I’m sorting out my home office while I procrastinate about my next book. I’ve gathered a lot of notes and material over the last ten years of working with researchers, and not all of it is useful now. There are workshops I regularly did ten years ago that I’m not involved with now, and yet I’ve kept all of those notes just in case. It’s time to be ruthless, but I read and check them all one last time.
Just in case.
I found an old note about the 5Ps for elevator pitches and sharing business ideas. You can use the 5Ps – pain, premise, people, proof, purpose – to frame what you’re going to say about your amazing business proposal. These are essentially a shorthand for questions you’re answering while you tell the story of your idea.
- Pain: what is the thing your business helps with?
- Premise: how does your idea help with the pain?
- People: who do you have on your team?
- Proof: how do you know that your idea works?
- Purpose: why are you doing this?
I like simple models for telling stories and communicating ideas. So when I found the 5Ps in an old note, one thing in the centre of a page of now-redundant information I wrote it out as a reminder. After a week of stewing at the back of my brain, I realised it could be a good way of reflecting what your research is about.
If you were to give a thesis elevator pitch, perhaps you could use the same 5Ps to prompt some questions and exploration.
- Pain: what is the problem your research addresses?
- Premise: how did you set about finding answers?
- People: whose work do you reference in your thesis?
- Proof: how do you know that what you’ve done is good?
- Purpose: why did you want to do this research?
Each of these questions is generally good to explore before the viva. Together they make a neat little story about your research. Reflection and writing summaries before the viva is good preparation because it gives you opportunities to think about your work, and practice how you could talk about what you’ve done during your PhD.
Just in case.