Quest Suffers Fracture At Davos

Another year at the One Percenters Club in Davos, another Richard Quest whiteboard (here’s last year’s flipchart).

He trampolined on the WEF’s pitiful 2018 theme, “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World”.

Above you can see what five days of The Elite scrawling their wisdom looks like.

A ‘fracture’ line down the middle. Your left-sided mark denotes a world not so fractured, one on the right more so. Arrows show their perceived direction of travel.

One man who didn’t seem to see the CNN internal memo was their Senior Political Analyst, David Gergen. His summary?

I think people will go back from here feeling a little less fractured.

And with that, Leftists shed a tear. Although salvation came perhaps from Richard’s own closing thoughts;

And you make of this what you will. I think overall what you get from it is where people sort of in [the fractured] area. But it’s the arrows there also were most fascinating. And by and large when you try and count them all up, more arrows do suggest that [more fractured] direction. But the fracture board has well and truly served its purpose.

I flicked through the show’s transcripts. I counted 21 luminaries leaving their mark. They all embraced the task. Smiles all round. They liked choosing (and explaining their) pen colours. In some cases, sticking to type maybe, even two. They drew shapes, arrows, circles, squiggles. Happy to talk through their thoughts.

Whiteboarding works. All solution salespeople must deploy this kind of exercise.

Regardless of how ridiculous I might personally find the majority of contributors in this particular case, once again Quest shows how to achieve great engagement and find out intel you’d otherwise not be shown. I hope you’re doing the same with your prospects.