Author: Woody

Will be joining my pals Kathy Gil, Scott Berkun, Brady Forrest, and Buzz Brugeman (among others) for Presentation Camp Seattle on Saturday April 4th 2009 at the University of Washington.

Here’s the schedule and the skinny –

PresentationCamp is an ad-hoc gathering of passionate folks who want to share, interact and spread the love around the topic of presentation design and delivery. It’s for anyone interested in public speaking, pitching and presenting. Come to learn, come to share: everyone walks away knowing a little bit more.

Sign up now over on the Eventbrite page for the event. It’s $15 until the day of, then it’s $20.

It’s an unconference which, if you’ve never been to one, is a blast. The main idea is that the best thing about most conferences are the hallway conversations, so why not make up a conference on the fly that has that feel to it.

So participants gather in the first hours of the conference and propose session ideas, then the popular ones are assigned slots. Looks from the schedule that this camp will have some good pre-planned sessions and some slots for real time session creation.

I’m proposing a session tentatively titled “Telling Ain’t Persuading (or teaching, selling, or training)!!: Case studies in conversational/Socratic presentation methods“.

It will be a discussion of presentation examples / methods that don’t just give an answer, but that invite people into dialogue / experience — and how that often has much more staying power that just passing along information.

Will be touching on:

• The structure of the attention economy unconference talk I’ve presented a few times — “Starbuck vs. Samwise in a Fight (and what does that have to do with the Attention Economy?)” — and how the form of the talk is an effective design for learning.
• How the unstructured and question driven nature of the classic video game Myst is arguably more involving (and compelling) that most present day games.
• How books like Ken Bain’s “What the Best College Teachers Do” and the American Society for Training and Development’s “Telling Ain’t Training” (by Harold Stolovitch) showcase proven ways to present more compellingly.

So, come join us!

Now and then I come across a product like this genteel pendant light set that makes me happy. It's the eureka moment that speaks to me, even if I don't necessarily want to rush out and buy it (although I probably would if I had a place in my house for these guys). I love the two disparate objects combined to make something different. It just works.

For me, having a great idea like this that clicks into place is enormously satisfying and what drives me to be creative in the first place. The "click" happens not when the idea is just interesting and different, but when it meets a multitude of criteria — does it say something unique? does it have longevity? will people connect with it? does it communicate the brand?

Learning to put unlike things together is key to making great ideas that work, and I believe it is learnable. In fact, honing this skill was one component of our company retreat earlier this year. And the more we use skills like this the better we get. Part of that is looking for the great ideas out there, especially those outside your everyday experience. Will knowing about lamps made out of hats lead to a smashing idea in our next ideation lab? Maybe not, but keeping our brains primed for creative thinking will.

Last week J.K. Rowling gave an inspiring speech at the Harvard Commencement titled "The Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination." The entire address is somewhat lengthy but worth the read. Below are a few paragraphs that stood out to me.

"Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies."

"The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned."

"You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared."