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(Almost) Free Training For Presenters In LA: PresentationCampLA

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
Speaker Training Will Happen At PresentationCampLA

Speaker Training Will Happen At PresentationCampLA

I was quietly minding my own business the other day when Lisa Braithwaite from the blog Speak Schmeak reached out to me via email and asked me if I’d be willing to help her to get the word out about some upcoming (almost) free public speaking training that’s going to be held up in Los Angles, California on June 20th, 2009.

I’m always a sucker for (almost) free training, so I asked her for more information.

The History Of Presentation Camp

So if you’ve ever been to a conference or some sort of training in the past, this event is nothing like those events. To understand how this all got started, you need to go back to BarCamp.

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants. The first one of these was held on August 19-21, 2005 – so you can see that its not really been around for all that long.

PresentationCamp is a specific type of BarCamp – this type of conference focuses on Public Speaking topics.

How Does All Of This Work?

This might seem just a bit chaotic when I describe it to you, but folks who have attended these things swear that it works. If you’ve ever been to a big formal conference, then you know that you are handed a pre-printed agenda at the door and you know exactly what’s going to be discussed where and when. PresentationCamp works just a bit differently.

The first difference is that everyone who attends PresentationCamp is asked to participate either by presenting or facilitating a session – no dozing in the back of the room here. Additionally, the conference doesn’t start with a pre-planned agenda.

Instead, the sessions are proposed and scheduled each day by attendees. You start to get a feel for how dynamic this is. If you’ll trust me that this actually works, you can see that hot topics and issues of great concern to all bubble up to the top. Likewise, there really are no boring sessions – they get voted away.

What’s Going To Happen At PresentationCampLA?

First off, the reason for going would be to learn about and discuss the most current topics facing people who speak in public today. This is going to be (hey, it’s in LA – what do you expect?) an intense ad hoc gathering of speaking folks to share, present, network, learn, laugh, and discuss.

As we’ve discussed, there is no agenda. Instead, everyone who is interested in leading a session provides a brief (that’s about a minute) pitch in the morning before things start.  Attendees then vote and those sessions receiving the highest votes are put on the schedule and groups form for intense learning. This will ensure that the participants get the most out of their experience.

The organizers will be keeping a close eye on who shows up. Depending on the mix of folks who are there and the participants’ skill level and interest, they may set up separate tracks for: Fundamentals, Advanced Skills, Professional Speakers, Coaches.

What’s interesting to me is that this is not the first time that this has been done. PresentationCamp has been successfully hosted in San Francisco , Seattle and Palo Alto.

I’m Interested, Now What Do I Do?

The best things in life are not free – to attend this event is going to cost you $10.  If you are going to be in CA, SoCal or the LA area on June 20th (or if you can get there), then here are the details that you need to know:

PresentationCampLA
Saturday, June 20, 2009 | 10am-6pm
BlankSpaces | 5405 Wilshire Blvd. |  Los Angeles, CA  90036

If you’re going to go, then they need to know that you’re coming so go ahead and register. You can get all of the details on this event by visiting their web site at:
http://http://barcamp.org/PresentationCampLA

Final Thoughts

Hey – it’s only $10, just how much thinking does this take? If you are even half way considering going – DO IT. The info that you get will be great, but the contacts that you can make will be even better.

Have a great time!

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The Presenter’s Dilemma: 5 Ways To Make Your Training Stick

Monday, February 2nd, 2009
Presenters Need To Take Action In Order To Prevent Their Training From Slipping Away

Presenters Need To Take Action In Order To Prevent Their Training From Slipping Away

Ok, so it’s time to talk about an ugly little secret that nobody who does presentations really like to talk about. What’s the secret? Most of the time what we tell our audience goes in one ear and out the other. It just doesn’t stick.

In fact, if you are presenting training or a new way of doing business to an audience, some studies have shown that only 10% – 40% of what you tell your audience will ever be used by them on the job. Ouch! What are we doing wrong?

Dr. Harry Martin teaches at Cleveland State University in (of course) Cleveland. He is an expert in both management and labor relations. He’s got some thoughts on what is going wrong here…

Take heart – it’s probably not all about you. When we try to train our audiences, we are really talking about having them change their lives. Change has the unfortunate side effect of creating anxiety in our audience and they will actively seek to avoid change at almost any cost. So is this a losing game?

Good news – the answer is no. However, you’ve got to start doing some additional work. You need to make sure that a workplace environment that will actively encourage your audience to continue to change is set up and exists long after your presentation is over. In a nutshell, this means that the training can’t end when your audience walks out the door. So what’s the trick to doing this?

It turns out that there are five simple things that you can either do during your presentation or cause to occur after your presentation is over that will dramatically boost the use of the information that you delivered:

  • Write It Down!: Everyone should recognize this one from all of those goal setting / time management programs that we’re always studying – just getting your audience to write an action plan on how they are going to use what you’ve covered makes it more likely that they’ll do it.
  • This Will Be On The Test: If you tell your audience that they are going to be tested on the material that you’ll be talking about, then they are much more likely to use what you are talking about. The test doesn’t have to be a written test, it can be as simple as having them observed and given feedback on their performance. I like it best when the audience is measured before your presentation and then two times afterwords – this always seem to produce the greatest results.
  • Peer Pressure Is Good: It turns out that having your audience get back together in “peer meetings” is a great way to have them self-motivate to use what you’ve taught them. What’s even more interesting is that this works even better when your audience’s management is only lukewarm in their support for your message.
  • Boosting Bosses: Having managers who are both supportive and actively involved does a lot to increase the odds that your audience will retain and use what you’ve taught them. This, of course, means that you are going to need to make sure that the bosses are involved in your training.
  • Ask The Expert: Finally, having the ability to reach out and ask an expert for help in solving a sticky issue or resolving a problem goes a long way in helping your audience use what you’ve told them. More often than not, you are the expert – make sure that you make arrangements so that you can be contacted after your presentation is over and done with.

When you’ve been to a training class, did you feel as though you were able to apply what you had been taught? What helped / stopped you from applying your new knowledge? What would have made it easier for you to do more with what you had learned? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Group Meetings: More Gain, Less Pain

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

Four more suggestions on how to make technical team meetings more effective

We’ve talked about the fact that group meetings, especially for technical teams, can be a large expense and a big waste of time if not set up and run correctly. These are great opportunities to communicate with the entire team and you really don’t want to blow it. If you get picked to set one of these meetings up, I’ve got just a few more suggestions on how to make the meeting memorable not a memorial.

  1. Bridge Virtual and Real Worlds: all adults learn differently and they don’t stop doing this just because there’s a large group meeting going on. Blogs, podcasts, wikis all play a role in day-to-day life and have become the way that some team members prefer to learn. Don’t fight this, instead embrace it. If you don’t have time for everyone associated with a project to present their part of it, why not record a podcast and make it available to attendees to download. This way you can reduce the amount of time spent on that topic and yet still provide complete coverage. Use the tools to enhance the meeting experience.

  2. So What Did You Think About That? Providing the audience with an opportunity to comment on speakers and sessions is the key to completing the circle. Especially with Gen-X & Gen-Y’ers there is a need to be able to provide feedback in order to feel as though their participation really counted for something. This also helps shape the next meeting by telling the organizer what worked and what just flat out bombed.
  3. Context Gives Meaning To Content: Identify what you want the attendees to get out of attending the meeting. Why are they coming and what do you want them to be able to do when they leave? With this knowledge you can plan the day’s events to start everyone out in the same place and then gradually lead them to where you want to get them too. This sure beats just throwing together a bunch of speakers to fill a day.
  4. Is This Going To Be Graded? How the meeting is viewed after it is all over will be the summation of how each individual speaker was viewed. You really want to get the audience’s opinion of each speaker; however, having one of those one-size-fits-all speaker evaluation forms never really seems to provide any useful feedback. Instead, create a set of different evaluation forms based on the presenter’s content – technical, motivational, strategic, etc. This way you can truly learn who made a difference with your audience.

There you have it – everything that I currently know about putting on a good team meeting. I’m sure that there is more to it than I have been able to share here, so let me know what I missed. Have you ever had to run or help out running one of these big team meetings? How did it go – can you remember anything that was discussed and, perhaps more importantly, did the meeting cause any positive changes? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Posted in evaluation, feedback, speech topics, training, virtual worlds | No Comments »

Group Meetings: Group Hug or Group Mug(ging)?

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

IT group meetings can either be done well or very, very badly

Every technical organization seems to have a big annual meeting of some sort. The last one of these that I attended was put on by an Executive Director at a firm who liked to do these twice a year. He would fly in all of his direct reports and have them spend 30 minutes each talking about what their team had accomplished. Some awards were given out, the Executive Director spoke some words of encouragement and then his vice president who had also flown in for the meeting wrapped things up with a motivational talk. This took the better part of a full day and for the life of me, an hour after the meeting was over I could have told you how many emails I had waiting for me once I got back to the office, but not what was discussed.

The motivation for these meetings can be quite different from group to group or even from year to year; however, each meeting seems to be painfully familiar. Although the scope of the meeting often depends on the size of the company. Now that we’ve got the inner game of public speaking taken care of, let’s talk about the outer game of how to throw a BIG meeting – those are often the biggest communications disasters.

What’s the purpose of these meetings? Often the firm has so many different products / projects / programs that they decide that a big meeting is just the way to ensure that everyone knows what’s going on at the company. These meetings are, on the surface, quite expensive to put on, and if you take an even closer look they turn out to be really, really expensive once you take into consideration the lost productivity that they cause. They could be a good use of time; however, here are a few reasons why they generally miss the mark:

  1. Who You Talking To? Most of these technical organization meetings are planned and put on by the same set of non-technical folks (the people who drew the short straws). What this means is that the topics that are covered and the sequence in which they are covered tends to be the same from meeting to meeting – why mess with success? How can you possibly expect an audience to “stay in the moment” for these types of presentations? What makes a great meeting is when controversial topics are included. Yes, this can be dangerous but that’s exactly why people will remember them.

  2. My Way Or The Highway. Who is invited to do what and how they are permitted to do it can be a real sticking point at these meetings. If every speaker is required to have 25 slides and to talk for 30 minutes and participate in one big panel session at the end, then congratulations – everyone is going to look the same and be forgotten just as quickly. If instead, each presenter is encouraged to do what they need to do in order to get their message across, then at least you’ll have some variety. Sure, there will still be some with 25 slides and 30 minute presentations; however, you’ll also have others that just might have their message stick.
  3. You’re So Popular To Me. Just because someone who is presenting during one of these meetings is popular, doesn’t mean that anyone is learning anything. I have seen plenty of presentations where a well-liked manager delivers a presentation to a packed house. However, afterwords I realized that he/she really hadn’t said anything. What a waste of time! Making sure that everyone has a point to their presentation is a key preparation step.
  4. Complex Meetings Need Simple Solutions. The more complicated the subject matter, the more simple it must be for the audience to attend and to understand what is being discussed. If the discussion requires detailed charts or process flows, then make sure that handouts are available and that the slides only show a subset of the information – no need to remind your audience that they aren’t getting any younger by making them squint at tiny fonts on a screen all the way up at the front of the room. Likewise, if everyone is going to be in one room listening to one speaker who is talking about a complex subject, make sure that everyone can see the speaker – ensure that there is a raised platform. This will go a long way to help keep their interest.
  5. Watch Those Awards. The one part of a meeting like this that can kill the whole deal is the awards show. This introduces two problems: first, they are boring and second, if I’m not winning an award then I’ll start to resent the person who is. Keep in mind what you are trying to achieve with the whole meeting and make sure that an awards show fits. If it does, then make it like a hotel room tryst – quick, pleasant, and forgotten once its done.

There are more communications keys that you need to keep in mind when planning a large meeting like this; however, we’ll cover those next time.

Have you ever had to plan one of these meetings? How did it turn out – huge success or crashing bore? Did you get picked to do it again or did someone else get lucky? Leave me a comment and tell me about your experiences.

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Huh? Learning To Stay In The Moment

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Audiences need to learn to pay attention!

Audiences need to learn to pay attention!


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.

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Posted in attention, focus, groups, meetings, retention, teams, training | No Comments »

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