dot com. And I hope you do because the thing that I love doing the most in the world is going out and teaching people to be tangibly better communicators. So now as I sign off, I want to fulfill my commitment to the as the Crow Flies journaling project that we are all engaged in.

Vance Crowe [00:26:04] If you're not familiar with it, go back a couple of episodes. It's about sending thank you letters to your future self. But I want to fulfill the commitment of offering you some ideas on journal entries that can help you reflect on your life and help you become a better communicator. And the question that I wanna ask you this week is, when were you in a discussion that it didn't go as well as it could have? Think about a conversation where you meant to convey some, some deep meaning. You meant to tell somebody about a project you wanted them to work on, or you needed their help on whatever it is. Where was a time where you wanted to explain something and it didn't go as well as it could have? And what part of that were you responsible for? 'cause that's really the only side of the conversation that matters. What is it that you could have done differently that would've made that conversation go better? This could be with your spouse, it could be with a coworker, it could be with somebody that you ran into in the grocery store, write down a conversation that didn't go that well and what could you have done to make it better? You don't have to write a big, long thing about it, just try and write it down. Try and think about this deeply, and we'll be back on Wednesday with another interview. And if you come up with anything good, a good story, make sure you either send it to me on Twitter at Vance Crow or check out the Vance Crow podcast on Facebook. The numbers have been growing there astoundingly, and it's really great it, it generates good conversations. So with that, I'm gonna sign off.

Vance Crowe [00:27:34] Thank you so, so much for listening. I'm so glad you're here and I'll look forward to talking with you on Wednesday.