When I was growing up, I went to one of the fastest-growing churches in America.
Mars Hill Bible Church was in West Michigan, and Rob Bell was the pastor. Thousands of people showed up every Sunday to hear him teach in what was basically a converted shopping mall. Whatever you thought about Rob Bell, his theology, or where his career eventually went, it was hard to argue with his ability to communicate.
I've spent most of my career watching people try to persuade other people. Founders pitching investors, CEOs presenting to boards, salespeople trying to close big deals, leaders trying to get a team behind a new direction. I've seen a lot of very good communicators.
Rob Bell is still one of the best I've ever watched.
I don't even mean one of the best pastors. I mean communicator, period. He could stand in front of thousands of people with very little in front of him and completely control a room. He knew how long to sit in silence, when to move quickly, when to repeat something, and when to let one sentence hang there for a while.
There was another part of his process, though, that I probably think about more now than I did then.
He lived near me, and there was a small public lake nearby where you'd occasionally see him walking before Sundays. He'd be out there by himself, and even as a kid you could tell he wasn't just getting some exercise.
He was working through the sermon.
You'd see him talking to himself, moving his hands, changing pace, stopping and starting again. He was clearly saying pieces of it out loud and figuring out how they sounded. The sermon that would eventually land in front of thousands of people was getting worked out next to a lake with nobody around.
At the time, I didn't think much of it. It was just something he did.
Now, after spending twenty years in rooms where ideas are presented, debated, approved, rejected, and occasionally torn apart, I think about that lake quite a bit.
We do most of our thinking on a screen
Business has a pretty established view of how you develop a good idea: write it down.
I believe in that. Writing forces you to figure out what you actually think. I've written more strategy documents, plans, memos and board decks than I could possibly count, and plenty of ideas that sounded great in my head got a lot weaker once I tried to put them on a page.
That's useful.
There's a reason Amazon became famous for the six-page memo. There is real discipline in forcing someone to explain the problem, the recommendation, the assumptions and the logic instead of hiding behind a few bullets on a slide.
But I've also had the opposite experience.
I've walked into a board meeting with a deck I felt great about. I'd gone through it ten times. The numbers worked. The logic worked. I knew where everything was.
Then I started talking, and somewhere a few minutes into the presentation I could feel the argument getting weaker.
It wasn't necessarily because anything in the deck was wrong. Sometimes I would hit a transition and realize I couldn't explain, without looking down, exactly how I got from one point to the next. Other times I'd make a recommendation and hear myself saying it out loud for the first time and realize I wasn't quite as convinced as the slide suggested I was.
That is a different kind of test.
Writing can tell you whether an idea holds together logically. Saying it out loud starts to tell you whether you actually understand it and believe it enough to carry it into a room.
I've noticed over the years that when I really believe something, I usually don't need the deck very much. I can make the case in a hallway, over dinner, on a phone call, or standing at a whiteboard. The words might not be perfect, but the argument is there.
When I'm constantly reaching back toward the slides to do the explaining for me, I've learned to pay attention to that.
Sometimes I haven't finished thinking. Sometimes the argument is too complicated. Sometimes I've written myself into a recommendation that sounds smart on paper but doesn't quite feel right when I hear myself say it.
All three are things I'd rather discover before the meeting.
AI makes this even more important
I think this matters even more now because writing has gotten incredibly cheap.
AI can take a rough collection of thoughts and turn it into a polished memo in less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee. It can tighten the argument, create the framework, clean up the language and build the presentation.
That's useful. I use it all the time.
But it also changes what a polished document tells you.
There was probably a time when a really good six-page memo was evidence that somebody had spent a lot of time wrestling with the idea. That's not necessarily true anymore. Anyone can make something read like strategy. Anyone can create a clean deck.
The harder question is whether the person presenting it actually understands what is underneath it.
Can you explain the recommendation without reading it? Can you deal with the obvious pushback? Can you explain why it matters, why now, and why this option is better than the alternatives?
Most importantly, do you actually believe it?
AI can help me write a better board deck. It can absolutely help pressure test my assumptions. What it can't do is decide whether I have conviction around the recommendation I'm about to make.
That part is still mine.
Walking out the idea
I've started thinking about this as walking out an idea.
It doesn't literally have to happen on a walk. I've done it in the car, pacing around an office, sitting by myself before a meeting, or talking through something with a person I trust.
The important part is taking the slides away and explaining the idea out loud before the room gets to hear it.
What are we actually doing? Why are we doing it? Why now? What do I think is going to happen? What am I asking everyone else to believe with me?
Then I listen for the places where the explanation starts to get fuzzy.
That's usually where the work still is.
I don't mean rehearsing a presentation word for word. I've watched enough executives do that to know it can have the opposite effect and make somebody sound like they're performing instead of thinking.
I'm talking about rehearsing the reasoning.
If I can't explain a recommendation without flipping forward three slides, I probably don't understand it as well as I thought. If I keep getting hung up on the same transition, I need to go back and work on it. If I hear myself say the conclusion and realize I don't completely believe it, that's probably the most valuable thing I could have discovered.
Those are cheap discoveries when you're walking around a lake. They get a lot more expensive when you're sitting in front of a board.
Not everything needs a walk
There is an obvious practical limitation to all of this. Nobody has time to spend thirty minutes walking around thinking deeply about every meeting on the calendar.
Nor should they.
Most business communication is routine. A weekly update is a weekly update. Write it clearly, send it, and move on.
But a handful of times every year, you're carrying something into a room that actually matters. You're asking for a big investment, changing the strategy, making a difficult recommendation, entering a new market, cutting something that people care about, or trying to get a team to follow you somewhere new.
Those deserve more than another pass through the deck.
Sometimes the idea needs to be walked around for a while. Sometimes you need to hear yourself say it badly a few times before you understand how you actually want to say it.
By the time you walk into the room, you've already been through the argument. You've found the weak spots. You've heard your own doubts. You've figured out what you believe.
You're not presenting the idea for the first time anymore.
I think this works outside of business too
These days I have a friend I walk with pretty regularly. Usually around a lake, which is probably part of why this whole thing has stuck with me.
We end up talking about the bigger stuff. Being dads. Being husbands. Careers. Money. What we're trying to build and whether it's actually what we want. What the next ten or twenty years are supposed to look like.
Some of the best conversations I have happen on those walks.
There are things you can turn over in your head for months that sound completely different once you say them to another person. You can hear yourself describe the career move you've been chasing and realize you don't actually want it. You can explain what success is supposed to look like and suddenly realize you've borrowed somebody else's definition.
Talking forces a different kind of honesty.
Maybe that's why I keep thinking back to Rob Bell walking around that lake.
As a kid, I assumed I was watching him practice a sermon. Looking back, I think it was probably more than that. He was figuring out what he wanted to say, what he believed, where the story worked, and where it didn't.
The thousands of people who showed up on Sunday saw the finished version.
I happened to see some of the work that came before it.
And after a career spent building decks, making recommendations, pitching ideas and trying to get rooms of people behind them, I've come to appreciate that process a lot more.
Sometimes the best thing you can do with an important idea is get away from the screen for a while, take it somewhere quiet, and see what happens when you have to say it out loud.