by FaceMePLS
Nonprofit Presenters: What are your best tips for preparing presentations?:
[Via Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media]

Humans often deal with a complex world by using simple stories, simple rules of thumb (or heuristics for the technobabblers). We use stories to teach us how to behave, how to react, etc. Almost any ad tells some sort of story.

The presentations that stick with people long after the talk are almost always based on a storytelling tradition. The same tools and tricks used by the teller of the Iliad still work, even in front of a small audience using a digital projector.

Beth Kanter gives a lot of presentations every year. Here are some of her thoughts:

Earlier this week, I was inspired by my good colleague, Alan Levine (aka Cogdog), I visited Save the Words. It’s an interactive flash site that lets users find and adopt words that are in danger of being removed from the dictionary.

I adopted the word archiloquy. It’s the first part of a speech or presentation. That’s the most important part of your presentation because you need to grab the audiences’ attention. I use a variety of techniques to do this, but one of my favorites is to create a story. I learned this from Andy Goodman — I’ve taken his workshops and read his books.

Andy is a master at storytelling. In his workshops, he offers the following formula for a storytelling based on Hollywood script writing:

• Introduce the central character
• Inciting moment: something bad happens to the character that will prevent them from achieving a goal related to the goal of your presentation
• Barrier to resolution #1: Character tries to solve the problem, but can’t
• Barrier to resolution #2: Character tries to solve the problem, but can’t
• Resolution: What you’re going to share in your presentation
• Widen the Lens: The bigger picture

I’ll have to help revive archiloquy. There are only 41 hits or so for the word on Google but it is a really useful term. The beginning of a presentation is the most critical to get people on board for the story you are about to tell.

Putting real thought into the start of a presentation, and to what sort of story you want to tell, are very important items to check off when preparing a talk.

As with any story, if you can make it personal, and make the audience connect with the narrative, you have engaged their attention. But remember PASS – Present A Simple Story.

You do not need to make the presentation a Shavian critique or a Swiftian satire. There is a nice legend (another way of saying story) that suggests there are only two types of narratives: a hero goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town.

Andy uses the former mode – the hero goes on a journey to achieve a goal that has been stymied. The latter also works quite well because the stranger coming to town almost always brings change. Here is one mode of this story:

• Introduce the town (perhaps in Iowa), which does not realize it yet but it is about to change forever
• The stranger arrives, bearing the tools of change (say 76 trombones, or perhaps only a novel way for communicating with others)
• Describe how the town reacts to these tools (perhaps by thinking the stranger is a fraud or by not understanding why they have to change)
• Show how a member of the village, perhaps a previously neglected member of the town with a lisp, finds the new tools open up avenues of success unseen before
• The town is changed forever by these new tools and the stranger moves on (or he can stay and marry the town’s librarian/piano teacher)

Which of these two stories you use really depends on whether you want the audience to adopt the viewpoint of the hero or of the town. But using just one of only two archiloquies helps you Present A Simple Story.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by Savannah Grandfather
A Really Open Conversation:
[Via A Journey In Social Media]
This is the first recession where many employees have actually had an open forum to discuss decisions. Some companies are finding out the benefits of just such a conversation, although it goes against some standard viewpoints.

I discussed transactional versus transformational leadership a few days ago. Transactional works fine when things are static. But in the rapidlychanging world we inhabit now, transformational leadership is called for. Here is how an organization can move to transformational leadership

As The Economy Slows

Like any other company, we’re tightening up the belt a bit as we head into a most decidedly unpredictable economic environment.

But, this time around, we’ve got our internal platform EMC|ONE. And we’re using it in some pretty interesting ways to share the news, discuss it, and — hopefully — get back to business sooner than later.

Spontaneous Vs. Planned

The first memo came out in a traditional way — there was a minor change to our vacation policy to keep the amount of carryover vacation down to a manageable number. Not a big deal in the broader scheme of things, at least the way I think about these things.

But a couple of spontaneous discussions emerged on the internal platform, right out there for everyone to see. A few people were (ahem) rather pointed in their thoughts about this particular change in vacation policy.

Some people were quite upset regarding the inconvenience involved — they had made plans far in advance, which were now impacted. Others had particular work-related situations that didn’t make it easy to burn off enough vacation in time — they were concerned about losing a valuable benefit. Still others felt free to spout off a bit — ill-advised in any public setting, but there you had it.

All very valid concerns.

Before too long, we had over 10,000 views on the threads, and hundreds of comments. Over time, though, more moderate voices joined the discussion, and softly rebuked some of the more vocal participants.

These more moderate people said that the economy was getting tough, and the company needed to look at every reasonable avenue for lowering expenses. If this meant a small change in the vacation policy, fine — better than some of the alternatives.

Fine, came back the collective response — then the communication should have been worded with this in mind. Be open and transparent, they said — don’t try to whitewash the situation. The executives in charge of the policy (formation and communciation) got to see this all unfold in realtime before their eyes — warts and all.

Very useful feedback, I might offer …

Employees know what is going on so trying to hide or sugarcoat it can be counterproductive to the intent of a decision. But more importantly, they are enmeshed in a social milieu that is going to discuss almost any change. By making these discussions open, not only does the bitching become apparent but the ability to use social mores to constrain behavior can come into being.

So an open conversation has not only resulted in all sides learning something new that will now color many of the subsequent conversations. Maybe by giving people more control and information, the organization can exert transformational leadership in ways helpful to all during times of excessive change.

This can be disruptive to everyone, especially managers who are used to living in static times and using transactional leadership.

You know, this sort of experience can be thought of as a “moment of truth” in any social media journey.

You wanted an open discussion — well, you’ve got one! Now, what are you going to do about it?

Seriously, though, the company’s management would have been well within their rights to yank the whole discussion right then and there. But — no — we all found this extremely fascinating.

And the discussion turned to “how do we use this platform to help communicate going forward?”

So the decision is made to be expand the use, not contract it, of this new method of conversing within the organization. The speed by which all this happens can be very troubling to an organization used to old style communication.

Look, any time you have to share disruptive news with your workforce, there’s an inherent disruption.

People want to ask questions, discuss among themselves, share perspectives. It’s a natural human reaction — you have to process things a bit before you can get back to work.

Well, using the online platform, we seem to be getting through that introspection phase far faster than before. Anyone can see the memo, and what everyone else has already said about it. Anyone can leave their thoughts and concerns as well — all in about 3 minutes flat.

No need to wander around the building, finding people to talk to. Or getting on the phone to discuss this with your friends. Or to immediately schedule a meeting with your manager to discuss pronto.

Sure, there are people who are going to want to do some of this traditional processing, but — as of today — the online platform is where people appear to be doing the majority of this “processing” — and it’s all there for everyone to see — including our executive management.

Finally, executive communications is not a precise art. Getting realtime feedback on how you did in crafting the message is valuable feedback for any executive. And you can find out pretty quickly just how well you did, and how to do better next time.

If you want to, that is :-)

Transactional leader would not want to use this technology because there is no inherent carrot/stick way to control the employees. But transformational leadership trusts the community to control itself, to provide its own motivations. With a solid example of the community doing just that, the leaders of the organization decide this is a good thing and will expand its use. Transformational leadership by its definition.

Being Thoughtful

So, based on that spontaneous experience, we’re going to be trying a few new things in the future. We’d like to integrate the use of the platform into the broader communication experience.

First, we’re going to proactively “start the discussion”. When a potentially controversial memo comes out, we’re going to post in on the platform, and explicitly invite people to discuss.

Second, we’re going to be as tolerant as we can be when people feel like venting a bit — and then gently reminding them privately if they’re being a bit too, well, passionate :-)

Third, we’re going to spend a little time and summarize the more interesting themes back to exec management — here’s what people are saying that we think is valid, go to this link if you want to see it all unfiltered.

They are creating an avenue for a lot of tacit information that remains hidden not only from many other employees but also from management to become explicit and to inform the community.

As transformational leaders, they realize they might not have the best answers but will trust the organization to help create the best answers. They will permit social mores that we have evolved to control the conversation rather than an authoritarian perspective that could be counter-productive.

The Bottom Line

It’s funny — having a social platform ingrained in your company culture is changing how we do things. I can remember a time not too long ago where this sort of thing would be entirely out of the question.

But now it seems like the most natural thing to do — invite people into the discussion.

This stuff isn’t about technology, it’s about changing the way you do business.

And this seems like a perfect example to me.

This company is developing transformational leadership which will be able to help it deal with the chaotic times we are living in. It has the tools to help it survive with fewer disruptive upheavals than if it stuck with transactional leadership.

A great example of how a large company can begin to alter its leadership style, its very way of doing business. This is really its best hope. Organizations that still use a management style based on stasis, that use transactional leadership, will have a very hard time surviving the hurricane of change we find ourselves.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by ThunderChild tm
Seven rules for the KM-lords in their farm of cubes:
[Via Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

David Snowden has expanded his three rules to seven principles. Now I have to wonder if there are nine rules somewhere. And if there is One Rule to Bind them All. Rendering Knowledge (rules excerpted)

• Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted. [original]
• We only know what we know when we need to know it. [original]
• In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.
• Everything is fragmented.
• Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.
• The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
• We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. [original]

The four new elements sound familiar from David’s other writing. Taking time to think about these principles and the additional context David gives them, they begin to sound like common sense. Of course people learn from failures. Of course we build things from fragments of other things. But then why do we forget this common sense when building approaches to knowledge management? Maybe not so common?

Yes, these are common sense but so often not observed. Many organizations do not tolerate failure, making their lack of innovation obvious.

When I was in Junior High School, we played a game called bulls and cows. One person tried to guess a 4 digit number the other person had written down. If the guess has a number in the right position, it counts as a bull. If the guess has the right number in the wrong spot, it is a cow. So the correct answer results in 4 bulls.

Now there are about 4500 possible numbers (assume no repeated numbers and you can’t have a zero in the first position) so having some sort of system helps. Like start with ‘1234’. But the absolute best answer is ‘no bulls- no cows.’ Complete failure to guess the number.

This results in the removal of 40% of the possibilities in a single guess. No other choice is as helpful in narrowing down the possibilities. Failing actually gets you to the answer sooner than an initial success of 1 cow.

This game taught me that failure can be much more helpful than a slight success. We see that so much today. Failing does not usually cost too much and can get the group to success much more rapidly by reducing the degrees of freedom one has to work with. It is generally corporate culture that hampers this path.

Those organizations that can tolerate failure will learn faster and innovate at a much more rapid pace. Not necessarily because they are smarter. They are just informed by their failures, narrowing down the possibilities that eventually result in success.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

by Dyl86
Failure as an event:
[Via Seth’s Blog]

I try hard not to keep a running tally of big-time failures in my head. It gets in the way of creating the next thing. On the other hand, when you see failure as a learning event, not a destination, it makes you smarter, faster.

Some big ones from my past:

The Boston Bar Exam. My two partners and I spent a lot of time and money building this our last year of college. It was a coupon book filled with free drinks from various bars in Cambridge and Boston. The booklet would be sold at the bars, encouraging, I dunno, drunk driving. Lessons: Don’t spend a lot on startup costs, don’t sell to bar owners and don’t have three equal partners, since once person always feels outvoted.

The Internet White Pages. This was a 700 page book filled with nearly a million email addresses. It took months to create and IDG, the publisher, printed 80,000 copies. They shredded 79,000 of them. Lesson: If the Internet Yellow Pages is a huge hit (it was), that doesn’t mean the obvious counterpart will be. A directory that’s incomplete is almost always worthless.

MaxFax. This was the first fax board for the Mac. It would allow any Mac user to hit ‘print’ and send what was on the screen to any fax machine. We raised seed money from a wealthy dentist, built a working prototype and worked to license it to a big computer hardware company. Lessons: Don’t raise money from amateurs, watch out for flaky engineering if you’re selling a prototype, think twice before you enter a market with one huge player (Apple knocked off the idea) and don’t build a business hoping to sell out unless you have a clear path to do that.

One of the important lessons is to fail as soon as possible and learn from it. Then move on. Today, the most rapid path to wisdom and success is to crank the innovation cycle as fast as possible. Here are a couple of other lessons from Seth:

Prepare for the dip. Starting a business is far easier than making it successful. You need to see a path and have the resources to get through it.

Cliff businesses are glamorous but dangerous.

Projects exist in an eco-system. Who are the other players? How do you fit in?

Being the dumbest partner in a room of smart people is exactly where you want to be.

And the biggest of all: persist. Do the next one.

There are lots of things failing around us everyday. Moving beyond that to success requires persistence and a vision. And a high threshold for dealing with failure.

Besides, maybe one of your failures will be epic.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

I’ve put together a nice handout regarding the seminar – Transformed! Information, Bioscience and Web 2.0. Take a look:

You can also download a copy.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0