Will it make the boat go faster? – that’s the question posed by Ben Hunt-Davies – have a look here. The point of Ben’s story is that once they’d decided on what they wanted to do, the team simply asked themselves this question over and over and over…
If the answer was ‘yes’ they did it. If ‘no’ they didn’t.
The same goes for your presentation or your report. Once you’ve figured out exactly what you want to do – your Twitter Test – you ask yourself the same sort of question about everything. It’s a simple trick but remarkably effective…
| Issue | Will it make the boat go faster? | What should you do? |
| Changing the ways the chairs are set up |
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| Making the font bigger |
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| Lights off? |
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| Shared handouts?
One each? |
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| What else can you
think of? |
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Here’s a little exercise we play with our own material… for each slide or paragraph in a report we simply take moment to look at it and ask “What would make this slide more likely to ‘achieve its target tweet’? In other words, what would make the boat go faster? It’s not hard, but you’d be surprised by how effective it is.
Simply having the self-discipline to ask the question is the hard part!
Reflecting in Glory (or not!)
A related tool, which we use after a presentation in particular (but the idea applies to reports too) is some Reflective Practice. This is simply the formal name for looking back on how things went, in a structured way. The aim is to get an objective feel for both how well it went and – more importantly – how it could be improved. This very short audio talks you through how we do it using a very simple methodology
The Rolfe Methodology isn’t the most thorough or comprehensive tool for Reflective Practice, but it has the key advantage of being pretty effective while at the same time being simple enough for us to use it easily.
So the question is, once you’ve delivered your report or your presentation, when are you going to do your Reflective Practice?