My 60 Seconds of Writing WIP this week is from the speaking book.
Enjoy!
The Transcript:
I’m Johanna Rothman, and this is 60 Seconds of Johanna’s Writing WIP for April 19, 2024, where I read an excerpt of just a minute of some writing in progress.
This excerpt is from the speaking book.
Go Meta to Design Your Presentation
Because you're speaking from your experience and expertise, you might notice several patterns that do not serve people well. Those are often your audience's problems. Instead of talking directly about the details of the work or their solutions, you might discuss how people think and reason about their work–how people create and recreate those patterns.
That's going meta on the topic.
This is particularly useful if you have a closing keynote at a conference. Instead of saying, “I'll do the mop-up,” as I heard one closing keynoter say, you can say, “I'm going to leave you with ideas that I hope make you think.”
Now, you can expose some of those patterns and discuss why they do not serve people well. For example, I speak a lot about how we need to bring people with diverse experiences and capabilities together to make teams that can create useful products. I do not say, “Homogenous teams don't do a good job.” Instead, I say, “You might think single-function teams or people with similar experiences and backgrounds are more efficient. But let's talk about the measures that matter.”