Archives for January 2009
Climbing F6
With closure of our business unit in Arnhem, a new team is being assembled in the US to carry forward the development and marketing of the product. This group held a planning summit yesterday to define the future product map and project plan, and asked me back to lead discussion of the programs that I was responsible for.
I’ve struggled with how to approach this event. The new leadership comes from outside the company, and I don’t know how they regard their Dutch predecessors: is our experience a stepping-stone into their future or a mistake to be avoided? Their organization and funding won’t be defined for another month: is presumptive engagement or consultative distance appropriate for me?
And, since I’m still between assignments, the organizational uncertainty blends into personal worries about the future.
The British playwrights Auden and Isherwood wrote The Ascent of F6 in 1936. It tells the story of Michael Ransom and his team of climbers, sent to remote Ostnia to conquer the fabled peak. Instead, all are killed during the climb by demons that embody each man’s individual weakness.
I feel much the same at this juncture. The professional challenges of finding my next position are making for a difficult climb, and I’m feeling the pressure of time before the storms finally close in. It’s all too easy to feel defensive about the past, slighted in the present, or isolated from the future.
It’s not clear what opportunities there might be for me: it’s work that I loved doing, but the new team has less scope and funding than the Dutch one did. I don’t know if they would offer a position, or even if I want to ask for one.
In the end, it’s good to find that the meeting included very good people who identified the right issues facing the business. Even though I was the only one among the 30 who had actually worked in Arnhem, they had found most of the people with product and market knowledge.
However, the agenda was overcrowded and we only discussed a fraction of the material I (and others) was asked to prepare. The discussion repeatedly circled familiar points, absent the data or experience that we had in the Netherlands. It reminded me of how much knowledge and momentum was lost as a result of the decision.
Organizing a presentation
It’s been a busy week for travel and presentations, first in the UK and now in the US. When I was younger, it was hard for me to give public speeches. My mind was on the audience, I was self conscious, I worried that I didn’t have anything worthwhile to say. Clenched muscles, shaking hands, and quavering delivery was the sorry result: my best prop was a podium to clutch.
Over time, I learned to organize material while teaching community college, and I watched how my directors presented and connected with their audiences. Business school focused on the pitch: how to capture and persuade an audience.
Today, I really look forward to talking with a group. I never get butterflies; I keep a good pace and make better eye contact. I still make mistakes, but (I hope) I’ve also gotten better at learning from them. And a lot of that success depends on the preparation work, the thinking and organizing that distinguishes timid talks from engaging ones.
Broadly, I first think about whether I am lecturing or pitching. A lecture is a journey from common ground to unfamiliar frontiers; I always identify where we start together and what (limited) new knowledge I want to leave them with. In contrast, a pitch builds a more emotional case, still facts and data, but traveling from a shared problem to a consensual solution.
Then I set my subconscious to work. A talk on remote medical monitoring is really about how can a physician keep track of hundreds of patients scattered across a city. I get associated insight everywhere: looking at Facebook, where I am keeping track of dozens of friends scattered across the country, or reading how computers at CERN distinguish significant events from meaningless ones. I scribble it all into a notebook.
I storyboard my notes to define the talk, using big flip-chart pages to collate my notes, then cutting them up to arrange thoughts by progression or affinity. It’s a mess, but reveals the major themes that I want to share.
Time constraints define the structure: A half-hour talk allows about 25 slides. I take a blank sheet and segment out a storyline: 5 slides for the introduction, 6 each for three major topics…the storyboard migrates onto the storyline. In formal lectures, I expand the storyline into an outline of lecture notes.
I simply transcribe these topics into slides to create my first draft,getting thoughts composed clearly and topics into the right order. Each slide forms a paragraph: a logical unit of thought flowing into the narrative ahead and behind.
Once the story is complete, I challenge myself to take a third of the material out, editing, focusing, tightening. There’s often too much background, or excess detail where the point isn’t being made. In the end, I want a strong narrative flow to carry both me and my audience.
Finally, I fix the visuals, adding illustrations, ensuring that the font and headings are consistent, making the text blocks visually interesting. I like the Fast Fade transitions between slides, but rarely use animations except to introduce sequences of pictures.
And a final review by a friend catches any last spelling errors and obscurities.
When my talk arrives, I own the topic. I’m excited about the ideas, the points are clear in my mind, so there’s no need to read from the slides and I can get engaged with the audience..
Disasters still happen: I included some borrowed slides in a talk this week and got lost trying to present them. There was nothing to do but declare a break, rip out all of the offending slides, and then make the top level points without any presentation materials. I kicked myself hard: I know better.
But when the session moderator cut my pitch on the fly yesterday, asking that I skip ahead to a particular topic of interest, I could adapt. I knew my material: nod, Slide 24 please, and we were off without missing a beat. That’s how I like to be able to do it.