Stu Downes

I’ve recently finished reading Speaking PowerPoint by Bruce Gabrielle which I would recommend to anyone who needs to present information in order to reach a decision or build trust. The book is the first presentation book I’ve read that deals with the full range of presentation styles (reading decks, business decks, conference decks) and helps you understand how to formulate your arguments into a cohesive message that looks superb.

In a great easy to read format, spoiled only by the lack of colour, the book helps on how to build a story based on the evidence you have, how to present the story and then on the slides themselves includes excellent guidance and recommendations for using the correct style of title, the correct layout, the right amount of text, the appropriate use of colour and all of this without creating “powerpoint shock”.

The book incorporates many real world examples of how presentations and presentation slides could be improved. The book also reminds us why it is so important given that even back 2,300 years Aristotle recognized that decisions were made based on logic and emotion. This book certainly has helped me present information more logically and use the look and feel of a presentation to win the emotions too.

I’d recommend you purchase the book. If you do I’d recommend you print the colour images before reading.

Other links:

speakingppt.com

LinkedIn Group

YouTube Videos

 

please let me know whether you like or dislike it.  I’m not sure it will survive the week at the moment.

 

We all live in a world where managing information is key.  If I look back 20 years I got most information from books and libraries, research involved paper and general announcements and news came through in trade magazines.  Its an area that has been completely turned on its head, and continues to change.  I thought I’d spend a few minutes jotting down how most information arrives at my door and what I do with it.

• Email: is generally where colleagues suggest information, partners email me and general update newsletters arrive with links.  These either generate a file or a URL.  Files if I class as personal knowledge are off into Evernote and corporate knowledge off to the appropriate repository.
• Web pages: either arrived in an email, via twitter, within RSS feeds or from direct searches.  Most web pages get read and ignored.  Some get read and instantly stored to Evernote or Instapaper (Evernote when I know its needed for good and Instapaper when I need to read later or take time to digest).
• RSS: is still a great source, and like twitter tends to be where I keep up with industry news and announcements.  What I love about Google Reader and Instapaper is there is a clever tool that takes all starred items and automatically posts them to Instapaper.
• Instapaper: is absolutely excellent.  It allows me to read on a number of platforms at a time that suits me.  The new features to have friends and share favourites is excellent.  It means I get wisdom from people much cleverer than I.  The other feature I love is all my favourites flow automatically into Evernote.
• Evernote: is ultimately my resting place for content and knowledge.  I know when its there its indexed and searchable, its available on numerous devices and from the internet.  I know wherever I am I‘ll be able to find information when needed.

It’s a far cry from the first job when I graduated where very little information was available online and most was available at the laboratory’s library.  Now I have better knowledge management and retrieval tools available to me than I could ever dream of from any enterprise.  I capture knowledge from new alerts, friends, industry experts and use the wisdom of others selecting the best information for me to consume.  I wonder how my children will laugh at these primitive tools in another 20 years time!

 

I’ve had some time recently to catch up on a number of TED talks.  Rachel Bostman spoke in Sydney on 2010 on the subject of Collaborative Consumption.  The main themes of the talk were society moving to a point of utilising technology to highlight reputation, and trusting that reputation in transactions which are moving from ebay and swapsites through to lending money or sharing expensive resources such as land or cars.

One graphic that stood out during the talk was this visualization from Jason Tester proposing a reputation statement account, and he first created this back in 2004.

Image Rights Creative Commons (Jason Tester) (Source)

There are some interesting points of reflection in 2011 which make me believe we finally have the critical mass to start to see reputation based models moving into employment models.  Those are:

• We are increasingly trusting of reputations to allow us to make purchases, its only natural that this will progress to skills and services.
• LinkedIn is now over 100 million people strong, this means that we all find peers and opportunities from this community than we do from our much smaller social circle or enterprise communities.
• We increasingly are working as specialists in the long tail and the likelihood is that within the tail is where we will find peer support, opportunities and employment in the future.

The question is when?  Employment contracts today aren’t ready for the change, simple financial tools such as credit rating tools aren’t ready for the change.  It seems that we need to see the shift that society is making in trusting reputations to be repeated by institutions.

With that comes cautions too.  How easy would it be for our reputation to be damaged maliciously etc..  Its an exciting new world we are moving towards but its also just a little bit scary too.

 

@grahamchastney today blogged:

I’ve spent a good deal of my time over the last few days ‘crafting slides’.

This particular activity hasn’t changed a great deal in the last 15 years.

All sorts of progress and development in the collaboration arena has taken place over that time.

So why no change?

Why do we still need to transact over a set of information in a meeting?

I’m going to answer how I see the world of crafting slides.  I think its more about what has changed to support us craft the story and how that has changed:

Excuse my clunky diagram but this is one way I actually tell the story with customers once crafted, I find slides just too constraining to complete the needs of most meetings.

Starting on the left the way we store knowledge has changed dramatically which then feeds our research.  Evernote and Instapaper are both important tools for me today to supplement what I can hold in my head, files and email have been there all the time, search is still a challenge but is better in these personal knowledge tools.  When I supplement my research with that from peers this is now increasingly feeding from tools such as linkedin or twitter – which in many cases link back to blogs from experts.

I also would argue that the crafting of slides has changed.  The thing I use is still called PowerPoint but my use of it is much more visually compelling than anything I created 15 years age.

What I don’t see enough of in meetings is switching between presentation tools and switching to an input rather than output mode.  I love to use whiteboards, or in my case the tablet PC, and mindmaps in meetings. 

To answer Graham’s exam question the purpose of a meeting for me is still to transact over some information and then come out with an agreed direction or next step.

 

In the UK we are getting older as a population, information overload is common, and we need to transfer knowledge.  Over the past few weeks I’ve read a few articles which discuss the shortfalls in both professional education and identify needs in workplace professional development.

Craig Roth discussed MBA courses and the use of simulations to help candidates understand the need to filter data with dashboards and KPI’s and extended the thought processes to take a view on information management:

I’m not just joking about how screwed up the average corporation is.  These difficulties exist in even the best of organizations, making attention management an essential discipline if one desires to be an effective information worker and good managerial decision maker.

I’d extend Craig’s concerns into schooling at secondary level and above.  My first point is we just don’t train our young people to filter and focus on priorities – I’m not saying its easy as I struggle with this every day.  However we aren’t even arming them with the mental skills to prioritise their schoolwork, study, research or plan effectively. 

When our young folk enter the enterprise and become knowledge workers we have excellent graduate schemes which offer training, but these may not be enough.  Dave Snowden recently blogged about the apprenticeship and the lack of a similar model for management:

Maybe its time we stopped treating management as something that can be taught and then practiced, and instead focus on creating a professional model of management education which is based on praxis. Of course that would mean HR giving up their cult like toys; competence models, assessment centers, psychometric tests and the like. It would mean KM people starting to create long term projects rather than information management with a candy coating of communities of practice. Physical presence can be augmented by virtual connectivity but it can never be fully replaced. Above all we should be authentic to humans as humans, and to the social ecology of their interaction. We are not cogs in machine, we cannot be engineered, but out evolution can be stifled by inauthentic attempts to make it so.

We can see that we have a problem over the horizon in many countries, including the UK.  We aren’t getting younger, we’re all getting older.  This will put increased pressure on organizations to transfer knowledge to fewer people.  Information overload will get worse, especially for the younger worker.  Prioritising will become more important.

The statistics from the UK Office of National Statistics show that as soon as 2018 we could see more people over 40 working than under 40, that assumes 300,000 people of pensionable age continue to work.  The column label is missing but that’s millions of people.

The beauty of demographics is they aren’t the same in all areas of the world, but the headlines for the UK are:

• population rising
• we are living longer
• there will be less workers under 40 compared to those over 40
• if people work beyond the pensionable age then everything changes (and they will, I probably will!)
• older knowledge workers are more likely to want to work part time – that then makes knowledge transfer and priority setting for those that remain more important

One thing I’ve not dealt with well here is whether globalization will solve the problem.  Will we truly get to the point that global teams drawing on skills from areas with younger populations will fill the demographic gap in the UK ….. that’s a bit heavy for an already long post so I’ll mull over that one with you over a virtual pint.

 

Healey Nab Promo Video from TartyBikes on Vimeo.

This year after about a year or more of not doing too much I got out a bit more and one night with @robblythe discovered a new set of trails round healey nab (about 20 minutes cycling from my door).  I’ve learned over at I Dig Healey Nab that much of the work was the brainchild of committed enthusiasts who secured funding, the pain of planners, and toiled for many a free time.  So thank you!!!  Your work has got me hooked again and for that I thank you all.  For friends reading this take a look at the video, this is one of the things which makes keeping fit fun, I’m not brave enough for the black run – the bits of the video before the scenes of them building the track.  I am a firm lover of the red route which is shown after the chaps building it.  So big thanks, spot on!

 

About time I shared my experience of the form factor I believe will be game-changing in the way all our tech is designed.  So purchase was a wi-fi only 64G iPad, couldn’t justify 3G version when mi-fi’s are the price they are.  So thoughts:

Screen:  excellent resolution.  OK in bright light, though hard to read in bright direct sunlight due to reflections.  Screen gets awful dirty so a micro-fibre cloth is essential.

Case: essential.  I didn’t go for the apple case but instead got this one which I’m happy with.  It has a stand for raising the screen enough to watch videos while it rests on a surface and sits low enough to rest on a table for typing.  When working on your knee the case also works well as I find the ipad too heavy to hold up like a book for reading for long periods.

Battery life: excellent – I’m looking forward to travelling just with it (to date I’ve needed my laptop too).

Size: smaller than the power packs from a couple of vendor folk’s high end laptop power packs

Weight: is ok but you wouldn’t hold it unaided for long like a small book.

Sound: excellent, I’m not too much of a music snob so the speakers are great for games and music and videos.  I just use normal headphones and they work fine too.

Video: great.  youtube good (though I need better bandwidth at home – come on BT!).  Other videos good too.

Wifi: I’ve had some trouble initially with this at home and had to disable 802.11n on my BT Home Hub (I hear the howls or derision already!).  Haven’t been brave enough to re-enable n yet.

Keyboard:  Fine but in meetings you need a case which allows it to stand at a shallow angle.

Touch screen: good for navigation and using sketch packages to show ideas.  Forget writing with it, this is no tablet PC device (that is one thing that lets the device down for me but as I have a tablet I’m not too concerned).

Drawing / writing:  I bought penultimate but found that without a stylus it doesn’t meet my needs for meeting note taking.  Even with a stylus all the videos I have watched lead me to believe that for note taking the experience just won’t be enough – so I use the keyboard for note taking. 

For sketching concepts I just use Adobe Ideas which is great and free. 

Reading from the web: the towering strength of the device.  I not use the ipad as the primary aggregator for reading RSS (NetNewsWire), twitter (Osfoora) and I now employ a lot of “read later” activities from pc, smartphone and ipad with Instapaper.  Email reading experience is good.

Meeting Notes and Reference: Evernote remains my tool of choice for capturing information on the PC and having this accessible on the iPad.  I’ve also found this is the tool of choice for meeting note taking (keyboard input).  I’m going to do another post on reading and the applications and my use of them.

Games: are great.  I love Real Racing HD which is excellent.

I have found that you’ll spend much more with the iPad on apps than you do with an iPod or iPhone.

 

Tongue in cheek obviously but if you do fancy some mountain biking in the Chorley area of Lancashire then come try our the newly completed Healey Nab route for fun (although don’t tell my thumb that which is still recovering from an unplanned dismount 3 weeks ago – although x-ray says no break).  Yeah yeah I know not very end user service but loads of fun!  Oh and the title of the post, well the second victim was one of my bosses cycling helmet!  Good job he was wearing one as it saved any serious harm.

 

I can’t believe how easy it was to upgrade to 3.0. In fact I was left thinking I hadn’t done something. Congrats to all the developers out there. Awesome!