The next step in your Peer Learning Framework journey is Show & Tell. There are pain points in your organization. And there are people who can share best practices that would help others. These people are your heroes.
They want to share their expertise but may not know how. Help them.
Here’s the gist of the process:
- Start with the story line
- Add key ideas to support it
- Build and test the one-pager
- Build out the content
- Get feedback
Let’s double-click on each step below.
A powerful presentation has a story line. This is the promise of the talk. What should the audience walk away with? What is the underlying message? This is the “present” in the presentation.
The promise of your talk becomes its backbone. It is the path for your audience journey. Next, you need to fill in the ideas. These are key places along the way. They should be clear, memorable, interesting.
Test your idea before building the entire course. Create the one-pager outlining what is that you want to communicate and who should care. Include the bullet point outline. Then run this one-pager with the potential audience. Ask them if they’d show up to see the talk. Testing it is cheaper than developing the entire thing first.
Build out the course content. It must take the audience on the journey hitting every key idea along the way. Think beyond slides. Sometimes a code example or a simulation delivers the message in a more memorable way. People prefer doing stuff over being lectured. Make it fun for them.
Run a canary class. Try it out on your friendlies. Get feedback. You’ll learn a ton from bouncing your presentation from a real audience. Incorporate the changes and you should be good to go Prime Time.
This is a 30,000 foot view of how to present. Luckily, Dan Roam wrote the fabulous book Show & Tell. He also runs Napkin Academy to help educate experts on educational skills. Nancy Duarte’s resonate and slide:ology are classics. Sunni Brown is the master doodler and author of The Doodle Revolution. And Garr Reynolds will help you make your slides stand out in Presentation Zen.
Build out your presentation Aikido library and share it with your experts. Enable them to make others better.
This is a part of Peer Learning Framework. Next up, see how to Promote your events.
