Never how you planned it
Published August 3, 2009 Planning , Presentations , Presentations=conversations 8 CommentsTags: Planning, Presentations
People often try to complain to me that their presentation wasn’t how they planned it.
They forgot a point/story/clever thingy, or something.
If you’re doing it well, it should never be exactly how you planned it.
If a presentation is exactly how you planned it, you’re working from a script and aren’t responding to the people in front of you.
This is the Presentations As Classical Music paradigm: presentations are a piece of Mozart (yuh – you should be so lucky) that need rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing until you remember the whole ‘script’. You can tell someone from this school as they talk about ‘writing a speech’.
Using a microphone in presentations
Published July 31, 2009 Good stuff from other people , Presentations 2 CommentsTags: microphones, Presentations
Ever wonder what to do with a microphone?
Lisa B Marshall does it again – everything you need to know about using a microphone.
Continue reading ‘Using a microphone in presentations’
Why people make weird decisions
Published July 29, 2009 Facilitation , Group dynamics , Systems Thinking Leave a CommentTags: bounded rationality, Decision making, Systems Thinking, team dynamics
What if you’re the crazy one and they’re the sane ones?
Do you find yourself dealing with people who are (from your totally objective, if not god-like, point of view) making short-sighted or irrational decisions? What if their decisions come from where they stand in the organisation/world, rather than from some inherent flaw in their decision-making apparatus?
How to stop people from being so patently freakin’ crazy
1. Put yourself thoroughly in their position – think what information they receive in a timely way and what’s delayed or never reaches them, what they’re rewarded for doing/not doing, what’s visible/invisible to them… In short, work out how the (mad, stupid, loco) decisions they are making are the logical, rational ones to make.
1b If possible, verify your understanding of their situation with them. Find out what’s missing from your model of their model of the situation.
2. Work out what information is obvious to you in your position that they might be missing.
3. See if you can find a way of communicating that missing information to them in a way that is relevant to them.
4. Step back. Breathe. See if anything changes.
Chris Says It Better
Published July 28, 2009 Books , Good stuff from other people , Presentations 2 CommentsTags: Chris Witt, PowerPoint, Presentations
Ok, I’m never writing about presentations EVER again.
Because Chris Witt says it better.
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I finally got around to buying Chris’s book Real Leaders Don’t Do PowerPoint.
Loved it.
Not being a presentation skills specialist any more.
Here’s why.
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First off, Chris chooses some great quotes…
“Safety first has been the motto of the human race for half a million years but it has never been the motto of leaders. Leaders must face danger. They take the risk and the blame, and the brunt of the storm.” Herbert N Casson.
“Information consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Herbert Simon, recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
“A confused mind always says no. ” Len Torres, Primus Design
**
Then he says so much that’s true, in a pithy way.
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Here’s Chris…
On leaders
Here’s the paradox: Leaders have to be themselves at all times and yet, when they speak, they speak not for themselves, but for their organizations.
Leaders speak to make a difference, and unsettled times are when their words can have the greatest impact.
Their value to the organization isn’t in what they know; it’s in their ability to present what they know to people in a variety of fields in a way that can be understood and acted upon.
Leaders either stand with, stand for or stand against.
Avoiding Groundhog meetings
Published July 24, 2009 Facilitation , Group dynamics , Teams Leave a CommentTags: Decision making, Facilitation, Meetings, Sam Kaner
Ever feel like you’re having the same meeting again and again?
A system will produce the similar results no matter what the content is.
If we use the same meeting processes, then even if the topic is different, the results will be largely predictable.
Think back to meetings you’ve had recently.
I bet that they were mostly presentations/updates and open discussion (open discussion being unstructured ‘talking things through’).
This is fine for what Sam Kaner, Participatory Decision Making King, calls business-as-usual meetings.
Business-as-usual meetings are for low-impact, relatively inconsequential decisions that have a reasonably clear solution people easily agree to.
However, if you’re dealing with a complex situation, with large potential consequences and no clear solution, the meeting process needs to change. Continue reading ‘Avoiding Groundhog meetings’
Getting situations to shift
Published July 22, 2009 Group dynamics , Systems Thinking Leave a CommentTags: Byron Katie, change, Havi Brooks, Systems Thinking
What aspect of your life won’t shift despite everyone’s best efforts?
It’s possible that situations are resistant to change because of how we approach them.
A lot of situations that aren’t moving in the direction you’d like have certain factors that work to change the status quo, and other factors that work to maintain the status quo.
First, list the factors that naturally move in the desired direction.
Now, list the factors that move in the opposite direction.
(If you’ve ever done a Force-Field analysis, this is a similar idea.)
Think of each group of factors as a loop. Continue reading ‘Getting situations to shift’
How to use graphs in presentations
Published July 20, 2009 Good stuff from other people , PowerPoint , Presentations , Statistics and numbers , Visual Aids 5 CommentsTags: graphs, PowerPoint slides, presentation skills, Presentations, Seth Godin
Do you use graphs in your presentations?
Seth Godin recently expressed some opinions I agree with (it’s not the first time…).
One point that stands out from his article is to use your graph to tell a story.
Helping the presentation gods to reduce the dread
Published July 17, 2009 Planning , Presentations , confidence 1 CommentTags: Byron Katie, dealing with nerves, Presentations
We really do ask a lot of the presentation gods.
They really want to help sprinkle their magic, smooth out the rough edges, supply us with a great answer to a question or an unexpectedly hilarious yet apt anecdote… and then we get it in their way.
I was coaching a friend the other night for a presentation she’s delivering today. Presenting some papers at some huge event with the whole of her industry attending.
You know, no pressure.
I found myself giving her this advice:
Remember: it’s never as bad as you fear, and rarely quite as excellent as you hope.
Continue reading ‘Helping the presentation gods to reduce the dread’
