Let's Talk

Author: letstalk

  • Getting the geography right

    I am currently delivering some training for Heart of Birmingham Teaching Primary Care Trust, as part of an excellent project to improve public health.  The idea is to recruit people who are active in the community – youth workers, religious leaders, voluntary group co-ordinators, ESOL teachers and the like – and get them to help promote particular important health campaigns locally.

    The hotel venue for this week’s training couldn’t have been more helpful and friendly – but as the day wore on, I realised there was a real problem with the geography of the room.  Attendees were sitting round the back half of large cabaret-style tables, all facing forward to see the screen where the various speakers were projecting presentations on their health topics.  The projector was positioned on a huge table some distance from the screen, that effectively cut the room in half.  This was fine as long as everyone was simply looking at presentations.  But as we all know, you can only do that for so long before your brain goes as numb as your bum.

    As soon as the floor was opened up for conversation, the problems surfaced.  People at the back couldn’t hear questions asked by those on the front tables, and frequently couldn’t hear the answers either as presenters forget to direct their responses to the whole room.  Inevitably people instead starting chatting in small groups at their own tables, increasing the noise level in the room and making the whole problem worse.  Even though they were actually discussing the topics in hand, the energy, focus and cohesion in the room became fractured and dissipated.  Trying to initiate any kind of group activity was even worse, and required lots of moving of chairs and large heavy tables to enable people to see each other, and then moving everything back for the next speaker.

    I have learned (or more accurately, re-learned) my lesson, and before the next session the geography of the room will be radically altered.  The round tables will be gone, replaced by oblong tables pushed back against the wall, where they can be used for group writing work when needed.  The huge projector table will be replaced with a much smaller trolley on wheels that can be rolled out of the way when not in use.  Everyone will simply be on chairs, that can be quickly and easily stacked away, or rearranged into any configuration, including the all-important discussion circle.  In order to make this happen, everyone will need to be given a folder or clipboard so that they can take notes on their lap, but this is a very small outlay to ensure that the room geography fits the needs of the training, and not the other way round.

  • Fun but far from Frivolous

    I’ve just got back from a 3-day conference in Amsterdam of the Applied Improvisation Network.  A gathering of about 200 people from all over the world, who use Improv not just for entertainment, but to bring about social, personal, political or organisational change.

    Now, if you’ve read my page on Applied Improvisation, you will understand that training in theatre Improv promotes and nurtures a number of very pleasing characteristics in people, including openness to others’ ideas, a willingness to try anything, a sense of adventure with little concern for failure, and above all a truly playful outlook and a huge capacity for fun.  And now I’ve discovered what that means when you multiply it by 200!

    This was my first AIN conference, and I wasn’t too sure what to expect.  So imagine my delight to arrive at the opening plenary session at 10.00am on day one, straight from my overnight ferry and train, to be greeted by a keyboard player entertaining the delegates with popular Dutch tunes.  The locals were singing along gleefully and unselfconsciously in their native tongue, and all the non-Dutch-speakers were just as lustily singing along too, in whatever language or gibberish they could muster!

    This sense of play and fun pervaded the entire conference.  Between each speaker that first morning, the same musician improvised ditties of praise and thanks for their contributions.  We played bingo between presentations, and prizes were duly distributed.  A little later on we were asked to clear our chairs to the side of the hall, and the pianist decided to play a little polka to help us along – within a few bars a 10-minute impromptu barn-dance was under way.  For the next three days I laughed, danced, sang, told and heard stories, and played along with all the other Improv-trained delegates.  This was the most fun I have ever had at a conference in my entire life, bar none. 

    But be clear – this was no frivolous or silly waste of time.  We had all spent good money to get there, some travelling in from the other side of the world.  There were attendees there who work at high-to-stratospheric levels in Business, in Government, in Education, in Health and in Social Welfare.  The topics under discussion were serious and far-ranging, and included social exclusion and cohesion, business productivity and leadership, economic growth and sustainability, workplace assertiveness and bullying, organisational and social change, neuroscience, and much more beside.   

    It is vital we don’t confuse fun with frivolity – in many ways the opposite is true.   By definition, active members of the Applied Improvisation Network understand at a profound level that learning is at its best when people are having fun.  That collaborative ideas are more likely to emerge when people are being playful.  That a roomful of supportive, playful people will learn quicker, retain more, solve problems faster, teamwork better and network more productively.  And now I have seen it with my own eyes, and experienced it viscerally.

    That is why I am redoubling my commitment to ensure that every one of my training and facilitation interventions will be fun, lively and permeated with the joyous spirit of Applied Improvisation.

  • Hearts and Minds

    I am currently working as an associate to another training company, which is helping one of our major utilities with a massive IT rollout.  The new system, which is costing hundreds of millions of pounds, will replace a host of incompatible and crumbling legacy systems, some of which date back more than 20 years, with a modern, streamlined, fit-for-purpose corporate platform.  The change and disruption will be huge, affecting everything from working practices and company structure to the culture and internal communications of the entire organisation.   While the potential benefits are fantastic, there is without doubt also potential for disaster.

    Fortunately, this company has learnt from previous less-than-successful implementations, and this time has taken to heart the words of John P Kotter and Dan Cohen in [popup url=”http://www.letstalk.uk.net/popups/heartofchange.htm”] Heart of Change[/popup].

    They have realised that for such a massive rollout to work, the key is not screens and keystrokes, not bandwidth and reporting, but hearts and minds.  That is not to say that the effectiveness of the technology is not important.  Flaky systems that fall over, frustrating screens that demand seemingly irrelevant information, security that is so tight it prevents functionality – all of these lead to user-frustration and dissatisfaction with the upgrade.  But none of these will be deal-breakers.  As long as the organisation is seen to admit the shortcomings, and works towards improvements as and when the business can, engaged and committed employees will be remarkably forgiving of glitches.  But fail to win that engagement and commitment, and no amount of whizzy screens and new technology is going to work.  Users will look for faults and problems, and as sure as bytes is bytes, they will find them. 

    In this case, the commitment to engagement has been laudable.  Future end-users have been properly consulted at every step of the design, from helicopter overview of processes to screen-by-screen input into look and feel.  The company has put considerable effort into hosting a whole series of pre-launch roadshows and workshops to give adequate time discuss all aspects the changes with the entire workforce, including plenty of chance for the doubters to air their (often quite legitimate) concerns, with a corporate commitment to listen carefully to all the feedback.  There has also been an emphasis to ensure that both training and post-launch support are well resourced.

    No system rollout of this size can be expected to run without a hiccup.  But with this much effort going into engaging and involving every single member of staff in every step of the journey, the chances of eventual success are very high indeed.

  • Whistling in the Light

    Box of Frogs has been meeting for 6 months now. There are around a dozen regular attenders, and about another 20 or 30 who drop in occasionally. We’ve been talking for a while now about performing in public. Because it’s one thing to amuse ourselves, it’s another to stand up in front of a real audience and see if what you do has any genuine entertainment value. So I approached a local venue who has a cabaret night once a month, and got us a 20 minute slot in early September.

    Last night we held tryouts. The difference between a normal workshop evening and last night, was the whistle. Instead of being in the role of workshop leader/facilitator who is focussed on giving encouragement, gentle feedback and positive support, I played the brutal Ringmaster who callously blew the whistle every time anyone hesitated, stumbled or was just boring.

    The result was fascinating -people loved it! Trying to survive the whistle was not the agonising experience we thought it might be – it was fun! Being whistled off was not only painless but usually quite joyful, as it was quite clear to everyone that it was a) justified, b) an act of mercy for someone who is failing out there, and c) just plain funny. Watching someone giving it their best shot, failing cheerfully and spectacularly, and, crucially, not being upset by the failure but instead embracing it geefully, is a delight to behold.

    Everyone agreed that not only was the evening great fun, but also a brilliant learning experience to get such direct, instant feedback on what works and what doesn’t. I shall definitely start to include “whistle” sessions in all my regular Impro workshops.

    As ever, there is a lesson for everday life here. How often, at work, at home, are we given such instant, direct, impartial feedback on what we do? Are there ways that such feedback be given so that instead of feeling like a criticism of the person, it is a genuine objective response to that particular moment of action or performance? And how can we create environments in which we feel so safe, where we are so comfortable with the possibility of failure, so personally unattached to the outcome, that we are gladly willing to give it our best shot, and be delighted when we are “whistled off” because of the great learning and fun it has provided?

  • DIY or (Wo)Man who can?

    Updating this website has been an ongoing back-burner project for most of this year, but finally was moved to the front ring of the cooker this month.  I had a fairly clear idea about what I wanted, but none on how to achieve it.  So I started looking around.

    The first person I spoke to, a sole-trader freelancer, wouldn’t even quote an hourly, daily or fixed cost rate, muttering darkly that no-one was ever willing to pay him to do the job properly.  I moved on.  The second people I spoke to were a local web-design company, with a funky website of their own that caught my eye.  At the meeting, they first flattered me by telling me how special my business was, and how they were willing to do a really good deal in order to have me on their portfolio – and then tried to sell me their standard five-page package at their standard price.  I moved on. I then emailed a selection of locally-based firms whose own websites didn’t seem too deathly dull.  I was quoted everything from £500 to £10,000.  None of them filled me with reassurance that they would give me what I needed.

    I was facing the dilemma that every small- or one-man business faces.  Do it yourself, or pay a “(wo)man who can”?  I’m willing to tackle pretty much everything involved in running Let’s Talk – accounts, marketing, tax, budgeting, purchasing, in fact just about anything but Graphic Design – but it’s always a balance between speed, quality, cost and best use of time.   

    Finally I bit the bullet, and decided to build this site myself.  It’s been a lot of work and a sharp learning curve, but I’m loving the control it is giving me.   I opted for WordPress as my platform,  for its ease of use, it’s infinite customisability, and its popularity.  Popularity is particularly important, because it means every time I hit a problem, Google could find countless others who had run into the same problem and found a solution.  

    What I am really enjoying is the total control, and the flexibility.  It’s taken a fair old chunk of time, and some wee-hour-candle-burning, but I hope you are enjoying the browsing as much I enjoyed the building.   Feedback always welcome by comments below.

  • Is your team a rock band?

    During the summer months, I spend most of my weekends skydiving. More specifically, I am a skydiving cameraman. Even more specifically, I specialise in being a cameraflyer for competitive Four-way Formation Skydiving teams. I won’t bore you with fine details of what this entails – if you are really interested you can find out [popup url=”http://www.fai.org/parachuting/FormationSkydiving”]here[/popup]. But, briefly, each team of four skydivers is trying to perform difficult, technical, precision-choreographed manoeuvres in a high-stress situation (i.e. while falling towards the ground at 120m.p.h.) faster than competing teams. Which I, the fifth member, film for later judging.

    What has this to do with my work? Everything! It gives me great opportunities to watch how each team functions or dis-functions, and what strategies lead to best results. What I have learnt is that such teams are a bit like rock-bands. They come together for a variety of reasons – some just for fun, hoping to play minor gigs, some with dreams and ambitions of major success. Like rock bands, skydive teams often comprise members with strong egos that may or may not be matched by talent.  The have to work very tightly together to bring off a good performance. And like rock bands, the members can have very strongly held, but very different, convictions about the best way of doing things.

    Most significantly of all, they usually have no formal leader, so everyone voices opinions on all decisions, and often very loudly! And just like rock bands, the conflict this causes really surfaces when the pressure is on. Classically, rock bands tour happily together for years, then start to fall apart fast just after they sign a record deal and release an album, with the possibility that they might actually make it big. For skydive teams, that threat of success translates into at, or just before, major national and international competitions.

    There are a number of strategies that seem to help.  One major one is for the team to have clarified in advance what they are hoping to achieve, and what resources they are willing to bring (time, money, etc.). Another is when there is a clear leader – either one more-experienced member who is player/coach, or when there is an outside coach.  Failing that, it helps to at least clearly distribute responsibility for different aspects, and have someone designated “captain for the day” on a rotating basis, so not every small decision becomes a point of debate and possible conflict. Lastly, it helps if every member understands that they need to work as hard at keeping the team cohesive and smooth-running as they do at achieving their tasks. That means modifying their own behaviour to be as team-orientated as possible.

    We can very easily see how this can translate into the workplace. Do you ever have to operate as part of a team? Are the members of your team all crystal clear and in agreement on the aims, objectives and level of commitment and resources required?  Is there a clear leader, or are responsibilities distributed?  Do you answer to someone external, or just yourselves? Who chairs each meeting?  Do you stop and think before acting or speaking “Will this help or hinder this team achieve its goals?”.

    The best skydiving-teams, like the very best rock bands, seem to run like effortless clockwork, to all get on famously, and to win consistently. The truth is that they have to work very hard to perform like that. How does your team compare?

  • Yah Boo Politics

    Presenting with Passion – Elected Members, Coventry City Council

    This was a first – I was asked to work with Elected Members of the council. I have often worked with employees and officers of Local Authorities, but Coventry have had the great idea of offering personal development courses to it’s elected Councillors.

    This was a cross-party group of attendees, and I’m pleased to report that politics never once reared it’s head, everyone worked well together, and it was impossible to tell who was from which side of the benches.

    However, what for me was the most interesting moment came right at the end, during feedback. One Councillor said that what he had learnt that day would be most useful outside of the council chamber, addressing community groups, public forums and the like. Inside the chamber, he said, it doesn’t matter how clear, passionate or engaging you are – you will still be shouted down by the opposition. “It’s just yah-boo” he insisted, and his colleagues all agreed. How sad. Yet I hold out for the hope that passionate and well delivered speeches might just break through the barriers of doctrine and engage with the hearts and minds even of our political opponents.

  • What Exactly Do You Mean When You Ask Me To ‘Just Be Myself’?

     A recent event has reminded me of the importance of clearly setting up the framework within which I operate.

    I was invited run a taster session by the Organisational Development department of a university, for a group of participants who were by and large postgraduate members of the lecturing staff.  Early in the session it became clear to me that I was facing a large amount of resistance, something that has never before happened to me on a Presenting with Passion workshop.  I stopped what we were doing, and invited discussion to discover what the problem was.

    It turns out that this particular group had very specific expectations of what they would be getting.  They felt that they are placed in a unique situation with very particular problems – that of a lecturer faced with a large student body – and that they have special issues entirely related to their material and their audience.

    “We sometimes have to lecture to up to 300 students. They walk in and out, they don’t listen, they play with their mobile phones.” 

    They were disappointed that I was not going to hand them a written checklist of dos and don’ts specifically to guide them in how to manage this problem of a large disinterested student audience and technical content.

    Given this background of expectation, I am not surprised that they were dissatisfied with what I offered. My entire focus is on the inner state of the presenter, the quality of the relationship between presenter, material and audience, and the emotional journey that ensues.  Experience has taught me that this is the vital area – once this is understood and improved, everything else falls into place, irrespective of the material and the audience makeup. 

    This group of academics understandably had a very different perspective. They could not perceive how my approach could address their particular problems as they saw them, and unsurprisingly they were much more comfortable theorising and analysing possible techniques than getting up and trying them (“what exactly do you mean when you ask me to ‘just be myself’?”).

    Since that day, I work hard at the beginning of each session to understand the expectations of the group, and then to state absolutely clearly the assumptions that underlie my presentation skills training:-

    • that we are all naturally good communicators
    • that we all already know how to package and present information
    • that in non-stress situations with friends and family we are more than capable of engaging listeners and holding their attention but that these well-developed skills are distorted and suppressed by the stress of standing in front of a group for a formal presentation
    • that this stress and anxiety is a state that is generated internally, by our reaction to the perceived “threat” of an audience. It causes us to lose our natural presence and self
    • that this response is in fact independent of the audience and the material we have to deliver. However, it is very much influenced by our perception and our framing of the audience and the material we have to deliver
    • that the best way to improve performance in presentation is to discover how those stresses manifest to block our natural style, and to find ways for releasing ourselves from those blocks
    • that it is entirely possible to transform the energy of anxiety into a more productive energy that feeds into engagement with the audience
    • that if a presenter focuses all their energy into engaging with their audience, and taking them on an emotional journey, all other aspects of the presentation (voice, eyes, posture, projection, etc.) take perfect care of themselves.

    What I have discovered is that there is a major advantage of being very clear about my assumptions and my area of work. Not only does it pre-empt confusion about, and consequential resistance to, my style of intervention, but it also means that participants have now made a powerful and positive choice to work on their own fears and blocks.

  • Bad News

    Presenting With Passion course at TRW Cooper Standard Automotive

    At the end of the session, somebody asks me “This is all very well, but we only dealt with upbeat topics.  What if I have to deliver bad news, such as redundancies?”

    I replied “The fact is, the challenge is identical.  The task is still to take your audience on an emotional journey.  In theory you could have delivered your message by email, by letter, even by text.    The fact that you understood instinctively that this was an incredibly insensitive thing to do means that you realise that you have brought people together so you can address their feelings as well as passing on the information.  So the key question is still “what do you want your audience to feel?”  Anger at the board?  Cared for by their managers?  Sorry for their colleagues?  There is an emotional reason why you called them together into the room, and that is what you must tap in to.  Let them know how you feel, and they will know how to feel themselves.”

  • Breakthrough

    Presenting with Passion course.

    The participants are 14 young people from all around the world, on their Graduate Training programme. Working with a multinational group is interesting. Half the group do not have English as their first language, although all have an acceptable level as English is the working language of the business. I have to remember to speak more slowly and clearly than my usual rather excited gabble. When we play the “2-object story” game, and someone calls out “smoking”, I am the last person in the room to realise this is not the smelly activity, but the word in several European languages for gents formal attire!

    Great to see a few breakthroughs. Most notably a young lad of Oriental origin who confessed to a loathing of speaking in public, and great anxiety at the thought of it. His presentation exercises are at first dull and lifeless, as he hides himself behind a screen of fear. He makes little audience contact, his focus is mostly internal as he tries to remember what he is saying next. I encourage him to look into the eyes of each audience member, but to no avail. His eye contact is a superficial sweep – he is still preoccupied with himself. His piece is a story about a failure of communication in a design process, that cost the company a lot of money. I ask him what is for me always the key question – “what do you want the audience to feel?” He says anger and frustration. I ask him to let us see the anger and frustration he himself feels. Transformation! His next attempt starts quietly and again hesitant, but gradually a stream a frustration starts flowing from him. He stands straighter, he looks directly as us, we are swept along with the emotion of his story. It’s like a whole new person has appeared before us. Afterwards, everyone congratulates him, and a glimmer of understanding appears in his eyes. When I ask him how he feels now, a slight smile passes his lips. “Good”, he says.

  • Fear and Demons

    Presenting with Passion  – Telford and Wrekin District Council

    The first part of a Presenting With Passion day usually consists of a series of games and exercises around fluidity and ease of speech.   I do this for fun and energy, and also to give people the confidence that they actually can speak without preparation and notes.  One or two of the games I play in this section require people to respond very quickly.  The game will go faster and faster until people cannot keep up, which enables them to “fail” at a simple task, and to realise that “failure” can be fun, and doesn’t actually matter.  This is tremendously liberating, and leads to enhanced bravery later in the day.

    Occasionally, it goes differently.  Some people become very anxious by the “failure”, and put further pressure on themselves to “succeed”.  This in turn increases their anxiety, until their mind goes blank and they “fail” repeatedly.  This leads to some very useful and revealing discussion around the assumptions we make about what is expected of us, the kinds of pressure we put on ourselves to “be perfect”, and the paradoxical negative results of that self-imposed pressure.  I then give players explicit permission to “fail” as spectacularly as they can, at which point the standard of play invariably improves.

    During a training day at Telford and Wrekin council, one participant became increasingly upset during this game, and despite encouragement to relax, to not care about the result, to just go with the flow, she became more and more blocked, and finally announced she couldn’t participate any more and left the room pretty much in tears.  I am pleased to say that she made the brave choice soon after to return and continue, and actually excelled and made great strides in the later parts of the day.

    However, what surprised me was what she wrote on her First Level evaluation form at the end of the day.  Alongside the more positive comments, she wrote that she could have done with “less pushing and a bit more care during the first hour”.  Which means my gentle suggestions of, “don’t worry about the outcome”, “allow yourself to get it wrong”, “we don’t care what comes out of your mouth” etc.,  all intended to reduce the anxiety and pressure so that she could participate more easily, had somehow been interpreted as “pushing and lack of care”. 

    This is a really useful reminder to me how much we externalise the internal demons that block us.  Speaking in public is a stressful and fear-producing activity.  But like all stress and fear, it is caused not by external events, but by our beliefs about those events.  A tiger does not make us afraid.  Our fear depends on whether we believe it is safely contained behind bars, or is free to represent a direct threat to us. And yet we prefer to simply say “the tiger made me scared”, and deny any responsibility.  In a similar fashion, people often project their fears about making presentations on their audience, their material, their situation, their status.  It is much easier than acknowledging that our anxiety is self-created and can therefore, with the right tools, be self-defeated.