The voice of a child ...

I write here about the environment from time to time, for I think there is a significant likelihood that we will face important transitions in our lifetimes or the lifetimes of our offspring that will impact us in multiple ways: personally, in the way we live, and professionally, in the way we produce what we need to live and earn what we need to acquire those things we need to live. (If TIME is right, we may not have to wait that long for those transitions.)

Presentation Zen posted You can learn a lot from "a child", a speech by Severn Cullis-Suzuki at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro. It touched on the big issues I perceive we face: figuring out how to make life sustainable on this planet, and figuring out how to live together. Watch it.

I also write about presentation skills from time to time. As Presentation Zen reports, Al Gore called this "the best speech at Rio."

Technology comes full circle

This goes in the category of a small productivity hint to those of you who have to manage or moderate presentations from time to time. One of the challenges is to keep to a schedule; in the midst of presenting, presenters can wax eloquent and use more words (and thus time) than they intended. Assuming you can signal them somehow, how do you figure out whether you're in time trouble or not?

I moderate online meetings from time to time, and I've tried different approaches. For some time now, I've been using a circular slide rule. It's fast, it's easy, it's small (inconspicuous, if you're working in front of others), and the circular slide rule ensures you never have to re-orient the rule. If you'd like to try this approach but don't have a slide rule sitting around, check out Concise. They make a variety of circular slide rules. I'm using a smaller, pocket-sized model they no longer make, but I'd be interested in their 300 today. For this work, though, the 27N or 28N would do quite nicely.

If you're not ready to buy one, consider a home-made version.

Visualizing data

Tom Paper of Data360 posted a link today to Smashing Magazine's list of ways to present data.

Rehearsing

I often help people with presentations, and I've noticed that those who rehearse seem to be those who do better. Now Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen has done an excellent job of explaining the creative process of presenting ideas to others in his Steve Jobs and the art of the swordsman.

Note the two keys to presentation success:

• Intense rehearsal in a team setting
  
• Absolutely no attention to technique or form in the actual presentation
  

Reread Garr's comments, if you need to, and note comments such as, "...once we allow our mind to drift to thoughts of success and failure or of outcomes and technique while performing our art we have at that moment begun our sure decent." [sic]

How can we possibly get through a presentation while following the second key? By following the first key until we have internalized what we want to say, how we want to say it, how others will hear it and respond, and what we can do if something goes differently than we expect. Then we have to rehearse it some more.

As someone once noted, we often rehearse something until we get it right. That means we may have done it wrong 20 times and right once; which do you think will stick with us better?

I think the same thing applies in other areas of our professional lives, and I think Dietrich Dörner and Harald Schaub might agree. That's why I wrote A somewhat unified view of decision making: to suggest the importance of spending time wrestling with what we do at a time that's apart from the actual doing. Whether we use computer simulation, scenario planning, role playing, or something else, the opportunity to rehearse what we do professionally before we do it and to learn from what we actually do afterwards to improve for next time is exceedingly valuable. And it's the cyclic action learning that helps us improve and helps keep us from getting fixated on a bad idea.

If you're still thinking of presentations, check out Garr's presentation tips.

Contribution

Yesterday I wrote about the power of narrative, as inspired by Andrew Taylor's posting. In searching for a link for my article, I discovered a powerful message about contribution in the last half of Presentation Zen's Two Questions: Why does it matter? What's your contribution?, the part I had skipped before. It builds on the three questions meme I wrote about previously, but it uses art to do it in a powerful fashion.

Watch the Benjamin Zander video from start to finish. Yes, it's just over six minutes long. Yes, some of it is probably promoting the speaker. Listen to it anyway; the message is important. If, after listening to it, you're not sure of its application to business, check out the "Fields of Interest" part of Hewlett-Packard's 1966 corporate objectives (scroll to the bottom).

An accidental experiment

I've published a number of At Any Rate™ columns through Pegasus Communications. They consist of text designed to capture people's interest up front and to remind them of what they experienced later as well as a simulation model people can download and explore. The model leads people through three stages: an initial stage-setting exercise, a more complete model to show added complexity in the problem at hand, and an exploration area where people can dig a bit deeper to try their hand at addressing the problem.

Pegasus Communications advertises each At Any Rate in their free Leverage Points newsletter that has a rather large circulation, and they set up a discussion area in their Pegasus Forums for each one.

In other words, that column seems to be planted in a fertile ground in which to talk about such things. The models are interactive. They tell a story. They are published on a high-visibility site and advertised in a high-distribution newsletter. There's a space established to enable discussion.

Yet I've gotten very few off-the-record comments (all favorable) about those columns. I've seen very few comments in the Pegasus Forum. I'm not sure anyone has contacted me about what they've seen there. I'm not complaining; I know that I don't write letters to the editor of the local newspaper, even if I strongly agree or disagree with what the newspaper has published. As a result, I don't necessarily expect (although I would welcome) lots of dialog about what I post online.

On Monday, April 9, I published a similar model (new URL) on Drew McManus's Adaptistration as part of his TAFTO 2007 (new URL) series. It was not interactive; rather, it contained diagrams, graphs, and a computer program (or a text-based model, which is the same thing). Admittedly, I tried hard to use literate programming ideas to intertwine the model and the story so that it would be more interesting and readable, and I let two others in the potential audience see an advance copy so I could find and fix any impenetrable sections.

Within a day, I had a thoughtful, lengthy comment added to that column. Two bloggers made quite favorable comments about the essay. I know of at least one person who had been telling me he'll get to the latest At Any Rate any day now who read and commented on my TAFTO column within a day.

What gives?

While I realize that the singular of data is anecdote, I think that this is showing me the barrier we erect when we ask people to download, run, and learn from an interactive model. While the barrier might be lower if I had used a simulator for At Any Rate that ran in a browser, I'm not sure; one would still need to take perhaps half an hour, perhaps more, to work through the model. It takes much less time to install the software, and i'ts a one-time action—a number of readers already have it.

The barrier may be more complex than simply the challenge of installing the isee Player required by the At Any Rate column. To explore and really learn from a simulation, someone needs to be willing to experiment. That means taking the time to understand the environment, to formulate hypotheses, to write those hypotheses down, to run various tests on the simulation model, to compare the results of the test with the hypotheses, and probably to try new experiments based on the learnings from initial experiments. That's far different than just opening the application, pressing a few buttons, and seeing what happens.

Needless to say, most of us who create such interactive simulations try hard to guide the user through the process. Most of us encourage people to form those hypotheses and to document them in writing or in graphs before starting a simulation. Yet I know (from personal experience—I'm not immune) that it's far too easy to treat a simulation as a video game: press the button, and see what happens. That's not often the path to deep learning.

With the non-interactive version, people can read just a paragraph or skim the entire article to see if it seems interesting. They can come back later to dig more deeply. They can print it out, if they wish, and read it on the bus on their commute. If a text version of the model is included, they can, if they want, copy it into the simulator and explore it themselves.

My lesson? Interactive simulation is no panacea, and it may be a disadvantage if I want to get my story told, especially if my audience consists of busy or high-level people. By telling a good story, I can help the reader learn something, most likely in less time.

Is there a role for exploration, experimentation, and interactive simulations? Certainly! But I need to be sure to consider the audience, their current interests, and what they know and want to learn.

I'd welcome others' insights and experiences. In an action research sense, I'll spend some time trying to disconfirm my conjecture; in the process, I might learn more.

An outline of a pitch

We all have occasion, perhaps frequently, to tell someone else about what we're doing. Entrepreneurs spend key time selling their companies to venture capitalists; now Bill Reichert has given an outline some of you might find useful. Thanks to the TP! Wire Service for pointing this out.