Deadendedness – Death by Cul-de-Sac
Symptoms: Presenter pursues non-productive pathways, perusing pointless possibilities and dead-ends. Elongates a demo segment from what could have been accomplished in 5 mouse-clicks to 24 minutes of detailed explanation, covering all possible options and settings. Presenter may also suffer delusions that the audience is earnestly interested in seeing all of this.
Examples: “And another way to do this is to ….”
“…But for this example we won’t do that and instead we’ll go back to where we were a moment ago…”
[Customer] “Oh my friggin’ God! – Will he never stop?”
Cure: Guide the afflicted presenter to choose the highest probability pathway for the customer at hand and execute that pathway with the fewest number of steps needed to complete the task. Apply Occam’s Razor, topically (“entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem“).
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