The Fish Story
I read in Presentation Zen yesterday on the essence of simplicity in your presentation. Garr Reynold shared a fish story sent by one of his seminar attendees, Deepak. This story was heard by Deepak while growing up in India.
I thought, hey this is an interesting story, and here is what Deepak said:
When you talked about reducing the text on the slides, I was reminded of a story from my childhood in India.When Vijay opened his store he put up a sign that said “We Sell Fresh Fish Here.” His father stopped by and said that the word “We” suggests an emphasis on the seller rather than the customer, and is really not needed. So the sign was changed to “Fresh Fish Sold Here.” His brother came by and suggested that the word “here” could be done away with — it was superfluous. doing?” Later, his neighbor stopped by to congratulate him. Then he mentioned that all passers-by could easily tell that the fish was really fresh. Mentioning the word fresh actually made it sound defensive as though there was room for doubt about the freshness. Now the sign just read: “FISH.” As Vijay was walking back to his shop after a break he noticed that one could identify the fish from its smell from very far, at a distance from which one could barely read the sign. He knew there was no need for the word “FISH.”
The story hits me with flashes of my experience in software development life-cycle. Somehow users or developers alike tend to have i-want-this-i-want-that-also attitude, trying to cover the widest range of features that they can possible think of. A simple system in the beginning may end up like a mini Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
Project development time will stretch, the cost will increase. The longer the project stretches, the higher it will go and the hardest it will fall. It ends up everyone misses the basic ideas why the system was needed at the first place.
I too sometimes have that kind of attitude, and I willl just step back, and ask, “Is the extra jazz really required?”.
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