Pic: Hemangini Tandel, Head of Identity and Access Management, Ramsay Health Care

There is an often-quoted phrase in cybersecurity that suggest security is like the brakes on a car, in that they enable an organisation to go faster because you know you can stop when you need to.

At the risk of stretching an already troubled analogy, if security is the brakes on the car, then identity and access management is the gearbox.

Throughout Clutch Events’ Melbourne Identity and Access Management Summit, one of the key challenges described by identity management professionals was that of over-provisioned access credentials, and the risk this creates when credentials are compromised.

When staff are given access to more systems than they need to perform their function, it can be akin to giving them a high-performance five-speed vehicle for tasks that amount to standard inner-city driving. This may not be a huge problem for them in the day-to-day, as they might rarely need to use that fifth gear.

But it is a huge problem when that car is stolen, and the attacker inherits access to systems that should never have been accessible through that identity in the first place.

The remedy often proposed is to restrict access, but this can have the opposite effect – perhaps likened to locking users into first gear and forcing them to ask permission every time they want to shift into second gear or higher.

This challenge is becoming even more acute as organisations adopt AI agents and other technologies that require privileged access to systems. The number of these so-called non-human identities (NHIs) is expanding rapidly within organisations. Organisations are no longer provisioning access only for people, but increasingly for identities that can act autonomously, at speed, and across multiple systems. Being able to effectively govern these NHIs is a challenge that few organisations have locked down.

The starting point for providing appropriate privileges for both human and non-human identities is visibility. As several speakers suggested, you can’t secure what you can’t see.

But it is important to remember that visibility works both ways. Having visibility of who has access to which systems, and how they are using that access, is one side of the equation. The other is visibility into how people actually work, and therefore what access they need to perform effectively.

In short, some people really do need a fast car and access to all five gears to perform effectively. Understanding who they are, and under what circumstances they need that level of access is critical for ensuring that identity does not become the choke point in operational performance.

But there is one other point to consider within all of this, which was well articulated by our final speaker, Ramsay Health Care Head of Identity and Access Management Hemangini Tandel, who said that when implementing an identity program, organisational change management matters.

Changing the gears that are available to workers is something that needs to be communicated, and its impact needs to be monitored and adjusted. Understanding the human reaction to change is another important aspect of identity and access management, as friction can be an important indicator of where identity controls are chafing against the needs of its users.

In the 30 years that I’ve spent observing business success and failure, there is a question that has puzzled me more than most: why do some organisations transform successfully, while others do not? And why do some leaders whittle away their organisation’s choices until the only ones left are whether to shut it down today or shut it down tomorrow?

For a long time I thought it was mostly a question of strategy, and in some instances it certainly has been. Nokia’s decline and eventual sale of its handset business to Microsoft under the stewardship of Stephen Elop is one example. It seems standing on a burning platform is not a great place from which to make existential strategic decisions.

But there are plenty of other instances where the strategy has been fine, and the business or project has failed anyway.

So if strategy alone doesn’t explain the difference, something must be happening between the decision and the outcome.

That missing piece is execution.

Because the best strategy is of little value if those tasked with implementing it can’t turn it into reality.

The concept of execution has also long fascinated my frequent collaborator Peter Fritz AM and the team at Global Access Partners, who have encompassed it in a concept they have developed called Execution Economics.

The principle behind Execution Economics is relatively simple. It asks whether those responsible for executing a decision have the genuine authority and control required to do so, whether they have access to the information needed to track its implementation, and if they have sufficient freedom from interference by others who might derail it.

These factors come together to determine Decision Sovereignty, which describes an organisation’s capacity to translate a decision into a realised outcome.

While the basic concepts behind Decision Sovereignty seem obvious, that is part of their strength. Its value lies in giving organisations a way to understand their execution capability and, when deficiencies become apparent, identify where they need to intervene.

Decision Sovereignty does not pass judgement on the quality of the strategy itself. Rather, it indicates the extent to which the value contained in that strategy can survive the journey from decision to outcome.

You’ll hear me talking a lot more about Execution Economics and Decision Sovereignty over the next year as we work to take the concept mainstream.

I introduced it recently in a presentation to a group of private healthcare executives at HAMBS in Adelaide. That presentation explored four factors that I believe are essential to successful transformation:

• Choice – the goal of transformation should be to increase the range of positive choices available to an organisation.
• Foresight – he ability to understand what might be coming and recognise the need to respond.
• Strategy – the codified response to that foresight.
• Execution – the translation of strategy into action in pursuit of an outcome.

If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then execution is where choices go to die.

All too often I have witnessed poor execution whittle away the choices available to an organisation, as cost overruns, skills gaps, supplier delays, competing priorities, and organisational interference erode the potential value of an outcome.

That matters because transformation is ultimately about preserving choice. Every failed implementation, blown budget, missed deadline, or compromised outcome narrows the range of choices available next time.

So perhaps the answer to the question I’ve been asking for 30 years isn’t simply that some organisations develop better strategies than others. It is that some are much better at preserving the value of a good decision as it passes from intention, to action, to outcome.

Execution Economics enables us to understand why.

The impact of AI on software engineering has been both swift and significant.

In some ways, engineering has become the coalminer’s canary for the impact AI might have on white-collar professions. We are already seeing the potential for enormous productivity gains, alongside growing questions about quality, security, skills, and ultimately, the future shape of the profession itself.

It is fair to say that the speed at which AI has disrupted software engineering has caught many organisations off guard, particularly when it comes to security. But the rapid announcements of supposedly AI-driven cuts to developer workforces, and the almost equally rapid walking back of some of those claims, have raised another set of questions.

If you are a junior software engineer entering the profession today, what skills should you actually be learning?

And what kind of job will be waiting for you when you have learned them?

These were among the issues raised in the Think Tank session that concluded Clutch Events’ recent Sydney Engineering & DevOps Summit, where Asif Gill (Head of Discipline – Software Systems and Director of the DigiSAS Lab at the University of Technology Sydney), Jeremy Burton (Chief Technology Officer at hipages Group), and Jovana Dunisijevic (Senior Technical Evangelist at Atlassian), discussed what the future might hold for engineering and software development in Australia.

The short answer is that nobody really knows. The pace of change is simply too fast for predictions based on today’s capabilities to remain reliable for very long.

What we can see more clearly are the changes already taking place in software delivery.

• Developers can produce code at a far greater rate than before.
• The increased use of generated code and pre-developed packages has created new security vulnerabilities.
• The bottleneck in software delivery has moved away from code creation towards testing, validation, and review.

But beneath these obvious changes sits a potentially more profound one.

AI is rapidly harvesting the low-hanging fruit of software development, and many of the lower-level, process-oriented tasks that once formed part of the training pathway for junior developers no longer need to be performed by human hands.

That creates an uncomfortable question: if we automate the work through which junior engineers traditionally learned their craft, how do they acquire the experience needed to become senior engineers?

What does “entry level” mean anymore?

Of course, software engineering has always evolved this way. Every era leaves skills behind. Few developers today need to write machine code or worry about many of the technical constraints that consumed earlier generations of programmers.

Perhaps AI simply pushes the definition of “entry level” further up the skills ladder.

But if entry-level work becomes more sophisticated, what sits at the top? What are the highest-value skills an engineer can aspire to develop in a world where increasingly capable AI systems can generate, test, explain, and potentially optimise large amounts of code?

Does the software engineering ladder extend upwards, or does the distance between its top and its bottom begin to compress? That question is much harder to answer because we don’t yet know where those limits lie.

One theme that did emerge clearly from the Think Tank discussion was that an engineer’s value increases significantly when they understand their work through a business lens. That might explain why the term “business engineer” is appearing more often.

The valuable engineer of the future may not simply be the person who can produce the code the fastest. It may be the person who best understands why the code should exist in the first place, how it interacts with the broader organisation, what risks it introduces, and what outcome it is intended to create.

I have a personal attachment to this question.

Many, many years ago, long before I entered technology journalism, I started a degree in digital systems and communications engineering at RMIT. I learned about things such as logic controllers, EPROMs, and differential calculus.

At the time, I couldn’t see what much of this had to do with the work I imagined myself eventually doing. I was told it was foundational knowledge, and that its relevance would become clearer as I progressed.

I never got the chance to find out. I dropped out by the end of my first year.

But what I remember is that each new piece of knowledge provided another fragment of the world I was entering. Even when something had little obvious practical value, it helped explain how the technologies around me had come to exist and how their different components fitted together.

That context matters.

Understanding why things are the way they are can be enormously valuable when trying to understand how different parts of a system interact. It contributes to what we now commonly describe as systems thinking, a capability that almost every employer seems keen to find.

And yet systems thinking is becoming harder to attain. Over the decades, science, technology, and engineering have become increasingly specialised. The depth of knowledge available within individual disciplines has grown enormously, but the ability for any one person to understand how those disciplines fit together has become much harder to develop.

Paradoxically, those who develop that ability may also be becoming more valuable.

This is where the impact of AI on engineering becomes more interesting than a simple discussion about productivity. If we only use AI only to produce more code, faster, we may be missing its greater value.

There is a risk that automation strips away some of the work through which engineers traditionally built knowledge, intuition, and experience. If that happens without us creating alternative pathways for developing those capabilities, we may eventually discover that we have automated away parts of the apprenticeship on which the profession has traditionally depended.

But the opposite outcome is also possible.

AI could remove enough of the repetitive, low-level work to give engineers more time to look beyond their immediate domain. It could allow specialists to explore adjacent disciplines, understand the businesses and systems within which their work operates, and develop the broader perspective that increasingly distinguishes high-value engineers from everyone else.

Perhaps, then, the goal for AI in software engineering should not simply be to help engineers produce more.

It should be to help them see more.

(pic credit Олег Мороз)

Sometimes your imposter can also be your friend.

One thing I hadn’t anticipated when I started running professional communications training was that I would not only be helping clients build skills, but also helping them overcome perceived shortcomings.

I would find myself sitting opposite people who appeared cool, calm, and accomplished, but who underneath were carrying a collection of jangled nerves and negative thoughts. They worried about being exposed as incapable, underqualified, or even being seen as frauds by their audience.

This concept of imposter syndrome is one of the most common challenges standing in the way of people becoming truly effective communicators.

But it can also be useful.

Imposter syndrome might make people underestimate their abilities and exaggerate the gaps in their knowledge, but the fear of being exposed can also drive them to prepare more thoroughly, examine their assumptions, and ensure they know their material.

The problems begin when preparation becomes over-preparation. That can lead to presentations that are too long, too detailed, and poorly suited to the needs of the audience. Speakers get lost in the detail, struggle to articulate their key point, and become increasingly anxious about forgetting something important.

There are three strategies people can use to ensure their imposter does not get the best of them:

• Know exactly what you are trying to achieve and stick to it ruthlessly. Having a clear objective and the discipline to stick to it is my most common advice. One objective, a small number of supporting messages, enough evidence to substantiate them, and a few compelling stories to bring them to life. It’s not a question of being prepared for everything, but of being confident in delivering what matters.
• Know the boundary of your expertise. You do not need to demonstrate everything you know. Staying inside the territory you can defend creates confidence and reinforces your authority. It is fine to concede there are areas where your expertise is lacking – provided you deliver value in the areas that matter.
• Remove the language of uncertainty. Cut unnecessary qualifiers such as “I think”, “I believe”, “hopefully”, “not necessarily”, “trying to”, and “sort of”. If you know something, say it. Confidence in delivery comes through what you say and how you say it. Getting to the point with confidence builds the audience’s confidence in you.

The goal isn’t to silence the imposter. Having a little doubt can be useful, because it makes us prepare, question ourselves, and avoid taking an audience for granted.

The trick is knowing when the imposter has done its job. It’s certainly done its job for me.

Prepare because your imposter tells you that you might not be good enough. Then, when it is time to communicate, leave it behind.

Great stories aren’t owned – they are share. Brand owners ignore this at their peril.

One of the defining qualities of a truly powerful story is that others want to retell it. In the act of retelling, stories inevitably change. They are adapted, embellished, and localised. This is one of the strengths of storytelling.

We see this in myths and legends. Stories travel across cultures, changing as they go. For instance, many societies have flood myths with strikingly similar elements – angry gods, chosen survivors, and the release of a bird to test whether the waters have receded (often referred to as the ‘bird scout’ motif). The core idea persists, but each culture makes it its own.

I often see this at conferences, where a story told on stage at one event is retold later, often with different details. One example is the story of the angry father who learned of his daughter’s pregnancy via the product recommendations she received – a story that most likely started out only as a hypothetical, before being translated into an ‘event’.

A story becomes more powerful precisely because it is no longer fixed – it is alive.

Fiction creators understand this. The popularity of a story is often measured by the fan fiction it inspires. Countless tales have been written about Sherlock Holmes that were never penned by Conan Doyle, including less obvious ones such as the TV series House (the clue is in the name – geddit?).

Entire fictional universes, from science fiction franchises to fantasy sagas, have expanded far beyond their original authors because fans wanted to continue the story. Were it not for E. L. James’ love of the Twilight novels we would not have 50 Shades of Grey (who do you think Mr Grey was based on …?). The worlds of science fiction are especially ripe for this phenomena, as seen through the thousands of stories that fans have written in the universes of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who.

Brands are no different.

Two decades ago, the rise of user-generated content clearly showed how brands were no longer controlled solely by marketers. Today, thousands of creators and influencers tell brand stories every day, through videos, reviews, memes, and social media.

This creates a paradox for brand owners: they are not really in control, yet they are still responsible.

In reality, a brand exists only because people believe in it. A brand with no fans is just a name. A brand with millions of fans is a cultural force shaped as much by its community as by its originators and legal owners.

For anyone building a brand, the notion that others want to tell you story for you is not something to control – it is something to nurture and celebrate – and learn from. Third party stories are in some ways a better reflection of the brand than its owners themselves might see – it is a representation of the brand as others see it.

Understanding how the brand story changes through retelling can provide a clear indication of what parts of the story work most strongly, and a good indicator for areas of further development.

Letting go of control is hard for marketers. It requires courage, and careful stewardship. While brands cannot own their stories, they can influence them by clearly articulating their values. These values become the brand’s “canon” – the principles that guide how the story should evolve.

When brands betray that canon, fans notice, and react fiercely (search for the term ‘Holdo Manoeuvre if you’re keen to dive into a rabbit hole for how fandoms respond to such transgressions).

Fans are loyal, and brands crave loyalty. But loyalty is not a transaction – it is a relationship. Take it for granted, and you will discover that a betrayed fan can become your most relentless critic.

Yet when brands stop trying to control the story and instead choose to listen, learn, and participate in it, something extraordinary happens. The stories told by customers, creators, and communities often illuminate the true meaning of a brand far more clearly than any boardroom strategy ever could.

These third-party stories reveal what people actually care about, what they cherish, and what they are prepared to carry forward. They are not noise – they are the brand in its most authentic form.

So the task of brand building is not to lock the story down, but to set it free with intention.

If people want to tell your story for you, that is not a risk to manage – it is the highest form of success.

Because great brands don’t just make customers. They create fans.

And it is fans – not marketers – who turn brands into legends.

Why? Because every presentation should be judged from the audience’s point of view, and 15 seconds is about as long as you can reasonably assume someone will give their attention for free.

If your presentation doesn’t give them a reason to listen beyond the first 15 seconds, why would they?

At that point, for them, it’s already over.

Great presenters are ruthless about how they use those opening moments. In the first 15 seconds, the job is simple: establish value.

Some do this by stating the value exchange directly – their knowledge for your time. Others open with a question or a challenge that pulls the audience in. One of my favourite techniques is to make a promise – something specific the audience can hold you to.

Whatever the approach, it must earn the next 15 seconds. And then the next. And the next – until the presentation is done.

A lucky few can afford to burn precious seconds before delivering value, because their reputation has already done the work for them. This is most often the case for big name speakers, where the value lies as much in entertainment as it is in knowledge exchange.

In their case, the value is established long before they stepped on stage. But that still doesn’t mean they will have everyone’s attention at the 16 second mark.

For everyone else, there is no shortcut. It’s the hard grind of testing ideas, refining openings, and practising delivery until something consistently works, and then evolving it again.

This also means that if you have something important to say, you’d better say it early. The first 15 seconds are the only time you can be confident everyone is still listening.

Good presentations are exercises in holding attention. If you want the audience with you at the end, it’s far easier to keep them with you along the way than to win them back after you’ve lost them.

Yes, every presentation has highs and lows, and contrast matters. Even Mad Max movies need quiet moments so the audience can breathe.

But if that quiet moment comes at the beginning, you may never gain the momentum you need to carry your audience through to the end. Miss the first 15 seconds, and your presentation is effectively over before it’s begun.

Every presentation lasts 15 seconds.

Why? Because every presentation should be judged from the audience’s point of view, and 15 seconds is about as long as you can reasonably assume someone will give their attention for free.

If your presentation doesn’t give them a reason to listen beyond the first 15 seconds, why would they?

At that point, for them, it’s already over.

Great presenters are ruthless about how they use those opening moments. In the first 15 seconds, the job is simple: establish value.

Some do this by stating the value exchange directly – their knowledge for your time. Others open with a question or a challenge that pulls the audience in. One of my favourite techniques is to make a promise – something specific the audience can hold you to.

Whatever the approach, it must earn the next 15 seconds. And then the next. And the next – until the presentation is done.

A lucky few can afford to burn precious seconds before delivering value, because their reputation has already done the work for them. This is most often the case for big name speakers, where the value lies as much in entertainment as it is in knowledge exchange.

In their case, the value is established long before they stepped on stage. But that still doesn’t mean they will have everyone’s attention at the 16 second mark.

For everyone else, there is no shortcut. It’s the hard grind of testing ideas, refining openings, and practising delivery until something consistently works, and then evolving it again.

This also means that if you have something important to say, you’d better say it early. The first 15 seconds are the only time you can be confident everyone is still listening.

Good presentations are exercises in holding attention. If you want the audience with you at the end, it’s far easier to keep them with you along the way than to win them back after you’ve lost them.

Yes, every presentation has highs and lows, and contrast matters. Even Mad Max movies need quiet moments so the audience can breathe.

But if that quiet moment comes at the beginning, you may never gain the momentum you need to carry your audience through to the end. Miss the first 15 seconds, and your presentation is effectively over before it’s begun.

In corporate storytelling, no one cares about your story as much as you do, so if you want it to influence an audience, your story must be clear, concise, and deliver value quickly.

That sounds simple, but clarity is fragile – especially when a story is shaped by a group. Each contributor arrives with their own priorities, messages, and details they want included. Before long, a once-focused narrative is buried under conditions, modifiers, and explanations.

The result isn’t engagement. It’s friction.

Instead of drawing people in, excess detail gives them reasons to switch off.

Good storytelling is an exercise in brevity. It demands ruthless focus on a single objective – influence – and a willingness to question whether every element genuinely supports that goal.

This can be an uncomfortable process. Cutting material often means disappointing people whose contributions don’t make the final edit. But if those elements don’t help achieve the outcome, they’re not helping the story anyway.

The rule is simple:

Do these words help me achieve my outcome?

If yes, they stay.

If no, they go.

Use this test the next time you’re crafting a narrative – especially when internal resistance appears and the urge to keep adding starts to creep in.

I spend a lot of my time walking from one place to another, and have found this time to be incredbly valuable for listening and learning. So in the spirit of the Season, I’ve curated a list of my 12 favourites, ranked in alphabetical order. This list covers everything from linguistics and etmology to astro and quantum physics, including a fair dose of folklore, mythology and narrative theory, and even a fair coverage of reseach into ancient relgious texts.

These YouTubers have not only been invaluable to me as a source of knowledge, but they have often reshaped my thinking, and proven highly entertaining too. If you want to master storytelling, you need to understand not just the role it plays today, but the role it has played in shaping history, and how storytelling has engaged the human psyche over the centuries.

And if you want to know how I managed to link the non-cannonical Gospels to the Star Wars Expanded Univese and 50 Shades of Grey, you might find some the answer in one or two of these videos ….

Language, Thought & Persuasion: How stories get encoded into words

languagejones: Dr Taylor Jones has a PhD in linguistics and is not afraid to use it – at high speed, and across a massive number of topics relating to how we speak (his dissertation on the Gen-Alpha ‘6-7’ brain-rot phenomenon is eye-opening). He explores the complexities in slang and dialects and is not afraid to call out spreaders of false information, or explain how language is used to shape opinion. His most recent exploration of how language shapes engagement on YouTube should be essential viewing (for both manipulators and the manipulated).

RobWords: A fun channel for anyone who has wondered why a dog is called a dog (sadly, no one really knows the answer to that one). Rob Watts delves into the history, etymology, quirks, idioms and word origins of the English language in a way that is quick to curry favour with word enthusiasts (and I recommend you look up the origin of ‘curry favour’). If his channel doesn’t expand your vocabulary, it will at least give you a stronger sense of why you might choose the words you use.

Myth, Meaning & Belief: The oldest stories

Crecganford: An unparalleled authority on mythology and history, with a focus on Indo-European mythic traditions. It takes a scholarly approach to mythology and is brilliant in its exploration of how stories transfer from one culture to another, and the motifs they take with them. One of his latest videos, on whether or not Neanderthals were storytellers, brings rare context to the idea that at one time there was more than one species of human on the planet and raises the question of whether humanity’s abilities as storytellers played some role in our rise to hominid supremacy. Grab a cup of tea and settle in for some amazing explorations of ancient lore from the earliest days of human storytelling.

Esoterica: Dr Justin Sledge has created a wealth of content exploring the esoteric in history, philosophy, and religion. His explorations of everything from mysticism and the Kabbalah through to the occult and witchcraft are both thoughtful and thought-provoking and provide rare insights into the origins of many of the narratives that influence our lives today.

Dan McClellan: Dan is a scholar of the Bible and religion, and while that might initially seem to be an odd choice for me, his examination of ancient texts provides an excellent perspective from which to understand some of the oldest stories still told today—their origins and their influence. Most importantly, he brings a highly critical perspective to both the texts and how they are interpreted, and he is exceptional in his use of scholarship to dismantle many of the dogmatic perspectives that exist within religious communities today. In doing so, he provides a host of examples of how reason and evidence can be wielded to support arguments against even the most fervent believers. And when you begin to understand that the behaviours of those writing ancient texts were not so dissimilar to those of many storytellers today, his channel becomes mandatory viewing.

Fiction as a mirror: Stories we invent to understand the world we live in

Feral Historian: This creator manages to find the political, social, and economic theming in even the most seemingly banal of science fiction worldbuilding, and his ability to relate fictional constructs to the real-world ideas that birthed them is enlightening. By teasing out the narratives and their underpinning philosophies, Matt offers up something both for those who want to understand fictional worldbuilding, and how fictional worldbuilding can reflect and even influence the world that birthed it.

Money, power, and systems: Stories of why the world is the way it is

Patrick Bolye: The king of the deadpan takedown, Patrick covers everything from rogue trading and crypto-bros to the Epstein Files and the financing of Saudi megaprojects (his videos on NEOM and the Epstein birthday book are really worth a watch). Sceptical without ever being mean-spirited, critical but with an insider’s knowledge of how things happen the way they do, Patrick is my number one source when trying to make sense (or quantify the insanity) of global financial markets.

EconomicsExplained: This Australian economics education channel is a brilliant resource for understanding the economies of different countries and how they work (or why they don’t), while also looking into issues such as the impact of taxation and monetary policy. A great example of data-driven storytelling, the channel offers something for both the casually-curious and seasoned geopolitical hacks.

How Money Works: US-based former investment banker Darin Soat is terrific at explaining the complexities within the financial system and at articulating problems that most are willing to ignore. His exposition of the fragility of the Australian economy ruffled a number of feathers but was no different to the type of analysis he brings to a wide range of economies and topics.

Wall Street Millennial: My favourite channel for regaining a sense of sanity after diving too deep into the goings-on of the innovation investment market. Another YouTuber who isn’t afraid to call ‘bullshit’ on the utterances of Sam Altman, Elon Musk and others, and who brings a critical eye to business deals often long before other sources start to look into them.

The Universe and Reality Itself: Stories that are bigger than any of us

Sabine Hossenfelder (Science News): German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is a voice of reason in the increasingly crazy world of academic research, providing in-depth analysis of the latest news, and not being afraid to call bullshit on specific papers and press releases, or on the fundamental flaws in the academic research community. Her news spreads across a wide range of topics from climate change and energy through to particle physics and the nature of the universe.

Anton Petrov (Wonderful Person): A tireless science communicator who strives to make the complex clear in fields such as astrophysics, mathematics, and quantum physics. Anton’s short videos are easy to digest and will keep you up to date with what’s happening both close to home and in the furthest reaches of the visible universe (literally).

No one in your audience knows what you meant to say. They don’t know the line you forgot, or that the sentence you just delivered wasn’t delivered with perfect cadence.

And yet the pursuit of perfection remains one of the biggest stumbling blocks I see speakers struggle to overcome.

When we watch someone on stage, we are almost never witnessing the “best” version of their presentation. We’re simply seeing the latest version, which may skip a detail, underplay a key point, or trip over a phrase.

But if the core message gets through – if it is clear, memorable, and compelling – then perfection becomes irrelevant, because you have achieved what you set out to achieve.

A presentation only needs to be good enough to be effective. Not flawless.

In fact, many great presentations are great precisely because they aren’t perfect. There is something deeply engaging about watching a speaker stumble slightly, then recover. It reminds us they are human – not a polished, faceless, corporate automaton.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in a failed demo. A flawless demo is impressive, but recovering from a failing demo is unforgettable.

This is not an argument against preparation. You should rehearse. You should test everything. You should stack the odds in your favour.

But you shouldn’t rehearse yourself into sterility, or catastrophise the moment something slips.

It’s worth remembering that when you’re on stage, you’re not reciting Shakespeare. You don’t need to be word-perfect.

So don’t strive for perfection.

Strive for effectiveness.