Pitch Placement The Angry Birds Way

I remember long ago advice on arranging a Board Meeting agenda.

It included the instruction to always have that item for which you most desire to seek agreement immediately follow a previous one which was both contentious and likely to find no agreement reached. The theory being that subconsciously, after a punchy pow-row, people automatically want to take a mental breath, make-up slightly and are more liable to wave the next subject through with a relatively relieved rubber stamp.

Other tips suggested you note to your advantage the inverse relationship between length of discussion time and cost of an agenda item.

Corporate Politicians may well have another arrow in their quiver courtesy of the record-breaking game app and cultural phenomenon origin story for Angry Birds.

You could write a post alone on the persistence message; “Angry Birds was our 52nd game and it started off as a side project.”

Yet here I’m focused on the selling slant of how it first emerged to gain prominence against all other options for committing effort to.

Here’s the key co-founder recollections to The Guardian on a fateful meeting;

“I was sitting in a meeting with our lead designer …
Who presented 10 new game ideas and talked us through a long written document about each one.
Then, right at the end, he showed us this last thing which was only an image –
A sketch of some coloured blocks, a flock of birds and some smoke and dust.
There wasn’t a proper game idea behind it at that moment.
But I fell in love with that image and its energy.
I just got a feeling that this was the game we should develop.”

The idea with seemingly no real prep became the one to ride.

Almost a decade on and the games developer this month floated as a bona fide Unicorn.

The reflections suggested that the original “sketch conveyed a lot of energy”.

Yet there’s another, more telling, interpretation.

You see nine proposals. All delivered in the same format. Each with forensic detail.

You can’t quite remember whether you preferred the third. Or fifth.

Like Eurovision Songs flashing by at their annual glitter fest, they all merge into a single mass.

Primacy versus Recency suggests the early ones have a better chance of getting through.

Yet here that continuum was disrupted.

After nine samey-same, there came a tenth. But presented very differently.

Which happened to be in a way that let the imagination run free.

You almost wonder if any of the ideas switched in to that last spot could have gained the room’s approval.

In any case, this method of presenting multiple options seems a winner. Provided you lick how to show that vital, last proposal as seed-ically and informally compared to the rest as possible.