Featherbedding

Gearing up to deliver a major new innovation to the world? That’s awesome! But you can’t just fling it into the world and expect it to be absorbed.

So, what do you do? You lay down featherbeds - layers of context - to get your audiences' minds ready before dropping a transformative idea.

Let’s say you have a profound innovation in protein folding that’s going to transform medicine.

In 2018, DeepMind’s AlphaFold 1 entered the CASP competition, but it was in 2020 that AlphaFold 2 returned to CASP14 and stunned the audience. The judges recognized it as a solution to a 50-year-old protein folding problem.

CASP and DeepMind held a press conference for science journalists and the research community that day, but the general press covered it too, doing the heavy lifting of explaining what protein folding was and why it mattered.

Then, between late 2020 and July 2021, DeepMind consulted over 30 field leaders, published a peer-reviewed paper in Nature, and a full database in partnership with EMBL-EBI.

Even those experts who were dying to find the protein folding solution needed to be informed and persuaded in steps. DeepMind met them where they were, building from press conference to peer-reviewed article to database.

You can (and should) featherbed too, because people fear and resist change. Here’s a recipe:

Talk about how things work now in the area your innovation will change. Where are the holes? What’s wrong?
Move on to the challenges inherent in solving this problem. Why is it so hard?
Introduce and explain the concepts and terms your audience needs to know.
Then, once your audience understands the landscape, the problem, and the terms, lay your idea on them.
Follow up by enlisting commentary from third-party experts and demonstrating proof.

Yes, you can go through all of these steps in one presentation if you have an audience that is engaged (or obligated) to listen to you, like the press at the first DeepMind press conference.

But to reach a broad audience (one that isn’t yet engaged and interested), you’ve got to subtly educate them with multiple communications over time.

When you properly featherbed, your big idea comes in for a smooth landing. And doesn’t every great idea deserve that?