Driving Technical Change

Pitfalls

There’s one glaring risk when relying on demonstration: Murphy’s law. When you are doing a live demonstration of technology, that technology will fail. Do enough demos, and you will wipe out in front of an audience and completely fail. There are ways of mitigating this. You can have prebaked versions of code that you will be writing in front of an audience. You can do a screen capture of the entire process working correctly. Eventually, though, you’ll suffer through a failure. It’s bad when it happens because as persuasive as a demo can be when it works, it’s just as persuasive when it doesn’t—it’s just that you’re persuading people that it doesn’t work.

The best thing you can do when a demonstration fails and your contingencies don’t ...