Before the screen is shared

There is a mild difficulty with the fully rehearsed tour, even a well-made one: it could answer, very capably, a question that this particular listener may not be asking.

The most useful part of a demo often happens quietly, in the questions asked before the screen is shared and between one screen and the next: what is painful today, what has already been tried, what would need to be true for this to matter. Something like a good doctor’s examination, perhaps: brief, responsive, guided by what the last answer revealed, and confident enough in what it has to offer that it need not show all of it to everyone. The showing remains the point. Listening is simply how one finds out where to aim it.