Seeing vs. understanding - Mosaic moments

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I had my first real experience of a "Mosaic moment" a little over six years ago when my many months of frustration with trying to explain the virtues and even necessities of an intranet to one of my company's executives had come to a head (I was working for a management consulting comany at the time). I then heard Gary Hamel talking to a bunch of supermarket CIOs about how tech guys had discovered that putting an executive in front of a computer with a web browser for 15 minutes did more than all of their explaining and educating executives over months and years. So I spent two weeks learning html and creating a sample website. And then I sat my guy down in front of his computer and asked him to click on the link in the e-mail I had just sent him. Sure enough, 15 minutes later, he was the executive sponsor of my intranet initiative (and asking, "how did you do this?").

This phenomenon is often called a "Mosaic moment", referring to when all of a sudden people SAW the Mosaic web browser, then they knew what they could do with the web – but until they saw it, they couldn’t see any relevance.

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