Huh? Learning To Stay In The Moment

So there I was, on one of those conference calls with way too many people and all of a sudden it started to happen. The moderator would ask a question of someone who was on the call and that person would say "Huh? I'm sorry, but could you repeat the question?" This happened over and over again with different people. I just sat there and thought to myself - "Man, is nobody paying attention to this call?" Although it sounds simple, it turns out that staying in the moment is getting more and more difficult to do...

What's really going on here? It's always been difficult to get people to remember & retain what has gone on it a meeting; however, now we seem to be having problems with people not being able to keep up with the flow of a meeting. According to author Cherie Kerr we may have the wrong focus. Outside of those folks who are deliberately doing other work during a meeting (BlackBerry anyone?), the people who are actually trying to participate often make the mistake of focusing on the goals of the meeting instead of what is being said right now.

The real goal of a meeting is achieve some sort of result. This can be an agreement, determine a next step, or reach a decision. That's the end point. How you get there is the responsibility of the person who is running the meeting. If that's you , then what you want to have happen is for everyone in the meeting to build on what has already been said instead of coming up with completely new directions for the meeting to head off in. Note that we're not talking about Brainstorming sessions here, but rather normal business meetings.

By building on top of what has already been said, there will be a clear path from where you started to where the goal of the meeting is. Each discussion in the meeting will have a clear start, middle, and end as you lead into the next conversation. It will also quickly become clear if you've gone off the path and you'll be able to bring the meeting back in line. Your participants will be more engaged because they'll have a better understanding of where the meeting has been and where it is going.

This suggestion is not new. In fact the folks who do improv comedy do this all the time. Their skits flow from one character's actions to another's quickly. Hey, if it works for a 30 minute TV show, then surely it will work for your next business meeting!

Are you ready to keep your next meeting in line? Do you think that an incremental approach to conversations is the way to go or do you like a more open and free ranging approach? What works best in your life - leave a comment and let me know.


Tags: attention, focus, retention, meetings, groups, teams, training

Arrgh! Isn't There A Law Against Giving Bad Presentations?

I probably need to apologize in advance for this rant -- I've finally reached my breaking point.

I somehow got myself trapped in a presentation on changes to my 401k retirement program. I guess that I should start by admitting that I really can't think of a much more boring topic to talk about in the first place even though I know that I should be really interested because, after all, it is my retirement. However, the person giving the presentation was beyond bad -- they were just awful. To make matters worse, the presentation went on for over 1-1/2 hours. Well before the end I was wondering if I could sneak out the back door, but alas, it was not to be.

When I finally stumbled out of this colossal waste of time, I found myself wondering how I could avoid getting trapped in any such presentations in the future. Yes, I did for just a minute dream of a world in which presentation police would show up and arrest anyone who did a poor or careless job of presenting information. I was thinking that the charge would have to be something along the lines of "... intent to do bodily harm."

Since we don't live in that world, what do ALL presenters of complex information need to know (we'll leave motivational speakers out of it for now)? At the end of the day I believe that there are two critical skills that all speakers must have: (1) the ability to understand and use how adults learn when constructing a speech, and (2) the ability to appeal to all types of learning methods during the same presentation.

The days of sitting in school and having a teacher talk at us are over. We get bombarded with way too much information every day. Ultimately, I believe that it's the presenters responsibility to deliver information in a way that we can understand and remember it. So there you go, there are no presentation police, but if there were would you have an arrest record?


Tags: training, adult learning, public speaking, memory, retention

Differences Count When You Are Presenting

Ok, so you've got a big presentation coming up and you know that you want to make a difference and have the audience walk away with a good understanding of the complex info that you are going to present. What can you do to really make sure that you key points get hammered home? Setting yourself on fire halfway through the presentation or using trained animals both would be great, if impractical ways to accomplish this. How about two simpler ways that us technical folks always seem to forget as we pull together our presentations?


Audience Attention is drawn to LARGE differences that are perceptible.

Let's say that you've got a slide that contains one of the key points that you want to make to your audience. There is probably other things on that slide (like a title?). You need to make sure that your key point, be it a number, a comparison, a figure, etc. jumps out at your audience. Background images, scrolling text, clipart, video clips, etc. are all swell; however, if they distract from your key point then they need to go away. Keep in mind that PowerPoint's ability to have items join the slide via animation might be a good way to lead up to and introduce the key point.


People group elements into units automatically, which they then remember

The human mind is an amazing thing. We can quickly take in large quantities of information and rapidly make decisions about it. You can make this talent work for or against you in a technical presentation. Things that you place close to each other on a slide will automatically be considered to be related by your audience. A good example of this is labels and the thing that they are labeling. A bad example of this would be a graph that shows that both the price of copper ore and the price of apples have both increased by 25% in the past 6 moths. Both items would be shown closely together on the same graph and the audience would associate them. However, they really have nothing to do with each other (unless you are trying to talk about the cost of copper apples...).

Just a few things to consider when you are making that last pass though the big presentation that you've created -- do your main points jump out or are they buried?