Be The Pigeon

UPDATED: September 2020 with added tips from experience I routinely lead customer workshops as part of my profession. 100% remote work is changing things in a major way!  Workshops are not designed as remote experiences; yet here we are.  I led my first remote customer workshop this week!  As expected, it was definitely a different experience but it worked pretty well.  I learned some significant lessons  along the way and thought they'd be a valuable share (beyond this forced-quarantine time).  Delivering workshops remotely certainly isn’t the preferred method.  But there's surely things we can do to make them as effective as possible. Tips: Energy.   Start with uptempo. music, jokes, and a high-level overview of what you're going to accomplish and how.  Have handouts that give people a strong mental model of where they are in the process.  They'll tune out and get bored otherwise. PRO TIP: I love to use a concept called ELMO ...

NOTE: This post is an update to an original post on LinkedIn in April 2018 . I've attended a lot of presentations over the years. And I mean A LOT! And I've given more than a few as well. Over those years, it's become obvious that the corporate world is very much stuck in a rut. Too often, the presentations are entirely forgettable and might as well be repeats of similar talk tracks from years or decades past! As speakers, it seems as though our message has to be plastered all over a slide in order for us to talk about it. We literally read the words on the slide to one another.  We're fearful these days of just talking eye to eye about a topic we're passionate about. There's tons of books, articles, and teaching about how to make better looking or more meaningful presentations. I love much of that content. But I want to share a different angle on improving presentations. Much of the content you'll find when searching on presentation tips...

In my profession, I’m often presenting and speaking publicly, often about technical topics. But last week, amidst the life-changing times to which we’re all now adapting, I was listening to a COVID-19 presentation from a virologist and biologist when I had an epiphany. No, nothing related to the virus; that’s for another time. I had an epiphany around the way we communicate. I sat for 90 min listening to incredibly intelligent people explain highly technical topics in a way that I found both interesting and relevant, but on topics which I was having trouble completely comprehending. The scientists were just speaking at their normal rate—zippy—because it’s their daily expertise, and with enough “A=B=C” style tonality to keep my head a half-step behind where they were at. As they concluded, I realized this is exactly how our audiences in technology/business often feel when we’re done speaking to them.  We—as vendors especially—quickly become accustomed to having topically similar...