プレゼン最前線2023年5月15日号
NPO日本プレゼンテーション協会理事長 高野文夫
整理番号161冊目の本
「こころ」をつかんで稼げ！: ロジックを超えた感性力勝負！ | 高野文夫 |本 | 通販 |
英語版
Be Nature！
Chapter 1: Everything is in Squirrel Catching
I used to be a “squirrel-catching expert”.
Have you ever seen a squirrel up close?
Squirrels are mammals in the order Rodentia and are about 20 to 30 centimeters in length.
Their fluffy tails alone are almost 20 centimeters long, and they run around trees in forests in every direction.
Their body color is a gray similar to tree bark, which helps them camouflage from predators such as birds of prey.
Squirrels can run surprisingly fast, and their reflexes are highly developed, making it impossible for humans to catch them with their bare hands.
They are found in almost all of Japan, from Okinawa to Hokkaido, with the most common species on the mainland being the Japanese squirrel and the Taiwanese squirrel, and the Hokkaido squirrel being the Ezo squirrel.
Although they may look cute, squirrels can have a rather aggressive personality.
Their favorite foods are grains and nuts, especially acorns, chestnuts, and the fruit of the akebi vine.
Squirrels rely mainly on their sense of smell rather than sight to navigate their world, so they are very sensitive to the scent of delicious foods.
In my hometown of Izu Oshima, squirrels that ate the seeds of camellia, the source of the island’s important specialty, camellia oil, were considered pests.
The Taiwanese squirrels, which had escaped from a nature park and become wild, were found on the island. Although they all had cute faces, they were hated enemies to the islanders who raided their property.
The local government declared a policy of “capturing squirrels for 100 yen each,” targeting the squirrels that ate crops such as camellia seeds, potatoes, and grains.
Mischievous children and adults who worked in the fields tried to capture the squirrels by setting traps on trees, but it was difficult to succeed and most of them just ended up exhausted.
However, as a twelve or thirteen-year-old boy at the time, I was able to capture squirrels every day and earn money.
I supported my poor family with the earnings. I was known as the “squirrel-catching expert kid” because I could see things in the forest that others couldn’t see.
③ Learning facilitation from squirrels
Facilitation, in brief, should be expressed as “organizational activation”, but the similarity between the human perception in facilitation and the methodology for capturing squirrels is astounding.
Both squirrels and humans appear to be free to act, but in reality, they are governed by certain rules and patterns.
You can understand this by considering your own daily life.
If you are a company employee, you are bound by your work during most of the day, and if you are a business owner, you have a certain pattern of behavior every day in terms of purchasing goods or selling them in your store.
Most people, on their days off, are controlled by the unconscious patterns they have created for themselves, whether they go out or stay at home, except in cases where they have something to do.
It’s no different from how squirrels create their own paths as a means of escape from predators such as snakes or foraging for food in the forest.
Squirrels have their own behavior patterns, and humans have their own. Therefore, the same methods should be applicable for capturing squirrels and capturing humans.
I was a master at catching squirrels. While other mischievous children and adults caught at most one squirrel a day, and in most cases none at all,
I caught three or four squirrels as a matter of course, and my record was eight squirrels in a single day.
At the time, my family was in poverty, and the money I earned by exchanging squirrels was a valuable source of income.
My family was extremely poor at the time, so the money I earned from trading with squirrels was a valuable source of income.
The reason I was able to capture many squirrels every day was that I lay on a mat in the forest all day, observing the movements of the squirrels as they crossed the treetops and analyzing their behavior patterns.
I did this not just for a day or two, but on rainy and windy days as well, until I eventually came to understand the feelings of the squirrels myself.
As I will explain later, it was through this process that I learned the basic practice of “empathy” in facilitation.
