IV. Objects Think With You
- Matthieu Sinclair
- Jun 8
- 5 min read
This article (5/7) is part of the series Principle of Action No. 2: Thinking with Your Hands, from the collection “The Other Path.”
Why Your PowerPoint Meeting Impoverishes Thought
If the hand thinks, then the objects it works with aren’t just tools. They’re full cognitive partners.
Hold a standing meeting around a whiteboard covered in Post-its, and compare the quality of ideas produced with those from a meeting around a screen. The whiteboard isn’t just an external support for your thinking. It becomes an integral part of the creative process. What you write calls forth what you write next. You delegate part of the processing to the wall, and that delegation radically transforms what you’re capable of producing together.
Before debating, materialize. Ask each participant to write their idea, objection, or position on a Post-it (one per note) before anyone speaks. Put them all on the wall, then look together.
This simple gesture produces three effects PowerPoint can’t: it reveals convergences no one had anticipated, it makes disagreements visible without loading them emotionally, and it stops the shyest ideas from being crushed by the loudest voices before they’ve even been heard. Collective thinking emerges from the physical map the group builds together. The wall knows things the meeting never will.
Concrete Sticks, Abstraction Slides Away
There’s a principle formalized by cognitive psychologist Allan Paivio: our brain processes concrete information through two systems at once: the verbal system and the imagery system. Abstract information only activates the first. The concrete therefore leaves two traces where the abstract leaves only one. This isn’t just a metaphor, it’s a cognitive reality documented since the 1960s, which Paivio named “dual-coding theory.”
The Multiscope, one of our exclusive devices, is a striking illustration: each participant looks at the same situation through a different colored filter. In thirty seconds, without a word of explanation, the room understands something about its own perceptual biases that two hours of lecturing wouldn’t have anchored. The object doesn’t just describe an idea — it brings it to life.
The consequence, for anyone trying to get an idea across, in a presentation, a meeting, or a training session, is radical: it’s not the depth of the argument that guarantees it will be remembered, but its ability to be translated into something tangible, sensory, and manipulable. That’s precisely what we’ve learned, sometimes painfully, in designing our interactive presentations.
What If Your House Were on Fire?
On the table, a mysterious wooden box. At the start of “La Voix des Choses” [The Voice of Things], a ninety-minute interactive experience, my partner Sébastien Clergue asks this question: “Your house is on fire. Your loved ones are safe. You have only a few seconds to save one object. Which one?”
The same finding emerges every time, regardless of the audience: no one saves their phone. And yet, for most of us, this device is indispensable, ever-present, and holds most of our photographic memories. But its perfect copy in the cloud strips it of exactly what gives an object value: its irreplaceability, the physical trace it carries of our history.
What people almost always decide to save are “loaded” objects.
A piece of jewelry passed down from a grandmother, a handwritten letter, a printed photograph, but also a book of sheet music or old exam papers. These objects are worth nothing on the market, but they’re priceless in a human life, because they condense something essential: not just the past, but the thread connecting what we’ve lived through to what we still hope to become. Some absorb time and relationships; others carry a project, an identity still being built. What we save in an emergency is what tells our own story back to us, or what once helped us find something we didn’t know we’d lost.
Sébastien’s box contains around thirty of these “loaded” objects, and therefore just as many incredible, instructive stories that only these artifacts can really tell. A fragment of the Hindenburg airship. A key that was supposed to be aboard the Titanic. A work of art whose original is on the moon… What makes this experience more powerful than any lecture on the same themes is precisely the materiality of these objects. The fact that you can see them, hold them in your hands, pass them to your neighbor. It’s that physical contact that anchors the emotion. And it’s the emotion that anchors the memory. We remember what we’ve held in our hands while feeling something.
That’s also why, in several of our interactive shows, we invite participants to use physical voting keypads instead of their smartphones. These keypads have actually disappeared from the market: everyone now uses phones instead. The logic seems unassailable: why keep a dedicated voting device when every participant already has an infinitely more powerful device in their pocket?
We bought out the entire remaining stock from the English parent company that made them: 3,000 additional keypads. And we stand by that choice completely, even when clients ask us, with amused politeness, why we still use these old gadgets.
These wonderfully anachronistic plastic keypads have actually solved several problems at once. Our choice is based on three concrete observations, gathered across hundreds of sessions:
When participants use their phone to vote, they vote — but they also do other things. They see a notification, read an email, or notice a missed call, and their attention fragments. The keypad exists for one purpose only. That single, physical gesture pulls all attention back into the room. There’s also a more prosaic argument, but one that twenty years in the field have taught us never to underestimate: the keypad doesn’t depend on any network. No temperamental Wi-Fi, no overloaded 4G in a 500-person auditorium, no server crashing at the worst possible moment. The most reliable technology is often the one with the fewest ways to fail.
The keypad sits in your hand. It has weight, texture, a button that clicks. This haptic feedback seems trivial. It isn’t, in what it produces: a feeling of physical participation, of having done something, of engagement that clearly goes beyond a simple tap on a touchscreen.
The most surprising observation: results displayed from physical keypads are received differently by a room than the same results displayed from phone votes. The group feels more genuinely represented. Something about the materiality of the gesture reinforces the legitimacy of the result. Looking back, buying these devices is one of the best decisions we’ve made in the last ten years.
This anecdote seems to me symptomatic of a broader trend: we’re systematically replacing physical objects with their digital equivalents, in the name of simplicity and efficiency. Sometimes that’s real progress. Sometimes we lose something we never saw coming, because we weren’t trying to measure it. The automatic assumption that technology always improves what it replaces deserves to be questioned.
Enough diagnosis. We’ve just seen what the body knows, what reality reveals, what objects do to collective thought. The question that remains is probably the most important one: what does all of this change about your practice as a manager, a leader, an executive?
