A stone dropped in still water produces a pattern that is both predictable and impossible to contain.
The rings expand outward. They do not stop at the point where the thrower can see them. They continue until they meet resistance - the bank, another wave, the edge of the body of water. The original disturbance continues to have effects long after it has dissipated.
The same pattern operates in rooms where one person demonstrates something that other people did not know was possible.
The mechanics of demonstration
A demonstration of a complex skill in front of people who do not have that skill does something specific in the observer’s brain.
It updates what the brain considers possible.
Most people carry implicit beliefs about what they can and cannot do - beliefs that were formed not through explicit reasoning but through exposure. If you have never seen someone who looks like you, who is your age, who has a similar background to yours, do a particular thing - your brain has filed that thing as “not for people like me.”
This is not a rational belief. It is an inference from observed evidence. The brain is pattern-matching on demographics and making predictions about feasibility.
A demonstration disrupts this inference.
When someone who does not match the implicit profile of “person who can do X” demonstrates X - when someone short juggles, when someone over fifty learns a new language, when someone from a non-technical background builds a complex system - the inference has to update. The exception is now in the dataset. The prediction changes.
This is why representation in demonstrations matters more than representation in testimonials. Testimonials describe what happened to someone. Demonstrations make what is possible directly observable.
The ball in the palm
The image for this post is not a ball in motion. It is a ball at rest.
It is the moment before the throw - or the moment after, when the ball has been caught and the hand is still. The ripple rings extend outward from the contact point.
The ball is not moving, but the effect is.
The rings travel further from unexpected directions. Choose for the ripple, not just for the performance.
This is the most accurate representation of how influence works in practice. The moment of demonstration is often brief. The person juggling on stage for three minutes is not in motion for most of the conference. But the effect of those three minutes travels with the audience when they leave the room.
Someone in the audience goes home and picks up three objects - oranges, perhaps, or rolled-up socks - and makes the first throw. They would not have done this before the demonstration. The demonstration changed what they thought was worth trying.
Someone else in the audience goes back to their team and says: “I watched someone learn something visibly difficult, in front of a room full of people, and I want to understand what it felt like for them, because I think I have been designing our onboarding like it should be easy and it isn’t.” They restructure the onboarding. The change in the team doesn’t know it started with a ball thrown on a stage.
Someone else says nothing about juggling at all. But they leave the conference with a slightly different relationship to their own capacity to learn hard things. That changes a decision they make in six months. The decision changes an outcome. The ripple is unobservable from where it started.
You don’t see where the rings go
This is the most important thing about the ripple effect: the demonstrator cannot trace it.
The stone hits the water. The rings travel. The person who dropped the stone cannot follow each ring to its terminus. They move on. They drop another stone somewhere else.
This is not a problem. It is the nature of the mechanism.
The demonstrations that have had the largest effect on the things I do and the way I think are almost certainly things that the demonstrators have forgotten. A teacher who let me see them work through a problem they didn’t immediately know how to solve. A speaker who showed they were not perfect at the thing they were teaching. A colleague who said “I tried this and it failed and here is exactly what I learned from that.”
None of those people know what they did for me. They dropped their stone. The rings reached wherever they reached.
| Juggling | Influence and change |
|---|---|
| Stone dropped in still water | A demonstration in front of people who did not know X was possible |
| Rings expand without the thrower following them | Effects travel beyond what the demonstrator can observe or intend |
| Ring meets the bank and stops | Ripple terminates when it hits sufficient resistance or irrelevant context |
| Calm water amplifies the pattern | An audience open to new information carries the ripple further |
| Multiple stones, multiple disturbances | Repeated demonstrations compound - each one adds a new exception to the brain's dataset |
Showing the ball
The practical implication is simple.
If you have a skill, show it to people who don’t have it yet - especially people who have reasons to believe it might not be for them. Not to impress. To update their inference about what is possible.
If you are a practitioner with many years of experience, let beginners watch you struggle with the next level of the thing you are still learning. The struggle is the demonstration. It shows that learning continues, that the ceiling keeps moving, that the skill is not a possession but a practice.
If you are in a position to choose who demonstrates things in your organisation, in your community, in your events - choose for the ripple, not just for the performance. The rings travel further from unexpected directions.
The ball in the hand is still. The effect is already moving.
Related: Change Management and the Ball in Hand - on what it means to commit to the first move before the pattern is complete.