Ties and Flies

Ties and Flies is a bad joke in my company. It’s a self indulgence too and you’ll see why when I explain it. The examples I’ve given below are for presentations but the principle applies to many business settings, such as meetings etc.

The solution is painfully simple – so simple, in fact, that some people don’t want to try it because they can’t believe it works. The solution is to write a checklist of all the things that need to be checked in the form of a tick-box list. Write it before the presentation, when you’ve got time and space to think clearly. Write it on something like Evernote, so that whenever something new occurs to you, you can add it to the list.

Don’t forget to add things to the list everytime you make a presentation and find something that wasn’t on the list… do that particularly if it’s something that’s gone wrong! The image shows a very simple example, created in only ten minutes but with even only that level of preparation it proved its worth the third time we used it!

Before you begin your presentation simply go down the list, ticking it off. By the time you start to make your presentation you’re as sure as you can be that everything which could go wrong won’t – because you’ve checked it.

Don’t worry if your list looks very different – it should! That’s simply because you’re writing your list for your presentations, not ours.