Learning Leader

With presentation skills practice makes perfect

One of the techniques I use is to practice. I always give my worst presentations in private. Rehearsing has given me the crucial feedback that my written notes/mind map would never give me and saved me from much public embarrassment, and saved the public from many a tedious, incoherent rambling.

Although rehearsing in private is hard work and feels artificial I have learned to value it as a private discipline. More times than not I would prefer to put the first rehearsal off. I find myself drawn to the graphics I will use and squander many an hour searching for that illusive 'right' image on the web.

On average I like to rehearse three times. It gives me a fluency of phrase, a confidence to be less dependent on my own notes/mind map, and helps me hear first the tempo and emphasis of what I have prepared.

Malcolm Gladwell in 'Outliers: the Story of Success' formulates a rough rule that it takes about 10,000 hours to master any complex skill, be it ice hockey, a musical instrument, or software development. Whether this figure is absolute for all skills or even true when it comes to public speacking, I don't know. But what I do know is that most of us only get a few crucial minutes in public to get our message across with clarity and impact. Private rehearsal is the only way I know of giving ourselves the mastery development time for this crucial influencing skill.

I'm speaking tomorrow, in fact, at the Best Practice User Group's Annual Members Conference in Milton Keynes. I'll be speaking on Programme Communications within MSP: Best Management Practice from Experience. If you see me there, please come and say 'hello.

P.S. I promise not to do 'Death by PowerPoint'. I'll be using Prezi.

Agile Stakeholder Engagement

The whole process of stakeholder engagement must not be thought of as purely linear. Management guides on this such as MSP(Managing Successful Programmes) have this sort of sequence: 

 

 

In reality it looks more like this:

 

 

 

I came across this account yesterday by a programme manager leading a huge physical move of his organisation to new HQ premises:

“I found from talking to staff that many knew little about the programme and were anxious to know more. Consequently I developed the ... Strategy.”

He goes on to describe the new communications channels he set up and how he planned key messages that flowed through them.

Once again we find that the best management ‘map’ may be useful, but it is not quite the ‘territory’ we find ourselves travelling through.

Audio Book a Hit! ... #PRINCE2

Recently we launched an audio series on the increasingly popular PRINCE2 project management method on our website... and it's really taken off!

What we set out to do was to record 'informed conversations between John Edmonds and me, where I interrogate John in a friendly, conversational sort of way, since John was one of the authors of the most recent edition.

I think people appreciate that we have hit upon a fairly accesible way of getting into an otherwise dry management reference.

Now ... where are the out-takes?

 

The Art of Training Alchemy

One way I explain 'what we do' is as a sort of alchemy. We turn the base metal of dry management theory and turn it into the pure gold of business performance.

Now although parts of the PRINCE2 reference book on project management include passages originally written by yours truly and more recently and extensively by my colleague and fellow-blogger, John Edmonds, nevertheless I will admit something...

... the PRINCE2 reference is quite a boring read.

It's boring if you try to read it from beginning to end, as you would, say, a novel. It's dry if you read huge chunks in one go. (Although I do know clients who have done this.) It does not have any unifying 'story' of a project to lead you through it by example.

So our business is simply to bring this dry book - and others like it such as MSP, P3O, M_o_R, Making Sense of Change Management, and so on - to life. We turn the lead into gold.

I say 'simply', but these seems to be beyond many in the management training business. 'Bringing to life' for me includes:

• catering for different and complementary ways of assimilating information (the visual, aural, intellectual and kinaesthetic)
• the element of colour, surprise and fun
• encouraging clients in what they aleady know and understand
• bringing fresh, value-added stories, images and research to reinforce the core material
• using conversation to lead people into new, profoundly more effective, ways of seeing things and doing things.

I've bemoaned often enough the black-and-white slide copies that pass for course materials or study guides, how PowerPoint visuals are mistaken for dense bullet lists, how material is presented in a way that suits the lecturer, not the delegate.

I continue to bemoan these practices because they are becoming all the more common, it seems. In these lean times, we see a resurgence of this as the norm, particularly as the market demands 'commodity training' to be delivered ever more cheaply.

When will the people who buy such nonsense ask themselves what outcomes they are really buying? If you pay base prices, you are likely to get base metal.

Strategy: Making it so

I was talking with a friend last night and our conversation turned to our work.

"What is it your company actually does?"

"We help our client make their strategies happen."

My friend, a retired accountant replied

"That's interesting. Do you help also them do their strategic planning?"

"We can do, but in our experience that is a relatively well-tilled field. The really hard part for our clients is putting their strategic plans into practice so that they get the outcomes and performance they really want."

My mind flipped back to Captain Jean-Luc Picard. It's relatively easier to say the equivalent of , "Make it so." the senior executive feels its a courageous, defining moment, and she can easily delude herself that the decision is the hard part done.

But really it is all in the execution. All our planning and decision-making comes to nothing if we can't make it happen.

So my friend probed further:

"Is there such a thing as a poor strategy?"

"Of course."

My mind touched on the most common reasons for poor strategy:

• I've seen strategies written in a vague, abstract and contradictory manner.
• I've seen strategies that are otherwise worthy, but are out-of date; the world has moved on, and such strategies no longer address current or breaking external drivers.
• Outside the few senior elite, I've heard rumours of a strategy, but no one else is quite sure of what it is.

But whatever the strategy is, it stands or falls in its execution through programme, project and change management, and the joined up governance between these.