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This is a new one… I haven’t re-posted other bloggers in the past but this one from Designing Change makes so many good points, it needs to be spread.
Written by Joyce Hostyn on June 29, 2011
“The world we see today is the legacy of people noticing the world and commenting on it in forms that have been preserved.” Art & Fear
Story is how we make sense of the world. Each piece of art we create tells a story. Each story we share contributes to the meaning that shapes our world.
Story was the theme of Podcasters Across Borders 2011, a gathering of artists who spent the weekend exploring storytelling across all forms of new media.
After struggling to summarize my experience, I decided adding a constraint would be the perfect way to push through my writer’s block. I’ve captured my reflections in 4 sets of 5.
Five takeaways from PAB:
Stories surround you. Listen for them. Capture them. Share them. Risks if we don’t? Voices lost from history. Explosions from people whose stories aren’t heard (great JOLT @RobinBrowne!).
Be naked. Reveal yourself. Take risks. @scarboroughdude was the most naked presenter, lounging in an armchair sharing his stories in the spirit of the original PAB as if participating in a fireside chat. Although @JohnMeadows vied for the title in a different way, pushing his limits with his photography.
Just hit publish. It’s hard to hit publish if you’re forever worrying about whether you have anything interesting to say or whether it’s good enough. If you don’t hit publish, you’ll never know what your audience finds interesting or valuable. I admire the mindset of my son who created and published his first 3 tutorial videos in 3 hours, sharing his learnings with each video published.
See the moments. Why use a film or view camera for photography when digital is available? Because it forces you to focus in on the moment. On the story you want to capture. This resonated with me as I’d just finished the book Zen of Seeing by Frederick Franck, who describes seeing this way: “Open your eyes and focus on whatever you observed before – that plant or leaf or dandelion. Look it in the eye, until you feel it looking back at you. Feel that you are alone with it on Earth! That it is the most important thing in the universe, that it contains all the riddle of life and death. It does! You are no longer looking, you are SEEING…” By learning to see the moments, you’ll discover stories everywhere.
Treat a conference as a conversation. Intimate. Safe to be naked. Open space for conversation and forming new friendships. @markblevis and @bobgoyetche did a phenomenal job curating and facilitating PAB. It was forged seven years ago with a campfire in mind and they’ve stuck with that format, the current fireside being Stage 4 of the National Arts Centre. There was far more conversation than at other conferences I’ve attended, and it was during those conversations that meaning was shared and new relationships were begun.
Five things I learned by presenting at PAB:
We learn by creating, sharing our creations, and then listening to the feedback shared by our audience. Here are a few things I learned about how I can improve future presentations, thanks to the opportunity to present at PAB.
Cut. Cut. Then cut even more. Even though stories resonate more powerfully than facts, I still have a tendency to sprinkle too many supporting facts (references to studies) into a presentation. Too many facts distract the audience and dilute your core message.
Ground yourself to reassure your lizard brain. Presenting triggers the flight, fright, flee response of the lizard brain for most of us. Someone shared with me a centering technique from yoga I’ll use in the future to reassure my lizard brain that it’s safe. Stand with your legs shoulder width apart. Lift your toes, spread them out, then anchor them to the floor. Imagine yourself as a tree, sending roots deep into the soil. Take a deep, yogic breath (inflating your belly). Exhale forcefully through an open mouth (making sure your mike is off).
Slow down. Give people time to absorb each slide. Each visual, each slide, is part of the story you’re telling. Hurrying through slides leaves people wondering what they’ve missed.
Invite your audience in. This was one of the tips @acedtect shared in his top 5 ways to engage the audience. How could I have done this better at PAB? Kept my presentation shorter. Then I could have facilitated an autobiography exercise, asking a few people to stand up and share. Then if there was time, followed that with an Inciting Incident exercise, again asking people to stand up and share. Story brings the audience in. Leaving space gives more opportunities for their stories to emerge.
Reveal the meaning. It’s not what something is about (the facts). It’s about what it means to you (the story). This is related to presenting naked. Someone mentioned their surprise at how interested people seemed in some of the books I mentioned. He reflected that maybe this was because I referred to what the books meant to me, how they changed my thinking, rather than simply saying what they were about (his usual approach). In his wrap @markblevis said the creators aren’t the people who decide what the benefit is of their creation to others. Rather, it’s about what it means to your audience. I was surprised by the variety of conversations I had with people about what my presentation meant to them. The meaning and what resonated varied widely (from finding personal meaning to organizational applications). That’s the power of story. It provides space for conversation. It provides space for meaning to emerge.
I’ll be uploading my presentation, It’s All Invented, to slideshare next week.
Five things I’m going to do as result of attending PAB:
The best conferences spark ideas and inspire action. As a result of my experience at PAB 2011, I’m going to do the following five things:
Capture stories with video and audio. I confess my lizard brain has hindered me from reaching out to people and asking them whether I can record conversations. And yet unless I get over this fear I can’t share their stories. I’m going to bring my video camera and audio recorder to Content World 2011 and ask people to share their stories, featuring them in the Adoption Community.
Write a book on life lessons I’ve learned through gardening. During my talk, I teased the audience with a few slides featuring my garden. Gardening has taught me so much about design, experimentation, persistence, emergence, serendipity… the list could go on. The number of stories it holds is huge. I started Ktown Gardener in January to capture thoughts and images of my garden, but didn’t stick with it. Thanks to PAB I’m reviving Ktown Gardener. I’ll post several times a week, using the blog as a garden journal to capture stories and images that resonate with me along with mistakes, successes, and learnings. I’ll also use it as a vehicle to help me develop my skills in drawing, photography, and video. And Ktown Gardener will become the shitty first draft of the book.
Seek out Kingston creatives. Artists (creators, designers) need other artists for inspiration and support. PAB has a wonderfully supportive atmosphere. While it’s awesome to travel to an event like PAB (and I plan on attending again next year) I’d like to connect with artists in the Kingston area. If you’re interested, send me an email or a tweet.
Capture family stories. @zedcaster shared the story of Ada, his great grandmother, mother of 15 and lifelong swimmer. A cassette of her stories was almost lost. Someone discovered it at a garage sale, recognized its value, and tracked down her family so they could return it. Much to my regret, I have no stories of my great grandmother. But I still have the opportunity to capture the stories of my parents for future generations.
Haul one or both of my kids off on an adventure. One of our family highlights is the month we spent exploring China when the kids were 12 and 14. We took Mandarin lessons together, then set off on our adventure. Since then I’ve assumed the kids are too old to head out with us again (they’re 17 and 19 now). But inspired by @scarboroughdude’s story of his cross Canada bonding trips with each of his sons and Christopher Griffin‘s tale of his family’s trip to India and his experience casting bronze elephants, I’ll be seeking out an adventure to share with my kids.
Five phrases from PAB that captured my imagination
- Fruitful incompletion
- Story showers
- Dead time between mistakes gives space for better ideas to emerge
- We’re not channels, we’re tubes
- Shiver moment
What images do these phrases evoke for you?
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Re-posted unedited from here.
Some fourteen years ago I started to work on a book of Maori tribal myths and legends. Some eleven years ago the book was finally published by the New Zealand publishing house of Reed. (The book sold out withing three years but the publisher refused to reprint. That’s a good subject for another discussion about giving customers what they obviously want – or not – and the state of the publishing industry but that’s for another time…)
By the time the book’s stock was exhausted, I had learned that Tauhia Hill, one of the ten people I had talked to had died. A wonderful bloke who took me for a long walk, told me rich stories of the Kaipara Harbour (the largest and least known of Auckland’s harbours) and paused just long enough for me to take a roll’s worth of portraits under a cabbage tree. (On a twin-lens Rolleiflex 2.8F, I’ll have you know.) Another, Tauranga carver Tuti Tukaokao, had promised to carve a wooden casket for the ashes of my father who had died while I was working on the book. Alas, he did not live to fulfill that promise.
Several years later, the truly wonderful Bubbles Mihinui from Roturoa, joined her ancestors after a long and distinguished life, as did Te Hau Tutua, a staunch man of great dignity and wide-ranging creativity who told me stories of White Island, the active volcano some two hours’ boat ride off the coast. Harold Ashwell from Rakiura has also gone, as has Jacob Hakaraia from the other end of the country, Waitangi.
Most of the storytellers have gone to sit by the great bonfire in the sky. Their stories, which are not really their stories but belong to the tribe, the tangata whenua, live on.
They live on for me, too. I received a pounamu (greenstone) pebble from Kath Hemi, one of the kuia (elderwomen) whom I visited at hear house near Nelson. (Recently I heard that she, too, had gone away to tell her stories in the spirit world.) The pebble travelled with me for a month till I finally arrived in Hokitika which, you may not be aware of this vital fact, is the greenstone carving capital of the World. There I met Stan McCallum, one of the master carvers, to whom I would entrust the task of making something out of the piece of stone. After several cups of tea and two hours’ discussion of important matters such as World travel and the year’s whitebaiting season, he finally set to and produced a suitable work – which, too, is another story except to say that when I visited him seven years later with my then brand new wife he remembered the story, and the stone, and the cups of tea. And picked out a special piece for my wife, of course.
What’s the point of all this? As Sir Paul Reeves wrote in the introduction to the book “Oral history is what one generation wants to share with another. It is the way the truth is enriched and brought into our living experience” and “History lies in the telling. Mythology or interpretation, and the account of what might have happened, can be gloriously mixed up.” Paul, I call him by his first name as he would insist, has also recently departed, having lived a big life, full of important stories.
The book, as all books, is enjoying its own life Out There, including delightful, if surprising, encounters with its author.
Which leaves one question. What stories next?
Here are some of the portraits.
 Bubbles Mihinui  Jacob Hakaraia  Rose Thompson  Te Hau Tutua  Kath Hemi  Tuti Tukaokao
 Promenade des Anglais, Nice, France Bless its silicon heart, the iPhone would be loved even by my old chiropractor who for years told me to quit lugging a camera bag the size of a small Victorian travel trunk on my shoulder… I did finally quit the year my damaged back convinced me I should listen, but that is a different story.
Seriously, though – it is not surprising that a quarter of the World’s photos are now taken on smartphones. The best camera is one that is with you all the time and while I still love my heavy DSLRs with their battery of lenses for every imaginable situation, for all situations that are not so much imaginable as real, right there, and ready to be shot, there is the iPhone.
 The bridge at Avignon, France A photograph as an object should of course only be judged on its own, certainly removed from its technological origins. Whether a photo is successful in its purpose is a result of the photographer’s skill, sensitivity, timing, and so on. What kind of camera it’s taken on is irrelevant. And a good thing, too. The best camera, I have maintained for a long time, would be no camera at all, but that too is a subject for another discussion. The iPhone, tiny and unobtrusive, with the huge variety of photo apps, and a growing collection of small but useful accessories is almost as good as having no camera. Almost fully Zen, you might say.
 Berliner Dom, Berlin, Germany What is actually really interesting to consider is not just the way the iPhone, and devices like it, are redefining how or when we take photographs but also the fact that they are actually cutting a new aesthetic swathe through the visual undergrowth. I may have not considered shooting and post-producing ANY of the photos illustrating this article on a “normal” camera. While with an iPhone, all of them are entirely, well, normal.
 Bakery in La Ciotat, France But back to the subject at hand. In travel photography the single most important point of any image is to convey a sense of place. What does it feel like? What does it taste like? A viewer will likely forget most of the information conveyed by an image as soon as the page is turned or the screen flipped, but the feeling should stay in her imagination long after the image itself has faded from her retina.
 Old Town, Warsaw, Poland This is where it gets interesting, from two perspectives – one of balance, and one of a two-way mutual inspiration between technology and the visual. We have hundreds of apps which allow post-production treatment of the image. From grunging them up to making them look as if shot with a Diana camera, there is a myriad possible filters, treatments and tricks available to those wanting to try them out. As with any technique, if done judiciously they can be used to enhance an already good photo, or propel a mediocre one into another level of meaning and appeal. Then again, they can be easily overused as a “wonderfully creative” tool, confining the photo to the ever-widening pool of visual cliches and fads. The aim – to use the tools to enhance the “feel” of the image, communicating the sense of place better than might be done otherwise.
 A village in the Rhone Valley, France I’m just starting to play with the iPhone as a serious tool for making photos – down new visual paths, using a vocabulary that has been redefined by the introduction of the photo manipulation apps. I’ve been using PhotoShop for something like seventeen years and have been, of course, well used to seeing heavily manipulated images but have not looked at making these kinds of photos for myself. This is the other perspective – technology pushing visual exploration, as much as it is itself defined by the established visual trends. Lomo and Diana had been around for a long time by the time Instagram and Hipstamatic came to be but relatively few people knew what photos Lomo and Diana took looked like until those applications popularised the post-production looks inspired by those cameras. What goes around…
(Incidentally, if you’re interested in this subject matter, check out the Scoop.it magazine we are starting to curate over at Pixengo : Best Mobile Photography. And please send us suggestions @pixengo if you find great examples of this “new old” aesthetic.)
As an aside – the photos above are from the first batch I submitted to my photo agency Aurora Photos for their nascent myPhone Collection. It’s an experiment but we think it’s worth the effort, as this somewhat loose, bright, funky, slightly melancholic, nostalgic and wildly unpredictable aesthetic is likely to stay with us for some time. Art Directors are not likely to ignore it for long, and when they start looking for pictures, we’ll be there!
A little while ago I had the good fortune to speak at the second Startup Weekend Warsaw, organised again by the team at Hard Gamma Ventures, and led by Startup Weekend’s own Jennifer Cabala. I had been asked to give a talk which would help the teams build presentations for the ultimate pitching session at the end of Sunday. The title of the talk was “Presentations are not just for presenting, or how to re-purpose your time.”
This is an edited text, to fit the blog format. As is usually the case, what works on stage doesn’t necessarily work on the screen. I have included only about a quarter of the slides, too – a page of text is not the same medium as a spoken presentation and they would be superfluous here.
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We’re all scared of public speaking, it’s just the degree that varies. We are more afraid of that than we are of spiders, vampires – the sexy kind and the ordinary nasty kind. (Scary slides.) We’re more afraid of public speaking than we are of clowns and of asteroids, though we really should rather be afraid of those as the statistical likelihood of us being offed by one that doesn’t quite miss the Earth is apparently fairly significant and your odds in dying in a cosmic crash are about the same as those for death in an aeroplane crash.
  
The thing we are most afraid of, apparently, is death by fire. (Witch burning slide.) Given our troubled history that is not entirely illogical. Public speaking takes the second spot, which IS entirely illogical unless we should find ourselves talking in front of a group of those gentlemen (cannibals slide) with the subject of the presentation being whether or not we’re going to become today’s lunch. We’re afraid of public speaking because we don’t like being judged by others (judges slide) and because we fear that we will not have enough time to explains ourselves fully (No Stopping signs slide.) We’re afraid of public speaking because we think it’s some kind of a magical skill, mysteriously acquired by a fortunate chosen few. I’m here to tell you it is not. (Crossed out magician slide.)
  
Remembering two key things about public speaking will make it easier to start and not as scary to continue. One, it’s a good thing to start with a strong point, preferably several. (Explosions slide.) Two, if you think it’s all about you, you’re wrong. It’s only about you to the extent that of how you are able to make the point that is of most interest to investors. (Money slide.) And there you can only do that if you show them that your product saves them time, earns them money, offers them something wickedly fun to do, or indeed earns them money.
And there’s one thing that investors hate more than pretty much anything and that is bullshit. (“No bullshit” slide.) So I would not suggest that you talk about that “fifty billion dollar market of which you only need two percent to make a killing” because nobody will believe you. Concentrate instead on the thing most of interest to investors and that is demonstrating the existence of a Large Addressable Market (Big Crowd slide.) Because one of those, given enough brain power and effort on your part, will translate into nice big returns for all concerned.
  
So this is your opportunity to grab the bull by the horns. Here’s a dictionary definition of this term for those not familiar with it. Doesn’t it actually define the pirate spirit that needs to exist in a startup? I think it does. (Definition slide : taking advantage of an opportunity.)
So, you need to grab the bull by the horns and you don’t have a lot of time to do it. That’s OK because you’re actually participating in a very exciting activity, and that is the creation of new life. (Swimming sperm slide.) I had a far more interesting photo on this slide but I was told this was a family show so… Incidentally, if you think that the Biology of Business is purely a fanciful term, check out some things that have been written about it. And if you don’t know who Esther Dyson is, you should. (Biology of Business slide.)
So, you’re creating new life but of course you want to end up here. (Facebook network slide) As an aside, this is not exactly a new idea. The value of networks has been known for a very long time, as illustrated by this telephone cable company map from over a hundred years ago (map slide.) So, you’re busy creating new life, and are aiming at World Domination.
  
I would suggest you certainly mention the ultimate aim of the exercise, after all how will you know when you get there if you don’t know where you’re going, but for the purpose of this weekend, it would be a lot more useful to concentrate on the next couple of the many steps which you will need to take between now and then. (Steps between now and then slide.)
Given you’re standing there essentially naked in front of the jury (anybody remember the film Full Monty?) what can you do? Well, you do have two super weapons at your disposal: your charming personality (cute dog slide) and your awesome idea. (Light bulb slide.)
So here’s where the work on presentations really starts. It is worth mentioning that a presentation consists of two elements – the presenter, we’ll be working on that part tomorrow, and the presentation itself. Which, we have already established, should lead to some blindingly obvious conclusions about the money in the context of the Large Addressable Market. (Presenter and presentation slide.)
I’d like to suggest that creating the presentation is actually your opportunity to what? Focus! (Ford Focus slide.) You have three minutes, as we know. You may think this is a tiny amount of time but it is actually plenty. And what you need to think of as the spine of your presentation is the picture you paint in their minds, the story you tell them to illustrate what you’re all about.
Anybody remember the 80′s TV series The A Team? Now there’s a bunch of stories! I can’t use an original team shot here because of copyright reasons but you will recall there was Hannibal who liked cigars and loved it when the plan came together. (A Team mock up slide.) There was Face Man, the smooth talking suit-wearing sell-sand-to-the-Bedouins guy. There was Murdock, the geek. He built things. And then there was B.A who was very useful for a variety of jobs requiring effective focus, immediate attention and direct community engagement. Well, I’ve always thought that they constituted pretty much the ideal startup team. Hannibal was the strategy guy but he left the smooth talking to Face the marketing guy. Murdock built stuff that actually worked, against all odds, and Mr T, that is BA, there to move heavy things and generally scare off the competition. Every one of their missions was indeed a new startup.
  
You too have created teams and are now working on your projects and there might be a natural tendency to focus much of the presentation on the team and only some on the great idea. (Winning team and idea slide.) I would suggest that it should be the other way around. While the team is obviously important and you may have some really strong domain expertise which you should mention, it is the project itself that should be the centre of attention. Especially in the context of that Large Addressable Market.
This is how we normally work with ideas : idea – discuss – refine – use or discard (circular process slide.) I’d like to suggest that building in the discipline of thinking about how you might ultimately present those ideas really helps in evaluating of those ideas in the first place.
  
So, am I suggesting that you turn on PowerPoint and create a presentation about every idea, or that you start by going to the laptop and whacking out slides to present on Sunday night? Of course not. (Crossed out laptop slide.) This is your tool of choice. (Pencil slide.) I’d like to suggest you start with pencil and paper and create storyboards. If you’re even moderately familiar with the movie business you will have heard of storyboards. Film makers don’t begin making a movie by loading up and heading out on location, unless they’re Wim Wenders… (Storyboards slide.) The process begins a lot earlier, with discussion over storyboards. These are the details you would need if you drew one up. The information is remarkably similar to what you need when planning a presentation – what’s on the screen, how long for and what is said while the slide is up. Incidentally, it is really a useful idea to think of your presentation as a movie, with a beginning, a middle and a conclusion.
  
So, using pencil and paper, start putting down the main points of the project. Features, marketing ideas, business propositions and so on. As you go along you will add iterations of those and shift the points around. (Progressive rough storyboard slides.) Here are the tools you will need. (Scissors and tape slide.) In case you’re not familiar with those, they perform the commands Cmd-X and Cmd-V. They are your friends. Oh, and if you think this is some outmoded technology and it’s not worth considering, check out these useful features. You’ll be familiar with all of those:
asynchronous / concurrent
zero boot up time
always on
flexible inputs
version control
automatic backup.
At the end of this process you will end up with what looks like this (sheet of notes.) Perhaps like this (a lot of sheets of notes.) And if you follow the process to its logical conclusion, you will end up with the presentation basically planned out. (Sheet of notes with the final set of points highlighted slide.) And importantly this process will help you find the kernel of what the project is really about. (Peach slide.)
  
So, to the presentation itself. The first thing you must show is a demo. I can’t help you with this, of course, but it should address the problem you’re solving or desire you’re satisfying, and how, and have some kind of a prototype, click-through or a mockup of the working app.
The presentation should also present in simple terms the market, and convince the viewers that it is a large market. It is of course tempting to say that the market is “everybody” but that is of course neither very precise nor actually true, unless you’re selling air. Instead why not state that your market are, say, all male slobs over thirty in major urban conglomerations around the World. (Slob on deckchair against World map slide.)
Next point, market entry. How many people can you feasibly sell to at the beginning of the project. I would suggest you stay within what is possible and, say, target all the slobs in urban conglomerations closer to home. Here, by the way, is a really useful definition of what a ‘market’ actually is. (“A market is a group of people with common needs or wants who can reference each other when making their buying decisions.”) I think the quote comes from Steve Blank, or at least his book is where I think I’ve seen it.
  
Next talk about user scenarios. Who are the people who will use your product? When? How? (User scenarios slide.)
Remembering that you have three minutes, I would suggest you aim for two and a half and here are some ABCs of a good presentation:
Accuracy. Obviously you have to have your facts straight.
Brevity. If you can’t say it in three minutes, you will certainly not be able to say it in thirty.
Clarity. The purpose of the presentation is to communicate precisely what you are doing.
Design. I’m sure I don’t need to stress the importance of good design to his crowd, do I?
Excitement. If you’re not excited, neither will be your audience. And just in case that needs stressing, F’ken eh!
Gregariousness. There’s no need to be afraid of people.
Finally, honesty. Remember that no bullshit slide?
Here’s the secret sauce. Preparation. Mark Twain knew a thing or two about public speaking. He made most of his income from speaking not from books. Apparently. Preparation is crucial. You don’t have a lot of time for preparation here which is another reason I’m suggesting you start working on the presentation right now and not on Sunday afternoon. (Mark Twain quote: “It takes me about three weeks to come up with a good spontaneous speech.”)
The key points to remember when preparing for the presentation are who’s listening, what do they know already (i.e. what do you not need to tell them); what it is that you do want to tell them and what the purpose of it is; what the basic message of the presentation will be, how you are going to go about structuring this message, and what you want them to take away from it all. And remember, it’s not what you say, it’s… what they hear. So the three pillars of Clarity, Brevity and Enthusiasm need to be foremost in your mind.
A couple more points of detail. Have you discussed the question of who is the best person to present or just kind of gone along with a gut feel? The team leader may be the best person but not necessarily. Choose carefully. And branding, it’s never too early to start thinking about that, so choose typefaces and colours that make sense, and be wise in the selection of images you use.
  
OK. Here’s what NOT to do. Let me start with bullets. Bullets are for killing things. (Crossed out bullet slide.) This is what bullets look like when they’re boring. And this is what bullets look like when someone tries to make them “creative”. (Plain bullet points and coloured bullet points slides.) Now I really can’t read a thing. If the purpose of the presentation is not to communicate anything of use to anybody, then by all means, go ahead and use bullets.
Next, complex diagrams. (Complex diagram slide.) You may understand what that says but you’re the only one. And if you put it on this pretty green background it doesn’t actually make it any clearer or better looking. Technical renderings. (Joystick with complex legend of symbols slide.) Lovely but what do all those symbols mean? Remember, you have three minutes. Do you want to spend half of that explaining this? Or technical drawings. Even a professional would need a few seconds to understand this. (Electrical diagram slide.)
If you absolutely have to use a diagram, make it really, really simple. This is about communication, not showing off how clever you are. And rather than using that lovely rendering how about showing off what it can do? (Moving horizon sequence instead of a joystick slide.) Relate it to how people will use it. The Thing itself is not even remotely interesting to this audience. The Users are, and what they will do with the Thing.
One last practical thing. Create a new account on your laptop which you use only for your presentations so when you plug it in, the audience doesn’t have to be confronted with all your emails and sundry other work but instead go immediately tot he presentation itself.
  
Here are a few resources for you. Some months ago I did a semi-scientific survey of what people thought were the things presenters should avoid. The post is here and it contains a list of Presentation Sins which is not at all surprising. We all hate them. We would be well advised then not to commit them.
Second, you could do a lot worse than start with the Zen Master of presentations, Garr Reynolds. You will find his hints on how to present here.
Last, don’t nick photos. Firstly because they’re not yours to use, secondly because it can come back to bite you on the arse and thirdly because Google Images is not the right way to find the right picture at the right time. Use illustrations which their owners have offered for people to use. Here are a few sites which offer copyright-free illustrations. This presentation was put together using illustrations from the MorgueFile and Wikimedia Commons.
So, start with your awesome idea, use paper and pencil to focus your thoughts and create storyboards of the presentation, then build the presentation itself. This is the right order of doing it. Now go do it, and keep the pirate spirit alive.
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After-note:
It was awesome to see the team at TicketAware take the idea and run with it. Here is a storyboard-in-progress:
A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of giving an Ignite talk at the second edition of IgniteWarsaw, held at the beautiful Zacheta Gallery. Aircon wasn’t cooperating all that well but other than that the evening went off like a rocket thanks to the efforts of Michal Paluchowski, Zuza Stanska, Mateusz Nowak and Leo Waldron.
The text below is more or less what I said – typing from memory is never 100% accurate…
G’day
I say g’day because that is where I come from. (Greetings from Australia / New Zealand slide) I’ve spent most of my life Down Under where the roads are usually good, bureaucracy you can live with and winter is not really an issue most of the time.
Now, a few years ago, through a stroke of fate, I found myself here. (Welcome to Poland slide) Let me just take a moment to explain the concept of six months of winter to the good people watching this on video. We’re not quite far enough North to have polar bears and not quite far enough East to be in Siberia, but coming from Australia, the difference is really not that great.
All was not bad, however. You see I knew the secret of this place. (Woman in cream dress slide) Yes, Poland has a secret, it’s not a very well kept secret but still… In case you don’t know, this place has the world’s most beautiful women.
So indeed, thanks to one such woman I decided to stay and was evidently not too unhappy about it since a month later I was ring shopping and four months later we were married. (Ralph jumping for joy slide) Wasting time at my age really is a sin.
So life, you could say, was looking blissful, I did however have one very serious problem. Here’s a graphic illustrating the problem and it’s not a graphic of global SARS or swine flu outbreaks but rather of places of where I knew people before I came here. (Map of the world slide with a big blank where Poland is) And I think you can spot the problem. Trying to get stuff done without knowing people can be difficult.
Luckily, about the same time, in its inestimable wisdom, TED decided to help me out, see? (TEDxWarsaw slide) Just for me, just so I could meet a lot of interesting people, they opened up the TEDx programme, which of course I enthusiastically embraced.
So, a couple of years later, we are now working on our third conference, (TEDxWarsaw stats slide) and indeed you could say that I have had the good fortune of meeting rather a lot of really interesting people. (Map of the World slide with big new dots) Here’s that map again, this time with a distribution of people I know now.
Here’s a photo of some of these people, this is about half our team (Team on stage slide) and in addition to being entirely awesome, these people have one other thing in common. They are half my age. Not that I’m particularly old, but they are particularly young. This is a fact whose significance will become apparent shortly – this talk is actually about the promise, and responsibility of Youth.
(Sneakers slide.) As an aside, my wife has recently bought me a pair of really cool Converse sneakers, in an effort to support my staying cool and relevant with all these awesome young people. I’ve never had Converse sneakers in my life so I thought I would share this joyful tidbit with you here today.
(Blog quote slide.) But there is a serious side to the story, of course. I had occasion to write this on my blog a few months ago. It was actually a post about a very positive event, involving lots of bright young people, but the fact remains the we have a very serious problem in this country and its very nature means we don’t talk about it very often.
(Poles don’t trust each-other slide.) This is a statistic which has been thrown about in the press and the issue with lack of trust is that it affects everything from personal lives to business and politics. I would go so far as to say that this is one of the most fundamental issues we have to deal with as a society right now because lack of trust is not very helpful in terms of getting the country to work as a dynamic, cohesive community (Silos slide) and it also helps our so-called politicians to put us into silos which are easy to manage and play off against each other.
(Maybe there is something slide.) So what to do? Well, if I may paraphrase the master, professore Umberto Eco: “By helping to create language, conversation creates a sense of identity and community.” We need to create spaces for conversation to take place.
(TEDxWarsaw 2011 slide.) I don’t pretend to have any answers but I think what we are doing with TEDx and what get-togethers such as this one are also helping accomplish is the development of a culture of conversation. And conversation is a really good way to help us get out of our silos. (Heated debate slide) Conversation with people we don’t normally meet, hearing about ideas we don’t normally consider. Heated debate, polite chats, and anything in between.
We try to emulate the ethos of TED at our little conference and I think it’s working. Sure, we get to hear amazing talks from incredible people, about ideas that blow my mind, but just as importantly we get to talk to a vast variety of people who are very different from each other. (Ideas worth spreading slide.) But they all have one thing in common, they are willing to give time to the other person, to hear what they have to say. Let’s think about the motto of TED for a moment – Ideas worth spreading. We understand the first part. Ideas – awesome things people have done, built or are considering. But the second part is just as important, and that can be accomplished by talking. (Ideas worth talking about slide.) In this city, in this country, what we need more than most other things right now, is a willingness to build conversations about things that matter with people we don’t normally meet.
(TEDxWarsaw slide) I’d like to invite all of you to join the conversation next March. It’s up to the young, and the young at heart, to get all this done. Because those without cool sneakers are too old and too set in their ways to do anything about it.
Thank you.
Jacek Kowalski from Gazeta Wyborcza, the leading Polish daily, did a little chat with me this week, in the context of TEDxWarsaw, public speaking and the role of the storyteller. We talked for a while and here is the resulting interview, translated from the Polish. It was titled : “Tell me your story, just don’t put me to sleep.” A perfectly reasonable request for audiences to put to speakers everywhere, I thought.
Jacek Kowalski: I have nothing to tell you.
Ralph Talmont: Impossible. Everyone has some story to share.
JK: It’s easier for you. You’re an established photographer, you travel the World, organise a popular science conference at which people share incredible experiences. But what about a milkman who’s been delivering milk in his suburb for thirty years? Nothing interesting ever happens in his life, right?
RT: Actually, his is an excellent story. For me it would go something like “I’ve been a milkman for thirty years, serving the folk in these here apartment blocks. During this time I have really come to know these people. This couple got married, they had a cool wedding; those two had twins…” He tells us a story of his relationship with the people who live in these blocks, about how they have changed, how the suburb, the town, the country have changed.. Right? Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of human communication, and it’s important to develop it as a skill. Why? Because if you don’t do it, someone else will tell the story for you, and it may not be told in the way you would want it to. Or, if you don’t tell your story, you will forever tell the stories of others. Neither is a great option.
JK: For twenty five years you have told stories, listen to the stories of others, you’re always perfecting your ability to tell them. Don’t you think that, as technology develops, people talk somewhat more but what they say is less interesting?
RT: A lot of our spare time has been taken over by social media – Facebook, Twitter. Thanks to those everyone can tell his story but since the initial wave of enthusiasm has passed it has become apparent that, as everyone talks at the same time, it is hard to hear anything, it’s so noisy out there. Plus a lot of what gets shared is, to put it politely, not very important. I tend to get more and more selective about who I listen and talk to.
JK: How do we talk so others will listen?
RT: Just say who you are, what you’re doing, what interests you and what is important for you. Before each of our TEDxWarsaw conferences we offer training in the art of presentation to our speakers – scientists, business people, artists. Everyone has to fit their talk into the chosen time – six, twelve or eighteen minutes so they need to be succinct regardless of how important the idea they are trying to share. Our events, though free, are frequented by intelligent people who will not tolerate boring BS from the stage.
JK: Does software such as PowerPoint help or hinder the telling of stories?
RT: Depends. Generally speaking, if you are able to grab the audience’s attention without the help of a computer, you should do it.
JK: Has nothing changed since the times of the ancient shaman weaving stories in a cave?
RT: Nothing has changed in that there still are few people with a shaman’s skills. Masters of public speaking can stand in one spot, not even moving much, while their stories are powerful and engaging. But those are the exceptions. Most of the time we struggle with the exact opposite – we get presentations with fifty slides of tiny type, containing all the wisdom the speaker is planning to impart.
JK: Sure, presentations as if somehow designed to be read – your classic conference or meeting fodder. By the time the third slide has come up I’m eying up the coffee stand and by the fifth one I’m falling asleep.
RT: And little wonder. I really can’t understand why people make these presentations. The audience can read faster than the presenter can speak. Plus, if you throw a mass of text on the screen people will concentrate on that – so what you are saying suddenly becomes irrelevant. It’s a waste of time. Far better to just email the material to them. The other important thing is to pay attention not just to what you would like to say but also to who is listening. At our last conference in Warsaw we had several scientists who were talking about fascinating discoveries but the material was pretty complex. When I saw the presentation material I got very concerned – lots of definitions, scientific jargon, graphs that were far from clear. Stuff which, if projected as submitted, would have been understood by a tiny handful. After much to-ing and fro-ing the speakers allowed us to change the presentations. Text was reduced to key words, key words were illustrated by images – everything so as to enrich the talk itself, instead of somehow being a substitution for it. The effect? A standing ovation.
JK: The Polish have trouble with telling their stories?
RT: Not so much the stories themselves as with their telling in public. There is the Polish “don’t stick your head out” plus we have the self-negating – if such a word exists in Polish – as in “I don’t have anything to say”. While we’ve already established that everyone does.
JK: Even the milkman.
RT: Yes, him too.
Original article © Jacek Kowalski / Gazeta Wyborcza 2011
Visit the “Next” section of the paper on line at Next.Gazeta.pl
No doubt detailed technical write-ups will soon pop up in lots of places so instead I’d like to offer a broad brush kind of review of the Warsaw StartupWeekend – an event I had the good fortune to attend this last Sunday.
The short version: fully awesome.
The long version: without putting too fine a point in it, this event ranks towards the top of the list of initiatives desperately needed in this country.
Poland seems to have a drastic shortage of trust as basic social currency. This fact has manifested itself in many ways, the discussion of which has been going on in the press lately (finally) and may be subject for another post at another time, but what clearly applies to the nascent Polish startup ecosystem is that members of the younger generation are looking for ways to push past this unfortunate limitation. This is crucial to the long-term economic and social prospects of the country (though I am yet to see any member of the governing order so much as tacitly nodding with approval at the huge amount of effort being expended by these young people, and the leaders of this small community, in bringing about some changes to make life easier for entrepreneurs in Poland.)
It is a well-established fact that SMEs are the engine of a developed economy. They employ the most people, contribute the majority of the GDP and drive innvation. Polish SMEs, though more or less aligned with the rest of the EU in terms of sheer number per 1000 inhabitants, have a long way to go before they reach the same importance as their peers in Western Europe. But there is a bright note to sound here. Read the EU Commission fact sheet here and look at the “entrepreneurship” category. It is not entirely clear how the compiler of this fact sheet arrived at a definition of entrepreneurship but the conclusion is clear. Poland has a high level of pent-up entrepreneurial energy which is just waiting to be released, since even with the current business-unfriendly governance, ridiculous bureaucracy, patchy infrastructure and limited access to capital, Poland’s entrepreneurs are evidently “doing their thing” to a degree higher than their neighbours. Most likely that includes business activities which have nothing to do with the tech startup world but the fact remains.
So what’s required to release this pent-up energy and what has the highest potential for the most impact on the country’s economy and its prospects when the future is measured in decades and not quarters? It it a fairly obvious conclusion that fostering large numbers of entrepreneurially-minded young people is about the single activity most likely to result in positive results. The reason, in addition to all the well-known other reasons which do not require repetition, is that in the right environment young people will gladly and readily add the one ingredient frequently missing from Polish business life at large – that elusive trust mentioned at the beginning of the post.
At the Warsaw StartupWeekend this came across as the most important take-away of the event for me. With technical skills being axiomatic in a roomful of hackers and the need for coaching in design, general business, marketing and presentation skills being equally obvious (we’re talking about geeks in their 20′s!) what came through as the Big Shining Truth was that people who knew each other barely or not at all on Friday morning, could come together in functioning teams and accomplish an awful lot of work by Sunday night. I suspect this lesson will only dawn on some of them in time but it is a lesson worth remembering. “Just add water…”
(Pardon the ratty quality of the photo – taken with the webcam of my laptop. I was camera-less on the day – but that’s Zuza Stanska and Michal Paluchowski diligently driving the day’s live stream and Twitter interface over to the left, and the team from CityRace.me in the front. (They won rather a lot of prizes, BTW.)
For community photos go to Sharypic. For a full report on what happened go the most popular web blog in Poland Antyweb here (in Polish.)
You couldn’t call me a great lover of things military, with the exception of metaphors which, as a sub-set of that mode of expression, are unsurpassed in terms of brevity and to-the-pointness. Unfortunately that also means that they have been over-used in relation to that other rigorous and arduous effort, running a startup, but that is another story.
“Beachhead” is one of those – I cannot think of a better word which expresses all the complexities of reaching a risky destination and trying to build on the initial advance, complete with the innate vulnerabilities and opportunities it contains. In an almost instant reaction we see the gritty marines wading through the bloody surf, digging foxholes and securing a small patch of dirt under enemy fire, in preparation for the main landing force.
So it is with finding an Initial Market for a startup.
Often we fall into the trap of thinking that “the market” consists of “all the people who use an iPhone” or “males over 40″ or “gardeners”. Unfortunately, for most products in most cases, that is merely a good description of the Big Market, which will be impracticable in terms of immediate access and entirely impossible to plan for.
Why? So you’ve read that there are 4.7 bajillion iPhone users in East Asia, all of whom evidently, without a doubt, sure as eggs, need your Squeedget-o-Matic App? The problem is that this is not actually a number, it is a statistic (and Mark Twain knew a thing or two about statistics.) A number is “100,000″ or “1,000,000″. That is a number a normal person can understand. More importantly, that is a number you can plan for and execute for. “There are 1,000,000 iPhone users who wear green hats, and I can get to them by partnering with the green hat guy who will love me because I give him a cut on every Squeedget-o-Matic I sell.”
A Big Market is for later. What a startup needs right now is a Beachhead Market. Those are the precious early adopters Moore so eloquently talked about and yes, that too is an over-used and misunderstood term.
A Beachhead Market has, by definition, several very clearly defined qualities:
• it is a piece of dirt either a bloody long way from anywhere (read: damn expensive to reach) or closely guarded by the enemy (established competitors), and often both;
• it takes all the ingenuity, surprise and tactics at one’s disposal to reach and hold it and the price is always high;
• the first platoon to get there will invariably have limited resources, or no resources at all if their kit gets dunked on the way to the shore.
With stubborn determination it is usually possible to land that initial platoon on the beach. Keeping them there without losing every man and having to start again is another matter. That requires a sort of elegant split-personality multitasking action of simultaneous long range planning and ability to turn on a penny if need be.
Just like writing a business plan which is dumped the minute the first feedback comes in or when a large, or at least well-funded, (read: better funded than you) competitor enters the space.
Nothing is more important in a startup that locating the RIGHT beachhead (the way to reach the early adopters) and figuring out how to hold it (engage the first few thousand users or first couple of hundred customers) until the reinforcements arrive (someone decides to invest in your company or it starts to draw revenue, or both.)
For the purpose of discussion may I suggest a simple but very precise way of defining a Beachhead Market which we have used at Pixengo. If you insert your own tightly defined terms in the brackets, you’ll be on the way to building a business plan that makes sense to strangers, and not just you.
Our Beachhead Market is (a group of people / a small set of organisations) who (precise description of their business or activity : what they do, when and how), all of whom need (solution or product which will clearly benefit them) in order to (save money, make more money, keep existing customers and/or get more customers – there are no other prioroties in business). Their main problems are (sliding market share / increasing costs / shrinking margin) and we understand that they would prefer not to spend any money finding solutions for those problems.
These people / organisations are located in (be as precise as you can), draw their customers or users from (have a really good idea of this) and congregate around (the campfires / the LinkedIn groups / the meetups) which we can access easily and at little or no cost to us because (we are members / we know people / we are willing to work 18-hour days).
We will find them and demonstrate to them that we are able to provide (A REALLY GOOD solution) which deals with at least some of their main problems (sliding market share / increasing costs / shrinking margin – see above.)
These people or organisations are worth this massive brain effort and emotional energy because they are a part of (a much larger Big Market – define it) which we will then be able to attack using the credibility gained and lessons learned from gaining and securing the beachhead market. And by the way, we already have a good idea of what we will do once we have planted the flag on that hill!
To find them and start conversations which may lead to (their buying our product / using our service) we need to begin communications like this (be very precise), we need to say this (be very very precise) and we will not stop until we have (x) customers or (y) users – or whatever metric works. (The metric is not an abstraction. Reach not for the stars but for the table you can sit at. If you’re a two-man startup, trying to get General Motors’ business is probably a faintly ridiculous proposition. Aim for what you can feasibly achieve and, once you’ve got there, service with excellence. Always under-promise and over-deliver.)
In order to do all this we need the following (technology, communications, creative services – be very precise; “design a website” is not precise) which we will find here (make a list; lists are good) and implement in the following order (insert, with a degree of precision.)
Notice one word which comes up again and again? Precision. As much as it seems either impossible or a total waste of time to try and figure out precisely the details of something which exists mostly in your head or on a few sheets of paper, it is vital to do so, and to keep doing so until they all fall into place. My partners and I used to say “how the hell would they write a business plan for Twitter at the very beginning.” (They probably didn’t but that is not even the point.) We don’t say that any more, for two reasons. One, Twitter and a couple of other similar companies are classic Black Swans – right place, right time, unlikely to be repeated, essentially irrelevant in terms of planning the execution of A Normal Startup. Two, and more importantly, look at how hard it has been for them to figure out ways of making money without alienating their user base. Somehow, relying on creating “the next Twitter” is a strategy, a hoping and praying game destined to end up with the platoon being slaughtered long before any reinforcements arrive. They probably never will – investors like to see how you’re going to give them a decent shot at planting the flag on the hill (read: ROI.)
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