As part of a mini series, I am looking at communicating complex topics, and I am starting with a book I read recently on holiday, recommneded by my 80 year old dad who provided IT systems for banks for many, many years. I've been reading Banking on It by Anne Boden, the founder of Starling Bank.
It's the story of building a completely new bank from scratch – taking on an established industry, raising the money, securing a banking licence, building the technology and, ultimately, persuading people to trust a bank they'd never heard of with their money. Oh, and she's also a women in finance.
But I found myself reading it less as a book about banking and female founders, and more as a book about innovation, customer behaviour and communications.
Because a lot of the challenges Boden describes are familiar to anyone trying to introduce something genuinely new.
You can believe passionately in the idea. You can have significant investment behind it. You can have brilliant technical people and a product you genuinely think is better.
But ultimately, you still have to persuade somebody to do something differently.
And that brought me back to something I've been talking about recently: when you're communicating innovation, there's a journey from awareness, to understanding, to confidence, and finally to action.
So rather than review the book chapter by chapter, there are three questions it left me thinking about.
So, let's dive in!
