How do you warm up a large audience?

You are in a room, in front of a large group of viewers, listeners and hopefully admirers. You are just about to begin a lecture, a presentation or a speach. How do you engage everyone's attention in a way that leads them to the topic?

Well, the easiest route is to ask them to dance, move around in the room, play a game or tell a joke. How about people who are not willig to behave like kids or feel offended by the topic of the joke?

Here is one idea that I used on a conference (ETC 2013): Take a careful look around, most probably there is something catchy in the environment that you can use as a riddle. Use it as a simple, yet powerful tool to jump start your session.

For example, how many of you know that the furniture equipment company Steelcase has played a major role in the first steps of the company IDEO? How can we connect this to the topic of the presentation of Design Thinking? Quite simple. Start with the question "Can you please tell me the manufacturer of the chairs used in this room and why is it important for our topic today?". As it happens they are a very fine example ot Steelcase chairs and at least someone in the audience will be able to deduce the connection.

So, with a very short question that does not require extensive effort you will achieve several goals:
 - people will start thinking about your topic - great, as they will listen more carefully
 - they will look around and make a basic connection to the ones sitting next to them - you can use this at later stages of your presentation, such as hands-on sessions
 - they will wake up, provided that you are one of the many speakers in a long series or presentations.

Great start!

Now you have to raise the bar with the presentation itself.

Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose

Well, sooner or later, the summer vacation is over and is time to get your hands dirty.

This transition is remarkably harder, when there are tough decisions to be made, especially involving close friends and colleagues. This, I guess is the right time to remember the first of the 7 habits:
 - Be proactive - willfully choose your path and do not let be acted upon, be "response-able".

Quite often there is the temptation to give ready answers and hope that they will stick. Similarly, quite naturally, they do not. Unless the receivers of these ideas is actually starting to
 - Dream of achieving your proposals.

Hmmm, it is an interesting relation between Stephen Covey and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Justine Toms and The Blogs

Justine Toms ignited quite a fire this week. It started with a presentation on the importance of online presence. Then, it continued with many heads considering revitalizing their blogs.

Who knows, it might be a new beginning.

Her online profile is: Justine Toms

Docupedia

Well, the collaboration workspace, the docupedia project that I spoke about, is now live. If you want to see what the next generation of product documentation is, you can go to

and see for yourself.



As one of the main aims is to let you actively collaborate in editing the existing documentation by applying to it your professional experience, you will be asked to register.

After that, the only way is up ;- )))

Birthday Party and Presentation Preparation

Last week was my birthday. Together with this I watched several in house presentation. You might find entertaining the similarities between preparing for a birthday party and a presentation.

who has accepted you invitation / who will participate
what are their tastes / their background
what is the preferred music style / voice and body language
what do you expect as a present (have you prepared it by seeing information to them on what are your preferences) / did you warm up the atmosphere with information that leaked several days upfront

If you can find more such couples, please do share them with us:

On the restrictive side of tribal behavior

Today I participated in a very indicative meeting which demonstrated that tribal behavior can restrict communication and exchange of ideas.

One of the topics discussed was how we, in our department, use one of the company-wide systems. There were many proposals and interesting ideas. What stroke me was the assumption that we should find our own workarounds and then think about the implications they will have on the system and the other users.

I pictured ourselves as members of small tribes (departments) in the vast greatness of a dessert (the company system). Even though we all fight to survive (deliver on time), we devise our own solutions and never take advantage of the economies of scale.

This made me feel sad. We are pretty strong in our knowledge of the system, but apparently quite reluctant to share that knowledge with the outside world. Behaving in the opposite direction to what Seth Godin proposes severely diminishes the chances of spreading our ideas.

Sad but True.

Collaboration Workspace

There is a very fluid like connection in my mind from the Tribes, through the post Slack to the community moderators training I am taking part of. Actually, it feels like riding on the crest of a wave. When ready, I would be happy to share a link to this new community with you.

For the moment, a slight hint would be collaboration workspace.

Guy Kawasaki

A link from Ekaterina's blog lead me to these rules How to Change the World

Apart from having a nice post about a very interesting car (Audi R8) it has some interesting observations on Macintosh history in the making and About information on effective learning. So, I think I will give it a try ;- )))

Language as The barrier to entry

Sometimes "small" things, such as the language you use might prevent your expansion to a new market. This is the case with, in my opinion, the best site for mobile phones tests:
The people who work there are incredible professionals. They always know where to look for details and can help you actually feel what it is to have this phone. As they are pretty strong on their market, they can afford not to adhere to the restrictions of the advertisers and so they provide unbiased opinions.

If by any chance you understand Russian, go and indulge yourself. If not, find somebody who does. The not so full English version of the site is also there. In the extreme case, use Google Translate. Whatever way you choose to go, it will be pity to miss this resource while preparing for the next buy of your phone companion.

Dressed for Success - a practical example

People tend to change their attitude towards you based on their perception of your clothes.

To check this statement, I have made a simple experiment.

One day I went to buy fresh bread from the nearby shop, I wore a leather jacket (that actually makes me looks pretty nice). The next time, the morning was particularly cold, so I wore my skate boarding jacket. Interestingly people treated me with more respect when I was with the leather one, even though it is three times cheaper.

The reverse experiment is to go on the skiing slope. You get more respect based only on the correct choice of clothes.

So, no matter where you go, do your research and get dressed for success.

Learning

I love learning.

Sometimes I just read or listen to new sources of information, just to check if they provide something new and interesting. I suppose this is the reason, why I was so happy when my wife pointed me to the UC Berkeley Webcasts

Watching the videos I can almost feel like I am actually there. At times I even feel like the Good Will Hunting.

Is it good, or is it sad?

I do not know. What I know is that I am grateful to the people at UC Berkeley for sharing their knowledge and culture of education with us. I hope to be able to pay them back some time (at least by spreading their cultural values ;- ))).

Confirm your information before acting upon it

One of the many advices in the Yes or No book is that you should research and confirm your information before acting upon it. This is an example of such a situation.

Yesterday I read in Powerful Reports and Proposals an advice about structuring your writing. Today I saw the very same structuring rule applied in the BPM book. This confirmed the theory that it is nice to warn your readers what to expect from the next part of your writing.

After that I prepared this post according to this rule.

Sun smile

This morning, for no particular reason, and despite all the troubles that are pressing my head, the sun in the sky made me smile.

I suppose this is due to the fact, that from the evolutionary theory perspective, we are all children of the sun. A fact to support this is the ease of communication that a single smile can bring.

The sun is behind clouds now, but the memory of it is still alive. I plan to share it with whomever I meet today ;- )))

Being Good vs. Being Respected

As a young kid I watched A Bronx Tale movie. One of the many topics is about the borderline between being good to people around you and being respected by them.

The gang boss Sonny had an interesting summary of the survival rules:
You should be tough on people, so that they fear you. At the same time you should be kind to people, so that they need and maybe love you and do not feel urged to kill you. The secret is in the balance between love and hate.

Nowadays, thinking about murder is not among the widespread fears. Nevertheless there are many different forms of deaths in our society. At work your idea might not win if you are not pushy enough. Or if people think you are too light-hearthed even though this is a sign of a life-philosophy (Happy Gilmore) and not a problem solving capability.

Sadly, even though we are mostly not living in a gangster environment, we are still guided by such rules.

The Original Zebra

It is Madagascar time again. The focus this time will be on the existentially confused Zebra. He is enjoying and dreaming of the colorful world. Yet, he is trapped by the impossibility to answer the quesiton:

"Am I a black Zebra with white stripes
or white zebra with black stripes?"

Can somebody help him answer it?

What do you mean? What did you say?

Have you ever wondered why people stare at you with those special empty look, silently conveying to you that they got lost somewhere in your words? What is even worse, as you can not get the precious "empty look" feedback, is to have some of your writings being misunderstood. I suppose this is the reason, why in most cases I prefer the face to face dialogues.

Some time ago, my wife found an interesting sounding book:
Powerful Reports and Proposals.
It deals with corporate communication. The interesting aspect is that most of the observations are true for the off-work interrelations as well. Probably it is due to the fact that after all we are all people.

Nevertheless, if you see some improvement in my writing, then you should know that this book is a good one.