Scott Berkun's Blog, page 72

How to torture your project manager

If you like your project manager, this is a list of things not to do. But if they really deserve it, here are proven ways to drive them mad.

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

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

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Published on February 17, 2011 11:21

How to show time during a presentation

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.

If you've seen other ways to mark time, leave a comment.

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Published on February 16, 2011 16:02

How to show time during a presetation

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.

If you've seen other ways to mark time, leave a comment.

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Published on February 16, 2011 16:02

The top 10 unsolved tech problems? help wanted

There are some problems consumers face with technology so persistent we forget they're there. Can you help me make a top ten list of them?

Making a 3-way conference call without hanging up on people
Hooking up a laptop to a projector w/o restarting
?

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Published on February 16, 2011 15:22

Thinking in Desire Paths

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.

There's a likely apocryphal story about a campus that didn't put any paths in until after the first year. They looked to see the paths the students had made, and put paths 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 it. 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.

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Published on February 15, 2011 08:22

Quote of the week

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.

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Published on February 12, 2011 10:35

Discovered: The Amazing Dr. Fox Video

To celebrate the release of the paperback edition of Confessions of a Public Speaker, here's another post on public speaking.

One of the most often referenced speeches in the history in public speaking, is the famous Dr. Fox lecture. In short, researchers hired an actor to pose as an expert, and he gave a meaningless, but complex sounding, jargon filled speech. They researchers studied, and proved, how easily even experts can be fooled.

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.

It's a canonical reference on how vulnerable to B.S. we all can be.

The problem is the lecture has been impossible to find. I spent ages looking for it while researching for Confessions, but couldn't find a single person who had even seen it, 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).

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Published on February 03, 2011 07:40

Speaking at Town Hall Seattle, March 9th

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

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Published on February 02, 2011 11:25

An open letter to conference organizers

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 a 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 that speakers are the center of your event. They are the core of the agenda. They are what you advertise and what they promise to teach is why people pay to come. Yet once signed up to speak, they are often an afterthought, neglected and ignored.

There are simple and inexpensive ways to solve this problem.

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. This is dumb. The speakers make the product people are paying for (e.g. talks and workshops) and should be well informed about who the customers are. If nothing else providing this data reminds speakers it's the audience that matters, not their egos.
Provide speaker training. There are many great books on public speaking and books are cheap. Send them to your speakers, and do it far enough in advance for it to impact their preparation. It signifies you care about their skills and want them to do their best. If even 20% of them read the book, and each avoid one basic mistake, it will pay off dramatically in higher quality sessions. Presentation Zen, which focuses on slide design, and my own book, Confessions of a Public Speaker, which covers everything else, make excellent companions. Major events and corporations hire speaker coaches, as speaking is a performance skill, but this can be expensive for large events. Books are an affordable place to start. Put this in a packet with #1, and send it out when you sign a speaker.
Send example videos from previous years. 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.
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. 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. If you are not allowing speakers to use their own laptops (which is preferable), a walkthrough is extra important. Moving slide decks between computers often breaks fonts and other formatting, problems the speaker needs to know about.
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 to help manage any unforseen 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.
Provide confidence monitors in ever room. One distracting habit among many speakers is they look at their own slides, annoying the audience every time. Some of this is lack of practice, but part of the problem is room design. If you put a 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 cheap to set up, has clear benefits and requires no extra work on the part of the speaker. Events like Ignite Seattle consistently do this, which helps explain why so many good talks have happened there.
Do not inflict a slide template on speakers. Attendees are not morons. They will remember where they are without an ugly reminder on every single slide in every single talk. Give a basic template to people as an option if you must, or to encourage people to use similiar colors, or as a head start for first time speakers, but that's the limit of the value of slide templates. They tend to be ugly, confining, and just plain silly.
Have a speaker's dinner or happy hour. Have an evening 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 can only happen through you.
Rate your speakers and share the data. Speakers rarely get any useful feedback on how well they did. Everyone is polite and tells them they were great, even when they bombed. Most events do surveys after each session, but the data oddly never makes it to the speakers. This is broken. 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?

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

Signed,

- Scott Berkun, A public speaker

(This post is part of a series celebrating the paperback edition of Confessions of a Public Speaker)

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Published on February 02, 2011 08:43

Help name the next book (Round 1)

I mentioned yesterday work on my forth 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.

View Poll

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Published on February 02, 2011 07:42