Author: Scott Berkun

Why you get ideas in the shower

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Innovationby Scott Berkun

[This is an excerpt from the Dance of the Possible: the mostly honest, completely irreverent guide to creativity]

When you are known as a writer about creativity, people send you interesting things. Recently I was forwarded a link to AquaNotes, a waterproof notepad you can put in your shower. I’ve never used one, but I can tell you the science behind why people get ideas in the shower.

Technically we get ideas all the time – that’s what it means to be conscious. It’s quite hard to stop thinking, as anyone who has tried to practice meditation can tell you. Our brains are idea generating machines. Most of our ideas and thoughts might not be Eureka-worthy but that’s more a matter of how we evaluate an idea than whether we have them all the time or not.

More germane to showers, much of who we are is driven by our subconscious, far more than our rational higher brains like to admit. We also know our dreams, which are owned and operated by our subconscious, can be incredibly creative.  It’s our subconscious mind that is the best at finding associations between concepts, something our more logical, and dominant, frontal cortex isn’t very famous for.

The rub is that these busy days in modern times we are bombarded with information, forcing our brains to take more defense postures to the world, and conscious mind dominates. Which means it’s only when we have quiet time, going for a walk, getting some exercise, or taking a shower, that our conscious minds quiet down enough for our subconscious to be heard. And that’s why you get ideas in the shower. You’ll find many creative people have dedicated time for being “idle”. Going for walks, exercising at the gym, or even sitting in a park watching people walk by. Making time to let minds wander is an important part of working with ideas for a living.

Scientist and creativity expert Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, known for his definitive work on Flow, refers to the time where we allow our subconscious to work as Incubation. This is time away from the work itself where our subconscious minds are free to work on our behalf and deliver ideas back to our conscious minds. It’s a necessary part of the creative process, and it can only happen after we’ve thought enough about a problem to exhaust our more rational explorations and choose to put the challenge aside for a time.

Today we have fewer places in our lives where we are not bombarded by incoming information. For some people it’s yoga, going for a run, or going for a walk that quiets the conscious mind down enough for the sub-conscious to speak up. For other people it’s driving in the car. Everyone’s psychology is different and will relax in different environments, or at different times. The start of being serious about your own creativity is paying attention to when and where you feel creative.

Of course, there are other ways to engage the natural creativity of your subconscious. Taking an improv theater class is all about learning simple games that quiet your conscious brain, and let your creative instincts come through. Waking up early, staying up late, having beers with friends, all shift how your attention works and might provide the best kind of environment for you. Simply changing your habits alone can stimulate new questions and ways of thinking. Lastly, there are drugs and alcohol, substances artists have used for centuries to shift their thinking and allow other parts of the mind to have center stage. Don’t kid yourself: the caffeine in your coffee does all kinds of things to how your brain functions.

But part of the mythology around ideas and showers is somehow a truly great idea will, on its own, make you rich and change the world, a fantasy I can promise has never happened. Ideas are easy to find once you understand the basics of how they work (See ideas are made of other ideas). But it’s always what you do with your ideas after you get them that matters. And perhaps this Aquanote gimmick, which lets you leave the shower with the idea in your hand, isn’t such a silly idea after all.

Want more specific creativity advice? Check out the rest of  the Dance of The Possible.

 

Quote of the month

Posted on in Creative Thinking, quote of the xby Scott Berkun

From an interesting series in The Atlantic on first drafts, and creativity:

After the first pass, the painting is wrong—at least in that it’s not complete yet. Because it’s a face, I can’t leave it turquoise, I can’t leave it purple. I love having rights and wrongs. You have to hang in there until you get it to read correctly. I just work intuitively and start making corrections. The colors combine like words into a sentence, or notes into a chord. Then I’ll rotate the painting so that a different axis is up. That allows me to reanalyze all the shapes and colors. The system seems totally mechanical and so systematized, but in fact the thing about limitations like these is that they free you to be more spontaneous and intuitive. The painting is always in a state of flux.

-Chuck Close, as told to Alex Hoyt for The Atlantic

Theres an interview with Close and singer Paul Simon here.

The series includes short articles on creative process by Paul Simon, Frank Gehry, T.C. Boyle and more.

How To Fix Email: A Radical Proposal

Posted on in Culture, designby Scott Berkun

Professor Beth Kollo has an interesting idea about our email dominated culture, in a post called Recreating Email. What if we changed a basic rule about how it works to give us back more control? Why do we assume it has to work the way it has? She offers:

…email isn’t an ‘it.’ It’s a technological system, built by people, and it can be changed! It can! It can have different kinds of functionality. Someone at some point decided email should be able to be formatted like word processors — so now we have bold,italics, etc. So let’s be creative about what’s possible with email — and what we could make impossible if we wanted.

I dig it. Beth believes, as I do, that technology encodes values.  A speedometer that goes up to 150 when the speed limit is 60 suggests a value different from the values of the law. Just as a 140 character text limit suggests values about what can or should be said. So there are dangerous assumptions are encoded in the design of email, and we might need a redesign to fix them.

Here’s her specific proposal for fixing email:

Here’s how it works: Email servers that service workplaces with actual working hours are configured so that individual users can write as much email as they want, but the server will only deliver email between 8 am and 6 pm. And only Monday through Friday. And not on holidays. That’s the default setting. An individual employee doesn’t configure it to do things this way. It’s the default. This is key. Because defaults telegraph the institution’s expectations. Defaults establish the boundaries of accepted and expected behavior.

So email only gets delivered during work hours. But let’s say I have a couple close colleagues with whom I collaborate, and I want to be able to reach them at any time. In order to do that, I have to ask their permission, a kind of friend request. And they have to agree. It’s a two-way handshake, like a pgp key. And it expires quarterly.

Interesting. I like the idea that there are boundaries for email. But I don’t like that the organization is going to set them for everyone. First, maybe some employees are most productive at night (I often am). The defaults here make it hard for them to be effective. Second, putting rules like these in place makes it easy for other rules to follow (length limits? Emails per day?), and I don’t like the idea of my employer dictating to me, or anyone, how to be effective. I suppose if it’s all optional, and these are just defaults that’s one thing, but IT departments tend to be heavy handed with rules and such.

I’d much rather see organizations evaluating me for my performance, but not restricting me to what means I can use to perform. Perhaps they can offer training, or provide tools I can choose to use like Rescue Time that help me get regular feedback on how I can manage my time, and my email usage.  It’s embarrassing how little Outlook, gmail and Thunderbird do to teach good email and information overload management tactics (they do almost nothing).

But I do like the spirit of Beth’s point: email has a design. How can we change the design of email, and email applications, to better serve us?

New update on the next book

Posted on in Books, Mindfireby Scott Berkun

After a pre-spring hiatus, things are rolling again on book #4.  First update on the book is here, and then weeks ago I let you all vote – here are the results:

As you can see 14% of you chose to take things into your own hands, and offered a write-in vote for the title. Since you took the time, I did read them all and they’re listed here:

  • Big ideas for curious minds
  • Intelligent Provocations: Big ideas for curious minds
  • Idea Inferno
  • Provoke the Mind; Idea Punk; On all Cylinders; Ignite your Mind; Idea Science;
  • Provocative Ideas for Curious Minds
  • The no BS guide to…
  • Making Scott Talk
  • Provocateurs: Reclaiming curiosity
  • Flame On! Ignite Your Mind
  • Intelligent Provocations: How to communicate big ideas to the masses
  • Because! (and other answers)
  • The Power of Serendipity
  • Ponder this: Intelligent provocations for curious
  • Provocative Ideas, Curious Minds
  • Advanced Trolling: Intelligent provocations for curious minds
  • A Mind’s Eye: my thoughts light fires in your cities
  • With Provocation: Challenge Everything
  • Ideas of a curious mind
  • The Berkun Blaze: Hot Ideas to Set Your Mind on Fire
  • Berkun Bag of Big Ideas
  • Fear me?
  • Steal this idea
  • Curious Minds Always Have Big Ideas
  • Its All About the Money
  • Poke your Brain with a Stick
  • Intelligent Provocations: non-polarized explosive thoughts
  • spark to inferno: ideas to set your mind on fire
  • The firebrand for your mind
  • only ok – tried playing off synonym of Confession?
  • Scott Berkun: Intelligent Provocateur
  • In Summation
  • Your Mind on Fire: Big ideas for curious minds
  • ______ : Big ideas for curious minds
  • Arguendo: Intelligence, Provoked
  • Pyrobrainiac: Set your mind on fire
  • Questionable difficulty
  • Provocative Intelligence
  • Minds on Fire: Big ideas to challenge how you think
  • Provocation: Challenging ideas for curious minds

My team of Tim Kordik and Krista Stevens will have another update soon. Stay tuned.

Innovation by Death: A Theory

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Innovation, Managementby Scott Berkun

One point from the often referenced, but rarely read, Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn, is true revolutionary progress happens only when a generation dies. That’s right – death drives change. Kuhn mentions this point, but also debates it, and I likely put more faith in it than he did.

Consider how every group of people, from corporations, to universities to families, has a rank of leaders who are the old guard. Having been successful, they have much to lose by adopting change. And even the minority who are hungry and seek change, they are informed by sensibilities of the past, not the future. Their very existence in leadership roles prohibits the next generation, and the ideas of the next generation, from seeing the light of day.  If change is their ultimate goal, it’s likely best served by them quitting and letting the new guard take over.

Kuhn uses examples from of science, and the assumption scientists revel in change. He points out how powerful deans at the great colleges, peer journal reviewers, and the grant providers, all have their guarded theories and philosophies they will defend, literally, to their death. It’s only when the next wave of younger scientists rises into power, and become the new gatekeepers, that philosophical change, and breakthroughs, tend to happen. Or are accepted.

The U.S. Senate, and all governments, are dominated by leaders born decades before the rise, and fall, of fax machines. Obama is the first president in history with an email, and not paper, centric work lifestyle. Many Fortune 500 companies are led by people whose email is printed out for them, or for whom blogs, Facebook and twitter, are, to them, toys for their grand-children.

Anyone born after the rise of the web, or the iPad, has assumptions about the world those born earlier can never have (just as my generation has assumptions about electricity and mobile phones, my parents could never have). This child will never look at a keyboard or a mouse the same way I do. And until she rises into a position of power, power likely yielded to her by the stepping down of an old guard, that worldview will not be in a position to change the world.

In nature, death is the leading cause of life. Everything that lives depends on the death of something in order to grow. When trees fall, some become what are called nurse logs – their decay becomes the basis for the next wave of growth. By falling down and letting light shine through, the future begins.

For managers and leaders of all kinds, perhaps the best way to make progress happen is to get out of the way.

Also see: Innovation by Firing People

 

Quote of the month

Posted on in quote of the x, x of the yby Scott Berkun

“A cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has if he see that it is accidental – came to him by inheritance or gift or crime, that he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him and merely lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires, is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fires, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes”

–          Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-reliance

 

The attack of the design weenie

Posted on in Creative Thinking, designby Scott Berkun

Zeldman wrote, in an excellent post on Vocabulary vs. Storytelling:

AFTER ALL THESE YEARS designing websites and applications, I still don’t think in words like “affordance.” And when my colleagues use a word like that, my mental process still clatters to a halt while I seek its meaning in a dusty corner of my brain…

Should you ask B.B. King if the lick he just played was in Lydian Mode, he could probably answer you after stopping to think about it. But after all these years playing blues guitar, B.B. King doesn’t say to himself, “I’m going to switch to a Lydian scale here,” he just plays blues. Scales and vocabulary are necessary when we are learning the craft behind our art. But the longer we practice, the more intuitive our work becomes. And as it becomes more intuitive, it disconnects further and further from language and constructs.

My singular divergence from his theme is the notion that intuition and language are mutually exclusive. They are more a set of different lenses than competitors, as you see different things depending on which lens you use. Knowledge of theory can inform intuition and vice-versa – a true master  sees value in both, as there are things you can learn from each you can’t learn from the other.

However my primary reason in writing is to call out the class of people in all fields that only feel smart when they are making others feel dumb. I call them weenies, and there are plenty of design and UX weenies out there, just as there are geek weenies, marketing weenies and writing weenies. They’d rather talk than do, which biases them towards unnecessarily sophisticated language.  They make lots of diagrams and offer lots of advice, preferring to be in the abstract than to offer their own specific ideas.

Even in cases where they are great designers, they can fall into weenie mode. Their ego blinds them into thinking their talent gives them the license to bludgeon others with theories and names the other person couldn’t possibly know. And the corollary is they assume anyone who doesn’t know the exactly facts and theories they know couldn’t possibly be a good designer. Task analysis, kerning, information architecture, composition, Paul Rand, contextual inquiry, Dieter Rams… anything said with disdain for those who don’t understand says more about the speaker than the listener.

True designers, or experts of any kind, should be ambassadors for their ideas and their craft. An expert has to know that most of the world is ignorant of their expertise, and the only way for great design, or UX, or whatever, to be more valued in the world is if the experts make the ignorant feel good about learning what they don’t know. Big words and fancy concepts are intimidating by design and any designer who uses them under the guise of teaching / inspiring / motivating should know better. All they are likely doing is intimidating the other person out of the conversation. This strokes a weenie’s ego as they think it’s a victory, but in truth there is no progress.

If you really want to change the world, don’t be a weenie. Be a teacher. Be kind in helping people overcome their ignorance. If you’re so talented, you shouldn’t be surprised or angry at how stupid everyone else is. Make it fun and safe for them to learn. And in your professional circles, don’t bet on vocabulary or name dropping, bet on your ideas. A sketch of a good idea doesn’t need $10 words or 20 layer Venn diagrams to be understood. If you don’t have the confidence to let your ideas stand tall, and you dismiss the discipline of learning to communicate your ideas well, theory and intimidation are not going to save you from yourself.

Q: What UX / design jargon to you think is most abused, unnecessary or counterproductive?

Why you should be weird

Posted on in Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

They told Van Gogh he used too much paint, and Englebart that the mouse was pointless. Galileo and Copernicus were called heretics for seeing the world for what it was. Dylan and Guthrie were told they couldn’t sing and that they had nothing to say. DaVinci’s helicopters and Tesla’s radio waves stayed in notebooks for years, as the ideas were too weird for ordinary minds to understand.

Most great ideas seem weird at first. Our minds are used to the old world, the old judgments and the old reasons. Few have the imagination and self-reliance to see a new world when it’s first shown to us. This doesn’t mean being weird, or having a weird idea guarantees you anything. Most ideas, weird, cool or reasonable, fail to take hold.

Yet it is certain the first time you hear an idea that will eventually change everything it will seem weird to you. And the first time you pitch a great idea, you’ll be told by even smart and successful people, that you and your idea are weird. This is to be expected. Many great ideas need second chances to show how great they are.


(POSTPONED) Speaking at Town Hall Seattle, March 9th

Posted on in On Tour, Seattleby Scott Berkun

Update.2: I’m forced to postpone the lecture. Sorry to do this but unavoidable for personal reasons. The Town folks are cool and we’ll reschedule.

Updated: Only a few days to go – Hope to see you there. Leave a comment – I’ll be buying drinks for a pre-show party. Venue tbd.

For all you locals, I have some great news. It’s been hard to find big public venues to speak at here in Seattle, but I finally scored a big one.

On Wed March 9th, 7:30pm, I’ll be speaking at Town Hall Seattle on Creativity and Innovation. It’s going to be fun, and I’ll be working on new material for the talk. First 50 people who show up will get a free copy of the paperback edition of The Myths of Innovation.

Leave a comment if you’re a fan and you’re coming. I might set up a pre-show happy hour, with drinks on me.

Town Hall Listing here, or go straight to ticketing at brownbag (it’s $5 and goes to supporting Town Hall)

How do creativity and innovation happen?

How do you know if a new idea will succeed or fail? It’s easy (even for experts) to get it wrong, relying too much on wishful thinking and a romanticized understanding of history. Based on the new edition of his bestselling book, The Myths of Innovation, creativity expert Scott Berkun will dissect misguided notions of creativity and provide simple lessons from masters like Picasso, Da Vinci, and Edison, with crossover insights from the latest in art and technology. The first 50 people to attend will get a free copy of The Myths of Innovation. Presented by the Town Hall Center for Civic Life, with Elliott Bay Book Company. Series media sponsorship provided by PubliCola. Series supported by The Boeing Company Charitable Trust and the RealNetworks Foundation.

At Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Avenue, Seattle, WA (map), get tickets

How to torture your project manager

Posted on in Managementby Scott Berkun

If you like your project manager, this is a list of things not to do. Life as a PM is hard as the job is to be in the middle of many people who often don’t have the best communication or relationship skills. This list, which hopefully will make you smile, is inspired by real-life experiences.

  1. Never give specific odds or probabilities. Always make ambiguous commitments like “Probably”, “we may be able to do that” or “it’s possible”.
  2. Once a week, try to do one of: double the scope, slash the schedule in half, invent a new stakeholder.
  3. Break into their schedule spreadsheet at night, and replace all the estimates with random numbers.
  4. Demand everything ASAP, instead of when you need it.
  5. Agree to a decision. Then the next time it’s mentioned, pretended you have no idea what they are talking about.
  6. Take surprise week long vacations.
  7. Do not disagree directly. Wait until you are both in the presence of their boss and intensely disagree then.
  8. Blame them for everything, but never give them any power.
  9. Accept meeting requests immediately, but don’t ever show up.
  10. Avoid short phone conversations in favor of obfuscated 20 email long multi-person threads.

Know of others? Funny or real? Or both? Leave a comment.

How to show time during a presentation

Posted on in Public Speakingby Scott Berkun

João Adolfo Lutz asked me recently about noting time progressed / remaining in slides:

I’d like to know what do you think about printing kind of a “timeline” in the slides, lightening the topic that is being shown at the particularly moment. One teacher of mine says it’s very important for the crowd to know WHERE they are in the presentation, but none of the writers i read about (Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds) spoke about this particular topic.

The short answer is no. A good speaker shouldn’t need them.

Here are five ways to solve this problem. One good, four questionable.

1. The speaker marks time.

Time is important. There is a entire chapter on managing time in Confessions of a Public Speaker.   However it doesn’t have to be in the slides themselves. A good speaker can remind the audience, in passing, when they are 1/3rd and 2/3rds of the way through their presentation. This implicit way is simple and easy.

However, I’ve experimented with different time marker techniques, mostly for Ignite, as the spirit of the format is that you do everything in 15 second units. I think explicitly putting time markers in slides can work if done with care. It’s all too easy to make it a distraction.

2. Gentle boxes – I divided the screen into 20 boxes, each box representing 1/20th of my total time. Each box slowly faded in. The light blue boxes represented 1/5th of the total time. I used no actual slides for the talk itself.

3. Progress bar – many people have done this. For my ignite talk on how to write 1000 words, we made a small progress bar on the bottom of the video, marking time. Its subtle enough not to be a distraction from the main event.

4. Numbers – The simplest way to go is to simply number slides, putting 4/28 in the lower right corner to indicate the 4th slide of 28.  Three problems. First, a slide is not a measure of time. Second small text (e.g. subtle) is hard to read, and defeats the purpose of being a gentle reminder.  Third, unless you have a slide footer, a number floating in space is a visual turd – it spoils basic composition.

5. Vertical bar – I’ve never done this, but I’ve seen it (picture is a quick mockup). You put a visual indicator on the right most part of a slide, that moves down vertically for each slide. This is easier to do in a subtle fashion than numbers, but has the same problem of slides != time, and it has to walk the fine line of being visible, but not distracting. It also causes composition problems.

Summary

Keep it simple. Practice enough to know your basic timings. Then the timeline comes through naturally in the lecture, or because you mention to the crowd when you are 1/3 and 2/3rds done. It’s less work and a better experience.

Have you seen other ways to mark time? I’d love to know about them – please leave a comment.

The top 10 unsolved tech problems? help wanted

Posted on in Cultureby Scott Berkun

Update: here’s a revised list based on all the comments (thanks).

I posted weeks ago asking for suggestions for top problems consumers face with technology that are  so persistent we forget they’re there. Here’s the best of the 40+ comments I received.

  1. Making a 3-way conference call without hanging up on people
  2. Hooking up a laptop to a projector hitch free
  3. Remembering to switch phone mode in a movie theater / airplane flight + remembering to switch it out when it’s over.
  4. Transferring a phone call
  5. Video + whiteboard conferencing for > 2 people
  6. Lack of a universal, no-hassle cord free gadget recharger
  7. Unified / simple manager for all your inboxes (social networks,  instant messaging accounts, twitter, text messaging, voicemail – it should all be managed in one simple way)
  8. Keeping music in sync across all computers and devices
  9. Remembering online passwords (lots of people recommended 1Password)
  10. Using technology to broaden viewpoints, rather than reinforcing narrow world views (ok, that’s a human problem, but still).

Know of a) solutions to these? b) other problems that should be on the list?

Thinking in Desire Paths

Posted on in Creative Thinking, designby Scott Berkun

A failing in all design thinking is faith you can perfectly predict human behavior. Often a wiser strategy is to observe first, try to understand, and only then predict.

There’s an old concept among architects and urban planners called desire paths. If you walk around a college campus, or urban park,  it’s easy to spot the well tread paths between buildings people have made for themselves. These are desire paths, or desire lines. The natural behavior among people shows you where the optimal path should be.

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(Photo by Kate Pugh)

There’s a likely apocryphal story about a college campus that didn’t put any paved paths in until the second year. For the first year they waited to see the paths the students and staff had made, and put the paved paths over them in the second year.

This idea extends beyond courtyards and urban planning. You can think in desire paths for nearly any kind of design problem. Take for example, dialog in film-making. Here’s a story from the making of Scorsese’s GoodFella’s:

According to Pesci, improvisation and ad-libbing came out of rehearsals where Scorsese let the actors do whatever they wanted. He made transcripts of these sessions, took the lines that the actors came up with that he liked best, and put them into a revised script that the cast worked from during principal photography. For example, the scene where Tommy tells a story and Henry is responding to him — the “what’s so funny about me” scene — is based on actual event that happened to Pesci. It was worked on in rehearsals where he and Liotta improvised and Scorsese recorded 4-5 takes, rewrote their dialogue and inserted it into the script.

The idea of prototyping, if done right, allows for many paths to be explored, either by actual users, or even through your own imagination. In the case of Goodfellas, the different possible paths were explored by the actors, and they gravitated towards one that worked well. Scorsese was simply openminded enough to let them explore and again in choosing to use the results. Rather than invent everything out of their own mind, wise creators know a little observation can be an easier way to find the right ideas.

Also see: Flickr photo pool of desire paths

Quote of the week

Posted on in quote of the xby Scott Berkun

This one seems depressing at first. But I’ve been thinking about it for days, which suggests there are many interesting thoughts in here:

“I once thought that truth was eternal, that when you understood something it was with you forever. I know now that this isn’t so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things. Society is no help; it tells us again and again that we can most be ourselves by looking like someone else, leaving our own face behind to turn into ghosts that will inevitably resent and haunt us.

It is no mistake that in movies and literature the dead sometimes only know they are dead only after they can no longer see themselves in the mirror; and as I sat there feeling the warmth of the cup against my palm, this small observation seemed like a great revelation to me. I wanted to tell the man I was with about it, but he was involved in his own topic and I did not want to interrupt him, so instead I looked with curiosity toward the window behind him, its night-darkened glass reflecting the whole café, to see if  I could, now, recognize myself.”

-Lucy Grealy , Mirrorings

The backstory to this quote is that Lucy Grealy was disfigured due to illness as a child, and explored issues of identity in many of her writings.

The idea from this quote I’ve been pondering is the nature of truth. I agree with her truth is fleeting, or the sense of truth, and can’t be held onto for long. But different truths have different half-lifes, some last longer than others. I do think there are universal truths, but they can be less interesting than the truths waiting to be discovered about our friends, families, moods, desires, passions and flaws. Everything around us in motion and it follows that truth in most moments is in motion too.

Discovered: The Amazing Dr. Fox Video

Posted on in Public Speakingby Scott Berkun

One famous speech in public speaking history is the Dr. Fox lecture. Researchers hired an actor to pose as an expert, and he gave a meaningless, but complex sounding, jargon filled speech to a group of true experts. The result? The majority of them were fooled into thinking they’d learned something, despite there being no substance to the lecture.

From the researchers:

The authors hypothesized that given a sufficiently impressive lecture paradigm, even experienced educators participating in a new learning experience can be seduced into feeling satisfied that they have learned despite irrelevant, conflicting, and meaningless content conveyed by the lecturer… The authors conclude by emphasizing that student satisfaction with learning may represent little more than the illusion of having learned.

It’s a canonical reference on how vulnerable to B.S. we all can be and how much power a good speaker has, power than be used for good or bad.

The problem is the lecture was impossible to find. During research for Confessions of a Public Speaker (Chapter 8 explores the implications of Dr. Fox for speakers and audiences), I couldn’t find a single person who had seen the video, much less had a copy. Thanks to Mikhail Simkin, it’s now online.

Here is the Dr. Fox video and the paper describing the study (with data).

drfox

An open letter to conference organizers

Posted on in Public Speakingby Scott Berkun

Dear Conference Organizer:

For centuries you and your peers have helped spread good ideas. For that, I like you. Events are important and organizing them is a thankless job. I’ve run my share of events, so I know. But there is an unspoken, often forgotten, problem I’m compelled to bring to your attention: most speakers do a bad job.

Some of this is not your fault. Good speakers are hard to find, especially ones who are available, affordable, and reputable. It’s challenging to fill an afternoon with great speakers, much less a 5 day, 3 track program. But it’s commonly forgotten in your trade, or by your sponsors, that speakers are the center of your event. They are the core of the agenda. They are what you advertise. And it’s what speakers promise to teach that gets people to pay to come. Yet once signed up to speak, they are often an afterthought, neglected behind the other critical tasks organizers have to manage.

There are simple and inexpensive ways to solve this problem.

  1. Don’t forget speakers are the stars. Most professional events sell tickets based on what attendees will learn and experience from the speakers. The people on stage are the primary talent. It’s true there are dozens of other demanding tasks in planning an event, but don’t make the mistake of losing the speakers in the shuffle. Make choosing and supporting them a top priority. Pay them, at least to cover their travel and expenses and reduce bias, as you are benefiting from the many hours they will put in.
  2. Provide speaker training. Unless you event is packed with pro level speakers, partner with a speaking coach to make it easy for your speakers to get the coaching they need. Even if you can’t pay for it, by making it easy for them to hire a coach signifies you care about their skills and want them to do their best. There are many great books on public speaking and books are cheap. Send them to your speakers, and far enough in advance to be useful. Presentation Zen, which focuses on slide design, and my own book, Confessions of a Public Speaker, which covers everything else, make excellent companions. Many major events and corporations hire speaker coaches, as speaking is a performance skill that takes practice and critique from experts to improve.
  3.  Give them a rundown sheet or a checklist. There are many details speakers have to take care of, and it’s in your interested speakers do as many of them as possible.  If you give a rundown sheet, listing where they need to be and when, contact phone numbers, addresses, and confirmation numbers, odds go up they’ll do fewer stupid things (which I admit, speakers sometimes do). And a great checklist for preparing to speak, helps remind them of the little things that make a big difference.
  4. Provide audience demographics.  Make it easy for speakers to make the right assumptions about your audience. Give a sheet listing: age breakdown, job titles, gender breakdown, reasons for attending, and more. Most events have this information for marketing purposes, but rarely provide it to the speakers who need it the most. If nothing else providing this data helps reminds speakers it’s the audience that matters, not their egos.
  5. After the event, collect feedback and share helpful critiques. Speakers rarely get useful feedback on how they performed. Everyone is polite and tells them they were great, even when they bombed. Most events do surveys after each session, but it oddly never makes it to the speakers. This is broken. Even a  simple stack ranking tells every speaker how they compared against their peers (e.g. “You were the 5th best speaker out of 10, based on audience surveys”) is a potent motivator for them to examine their skills, and to pay attention to what the “better” speakers did differently. Have a best session award, so everyone sees the feedback loop in action. UIE events even pays speakers a bonus that gets larger the better they scored. Shouldn’t pay be tied to performance for speakers too? Of course metrics and ratings can distort true value if not handled carefully, but nothing prevents an organizer from giving constructive feedback based on their own opinions of what they saw.
  6. Send example videos from previous years (show instead of tell).  Talking about presenting and watching a good presenter present are different things. Give people a sense of what you, as an organizer, hope they achieve. It will also familiarize them with what attendees saw, and how they responded, in previous years.
  7. Let speakers use their own laptops, and slide designs. Speakers are performers and you want them as comfortable as possible (both Keynote and Powerpoint provide a special view that shows the next slide, time elapsed, and other performance-enhancing features that they may depend on). Moving slide decks between computers often breaks fonts and other formatting, problems organizers rarely notice, but can be devastating to even a well-prepared speaker. Give a basic template to speakers as an option if you must, or as a headstart for first-time speakers, but that’s the limit of the value of slide templates. The audience is sitting there all day and knows where they are. Have an interstitial slide with your branding or event info, but make that your task, not the speakers.
  8. Schedule a walkthrough / tech-check for each speaker. We know how fear works – unfamiliar rooms and spaces increase people’s nervousness. If you schedule a 15-minute slot early in the day, or the day before, for speakers to go to the room, try out their gear, and get comfortable, everyone wins. This reduces the risks of letting speakers use their own laptops, as you’ve tested their gear before they speak. It’s also insurance against any compatibility issues (projectors vs. laptops), as there is nothing worse than discovering these problems in front of a live crowd.
  9. Have a volunteer in the room during the session. Every room should have a volunteer who can assist the speaker for any last minute needs or problems. This includes assisting with tech problems, getting water, helping with Q&A at the end and more. For a free ticket, many people will be happy to play this role, so everyone wins.
  10. Provide confidence monitors in every room.  One distracting habit among many speakers is they look at their slides, annoying the audience. Some of this is lack of practice, but part of the problem is room design. If you put a confidence monitor in the front of the room, facing the speaker, so they can see their own slides while looking at the audience, everyone wins. It’s not expensive, has clear benefits and increases every speaker’s ability to do a good job. Events like Ignite Seattle consistently do this, which helps explain why so many good talks have happened there.
  11. Have a speaker’s dinner or happy hour.  Have an evening before, or early in, the event where speakers can meet each other, and the organizers, and make some social connections. You want the speakers to be happy and friendly at the event, as it’s the interactions they have with your customers between sessions that are likely to be the most memorable for them. The more social you are with speakers, the more social they will be with your attendees. And some speakers are dying to meet some of the other speakers and that’s made easier if you lead the way. This also allows your less experienced speakers to get to know your veterans, which can lead to informal coaching and support.

Please consider these simple things. You, your audience and your speakers all benefit at the same time. Perhaps you know better ways that the ones in this list – that’s fantastic and I’d love to hear about them, and I’d be happy to help promote their use to other organizers.

Signed,

– Scott Berkun, A speaker

Follow Up: See An open letter to speakers. Or my book, Confessions of a Public Speaker.

Help name the next book (Round 1)

Posted on in Booksby Scott Berkun

I mentioned yesterday work on my fourth book is moving along. One key decision I need your help with right away is the title. Everyone has opinions on titles after a book is out. And I’m trying to be smart by getting your input now while I can do something with it :)

Which one is the strongest? Don’t worry much about the subtitle, we’ll focus on that in round 2.  Leave comments if you have specific suggestions. Thanks.

Update on my next book

Posted on in Books, Mindfireby Scott Berkun

It’s been awhile since I’ve said anything about my next book. Time for an update.

The book’s primary theme is: Intelligent Provocation.

What does this mean? These days, discourse is heavily polarized. We rarely see or hear intelligent arguments. Many of our popular voices are not thoughtful about how they express their thoughts.

The goal of the book is to take on big questions, provocative ones, in a thoughtful but challenging way.  Much of the book will be heavily revised essays and posts I’ve already published, with 1/3rd or more of new material written to make the entire project work well as single great read.

Since I plan to write many books in my life, I need this one to be self-published. I’m sure in the future I’ll want to write books publishers will be afraid of, and I can only do that if I do it myself. I need to start somewhere, and this book is a great place to start.

Weeks ago I hired an editor, Krista Stevens, and recently I hired Tim Kordik to join the project as the book designer (and yes, he’s being paid). We are officially on a roll. We have a complete outline, some draft sections finished – things are well on their way.  The current plan is for the book to be out late spring of this year.

I’m working on ways to involve you readers in the process. So stay tuned!

How to Prepare: a Checklist For Great Talks

Posted on in Public Speakingby Scott Berkun

To help celebrate the recent release of the paperback edition of Confessions of a Public Speaker, as well as it’s 100th review on amazon.com, here’s a checklist you can use to help make sure things go well at your next presentation.

You can download a nice printable PDF of the checklist:

speaking_checklist_small

Before the event

  • Questions to ask to prepare:
    • Who is the audience? Why are they coming?
    • Can organizer provide demographics?
    • Can you look at last year’s programs? Were there reviews of the event on blogs?
    • What are other speakers speaking about?
  • Will this be a keynote lecture (more scripted) or small (more interactive)?
  • Create a list of questions audience will want answered in the talk
  • Prioritize the list and sketch out stories / ideas / points
  • Budget at least 10x time to prepare ( 1 hour talk will take roughly 10 hours of preparation)
  • Develop ten minutes of rough draft material
  • Practice the ten minutes. Do not procrastinate.
  • Revise material when it doesn’t work, then practice again from beginning. Repeat as necessary. (See Chapter 5 of Confessions for a full description of how I prepare)
  • Do a test run in front of people who will give honest feedback (Or videotape and watch).
  • Practice with a clock with goal to end reliably with an extra 5 minutes.
  • Ask for emergency contact cell phone#, give organizer yours
  • Get directions to the venue, including office-park insanity, and within building insanity
  • If appropriate, post slides to web, include URL at end of talk

Leaving for the event

  • Get an hour of exercise that morning or night before.
  • Check laptop: do you have all cables? Is it working fine? Are slides on it? Battery charged?
  • Bring backup slides on flash drive / Extra-backup online somewhere / Print back-up of slides
  • Bring remote control: Check battery
  • Shower, shave, prune, scrub, brush, deodorize
  • Ensure you avoid all avoidable stress (get there early no matter what)

At the event

  • Register and let organizer know you’ve arrived (txt message if necessary)
  • Find your room and watch another speaker speak in it. Notice anything?
  • If time allows, mingle and meet people who might be in your audience
  • Return to room to catch (at least) tail end of last speaker before you – maximize time to set up.
  • Get laptop hooked up to projector immediately. Most problems occur here.
  • Find tech person, or call organizer – you’ll need their help to get microphone set up, or to deal with any tech issues.
  • Test remote. Test any fancy videos or fancy anything.
  • Walk the stage. Get your body comfortable with the room. Run through your first few slides or minutes and ask someone to look at you, your clothes, and your slides to flag any issues.
  • Make sure you have a glass of water or preferred beverage at the lectern.
  • Sit in the back row for a few seconds, and imagine yourself on stage.  Also check that the text on your slides is readable from back there.
  • Relax. You’re prepared and all set. Nothing left to do. Nothing you do now will change anything. Either you prepared well or you didn’t. Enjoy the ride.
  • If needed, distract yourself by going for a walk or other physical activity

After the event

  • If a speaker follows you in the room, get out of their way so they can get set up
  • Make yourself visible so people can find you to ask questions about your talk
  • Write questions from attendees on their business cards so you can answer in email later
  • Post slides online or to slideshare if appropriate
  • Email people who gave you their cards, answering their questions
  • Thank the organizer and ask for any feedback (positive/negative)
  • If your talk was videotaped, ask for a copy so you can watch and improve.
  • Have a beer

If you’re a frequent speaker, what else would you add? What might you remove? (Keep in mind, good checklists are short and smart)

Like this advice? There’s much more:

Read the national bestseller, with behind-the-scenes tales from the life of a successful public speaker, teaching you the inside view of how to be a great communicator. Recommended by the Wall Street Journal, Lifehacker, Wired and other media.  Buy on Amazon / Read a free chapter