The FORUM Effect

Serving Learners When Things Aren't Going as Planned

We can prepare all we want as facilitators, trainers, and presenters, but until we get in the room or online, until our content connects with the participant community, we really don't know what will happen.  It is at those precise moments that you will curse yourself if you haven't prepared for (or at least thought about) exercising different options for any or all of your major content segments.

When you only have Plan A, you hold participants hostage to your initial thinking even if their responses suggest your plan isn't really working. Instead of shifting gears and making real-time adjustments on the fly, you entrench yourself deeper in the outline and formats that aren't connecting.  It make sense to try and stick with what you know, but if what you know isn't working, it is the exact wrong choice to make.

Don't place yourself in that situation unnecessarily.  Create workshops and presentations that reflect your best sense of what will work for participants based on the advance research you've done about your target audience.  But, and this is a big one, you also want to prepare a variety of teaching techniques for each content segment and a few backup content segments that you can use if your real-time read of the participants calls for modifications to your original plan.

The analogy I would offer is working out with a personal trainer.  The best trainers come with an exercise plan for your 60-minute session, but they make real-time modifications in the weight, the pace, the number of reps, and sometimes even the exercises, based on the signals you and your body convey to them during the session.  That's the real value of the trainer, not simply having someone say "Come on now.  Two more reps.  You can do it."  This type of presentation modification offers similar value to participants in our sessions … if we come with options and alternatives in mind.

Imagine you're doing a 75-minute workshop. At its midpoint you've placed a 30-minute case study discussion as the primary practical application of new concepts you've introduced earlier in the session.  You've envisioned this segment as engaging and highly participative with small groups having very rich discussions.  But what if looks like it won't play out that way?  What if participant interaction and responses in the first portion of your program suggest they will flounder in the group work, that they don't necessarily have the background knowledge to get the most benefit from the case study you've designed?  You have to anticipate something like this happening and have an alternative teaching technique you can introduce almost effortlessly.  That means you may need to have prepared some alternative slides for this option, ones you've placed at the end of your deck but can go to easily.  You may need to have created some other handout or material that your new activity would require.

Even if you have done this more strategic level of preparation for your presentation, you may still not have brought with you the shift in content or format that participants need, or you might simply not be able to infer from their reactions what adjustments would set you on a better path.  in that moment, consider exercising the most powerful option of all: simply describe what you think is happening.

Based on your comments, I'm beginning to think that my content might not be connecting with you as I had anticipated or that I am not using examples you can fully relate to.  Is my sense correct?

Whenever I have made such a statement, participants have always rewarded my seeming vulnerability by offering honest and direct feedback that tells me what I need to do to better serve them as a presenter.  And isn't that what we are there to do?

The Story of Your Slides, The Design of Your Data

Last year, I sat through more than 100 presentations and probably viewed another 100-150 slide decks.  Far too many presentation still feature poorly designed (or less artfully designed) slides than is appropriate.

One of the most obvious yet underutilized opportunities for better information display is a slide filled with data.  Information displayed one way in a spreadsheet or pie chart doesn't necessarily transfer to a graphically appealing slide.  You can't simply export some cells to your deck and move on to the next slide.

Let's take an example.  This is an actual slide a speaker I was coaching planned to use during a presentation.  It basically is a data dump from Excel.  Because the Promotional Products category and data is in red, you can assume this is the key point the speaker was trying to make: promotional products rank fourth in how businesses promote themselves.

Let's set aside the obvious shortcomings of the slide: the excessive number of data categories, the dark gray background box, etc.  Instead let's ask how the slide can easily be modified to:  (1) better engage the audience's attention and interest, (2) shift from a static talking point to a more interactive learning opportunity, and (3) more effectively make the speaker's primary point.  Here's what we developed after brainstorming possibilities that meet those three criteria.

Much better, right?  Now the slide is a quick quiz.  Session attendees are asked to rank these six promotion categories in order of how much money businesses spend on them.  We've gone from an overload of data to a more edited set of categories.  We've replaced dark and dreary with bright and inviting.  It took only few minutes to turn a slide that was a real negative into one that is much more of an asset.

Participants deserve (and increasingly expect) you'll go through this same process.  It doesn't mean you have to have formal graphic design training.  It does require, however, that you look at each slide and ask yourself: what's the story I am trying to tell and how can I best communicate that message?  The answer often involves editing to the essence, replacing some words with pictures, and turning passive elements into participative ones.

Preparing to Present … Be Present

I look forward to guest blogging additional content related to my January/February FORUM article on honing your presentation skills.  I find the best blogs are the ones that have a vibrant dialogue in the comments section, so I promise to respond if you read and write.  You are reading, right?

Let me kick things off with my final point in the article: prepare to be present.  Most presenters do a decent job at tactical preparation, the other points I outline in the article.  Less common is strategic preparation (a term from consultant/facilitator Marybeth Fidler that I recently heard ASSH CEO Mark Anderson use).

Strategic preparation isn't about slides, handouts, or teaching techniques.  It's about advance anticipation and consideration for all the situations you may have to manage during a presentation or workshop.  This advance strategic thinking allows you to be fully present during the actually program, deeply listening to and connected to the participant and their needs and calling audibles in your format and flow based on your read of the group. 

Preparing to be present is perhaps the greatest gift you can give to participants because it allows you to engage with them and to respond to their needs and cues.  Failure to prep at this strategic level means you're tied to (or held hostage by) your outline or slides, neither of which may advance the learning or change you hope your presentation creates.

What questions about preparing to be present (or any of the tactical prep areas) can I respond to?  Let's get the conversation started.

An almost universal groan: Keeping up with frequently changing student addresses

Asking for suggestions on handling the frequent moves of students and recent graduates generally elicited a groan as well as some useful suggestions. 

• Having student leaders update contact information using their access to peers with Facebook, MySpace, face to face contact and school lists is very successful while the students are still in school. 
• Collecting additional email addresses without .edu is encouraged by some associations.
• Trying a student address drive with the first chapters to submit updated contact information receiving an incentive for their chapter was doing very well at one organization. 
• Requesting the effective month of address changes and using the home, not training institution, as the primary contact is recommended by another association. 
• “Holding hostage” a sought-after certificate for two months after graduation to be sent to the new addresses is another way of gathering the updated contact information. 
• Capturing email addresses at the next required professional step of searching the online training registry works in some situations.  

If any other associations have any other helpful suggestions, please add them to the blog!  Keeping up with students’ frequent moves is an ongoing challenge. 

Five D's of Working From Home - Discipline and Diligence

So last week, I wrote introducing the five D's of working from home. In that post, I talked about one of the most important of the five - dedication. Dedication, both to your organization and your craft, is the hallmark of someone who can effectively work from a home office. However, there are four more D's to get to, and today I plan on talking about discipline and diligence.

Without these two traits, working from home would be extremely difficult. Being a disciplined person and worker helps a great deal when you're first trying to develop a routine and figure out how to tackle working from a home office. Understanding that you need to be prepared and organized on a daily basis to come in and get your work done without any direct supervision is extremely important. And not everyone is that disciplined. When I first began working from a home office, it was difficult. I'll admit it - I wasn't as disciplined as I am now. However, over the last three years, I have really become a disciplined worker who understands what it takes to get the job done.

The other D I want to talk about today goes right alongside discipline, and that's diligence. This is one of the intangibles that you really need to develop if you're planning to work from home. To me, diligence is getting the job done no matter what comes your way. There are going to be days when the VPN connection is slow, the people at the office aren't returning your calls as quickly as you'd like, or something gets piled onto your already full plate that you weren't expecting. Working through these obstacles sometimes takes a great deal of diligence. As the person who works from home, you are often looked at with a magnifying glass. Your work might be scrutinzed a little more by the co-workers and boss. That's why being diligent in accomplishing your responsibilities is so important.

Next week, I'm looking forward to sharing the final two D's in the five D's of working from home, which are actually both included in one ability that you must possess if you want to work from home - the ability to deal with distractions... I'm looking forward to sharing that post with you.

As I close, I'd like to ask if you work for an association that allows working from home, and if you're someone who does this occasionally, do these D's make sense? What would you add to the mix of things you need to have in order to be an effective employee when working from home?

Thanks for reading.

Introducing the Five D's of Working from Home

I recently wrote the What’s the Big Idea piece in the November/December issue of FORUM Magazine, which talked about my experience as a remote worker and how associations can integrate this into their work arrangement for some employees.

While I work fully remotely from Aurora, Illinois – about 200 miles from my organization’s headquarters office in Indianapolis – I think my experience is easily translatable to telecommuting. I essentially used the two words interchangeably in the piece, and probably should have just used the umbrella of “working from home”…

Anyway, I have learned a lot in my three plus years working from a home office, with my cats being the closest thing to another human that I often see throughout my workday. It’s something that I had to adjust to, and in this experience, I have developed five major traits that you MUST be possess to be able to effectively work from home. I’m going to post these each week over the next four weeks on this blog, and hope that you get something out of the posts.

The first of the five D’s of working from home that you must possess is dedication.

Dedication in the context of working from home is one of the most important traits that you can possess. If you are not dedicated to your craft, to your association, or to your boss and co-workers, you are not likely going to succeed in working from a home office.

When someone determines that working from home is something they want to do, they have to be dedicated to ensuring that they will work collaboratively across geographic and sometimes time barriers. They also must be dedicated enough to the association to know that at times they will have to work harder to gather the information that’s necessary to do their jobs than those in the office. Lastly, they have to be dedicated enough to understand that in certain instances (like mine), they will have to travel more often to accomplish the job they’re responsible for. (I travel to Indianapolis about once every other month for a week of in office time.)

Overall, dedication is likely one of the most important traits necessary to working from home. Next week, we’ll talk about the second and third traits necessary to work effectively from home – discipline and diligence. Thanks for reading.     

Social Media Policies

Employers continue to be uncertain about their "right" to access employees' social media sites and monitor usage.  Certainly, the law is not well-settled in this area as of yet.  One of the overriding concerns is "are our employees saying negative things about the association?"  Has the increase in social media sites made your association more likely to consider a social media usage policy?

Read the November/December 2009 Digital Edition Today!

Click here to access Digital FORUM.

This month features the American Society of Safety Engineers. 

Are you utlizing social media when connecting with your staff? If so, has it worked?

We're all in this together

I've received a couple of interesting comments from the article in the October FORUM wherein I discussed involving MARCOM early in the planning process. Both were positive and expressed agreement with a couple of the points raised, along with noting that a lot of what I referred to as common sense wasn't all that common. It got me thinking. How often do we get so wrapped up in making sure our organizations are looking to the future that we miss what's in the here and now? More to the point, how often do we spend time and resources reinventing solutions that others have already discovered, simply because we failed to take the simple step of talking to our peers?

One of the most important resources I have as a manager is the advice and counsel of others -- both in and out of my industry -- whose opinions and observations I have come to trust. It has been my experience that most of the challenges I encounter are easier met when I engage others for input and suggestions. Although it's not generally as easy as getting the precise answer I need at that moment, I do find that such conversation usually leads me down a path to a solution much more quickly than if I go it alone. Such feedback is everywhere. From the blogs to the industry pundits, to the learned colleagues and (most importantly) my own team, I am never at a loss for useful input and information when what I need most is a second opinion. The trick is to remember to ask.