I was thinking about the way we might want to innovate following yesterday’s post so spent some time brainstorming.

I’ve mentioned before how much I am a fan of Alf Rehn and his creative approach to move beyond conventional techniques and explore more provocative, unconventional ways of thinking. I took up a topic that pretty much everyone in #learning knows – presenting and public speaking – and instead of designing a course, tried to pick out the topics which people would want to know:

• Understanding the audience
• Structuring a presentation
• Body language and voice modulation
• Storytelling techniques
• Difficult questions and challenging audiences
• Visual aids
• Different channel delivery
• Building confidence

Is there anything that’s missing? Let me know in the comments.

If this is the ask, then the answer won’t be a course but a series of different opportunities, scaffolded activity, and opportunities to practice. Here’s the list I came up with:

• Practice sessions – small group sessions rotating roles between audience and presenter
• Wheel of Fortune – random wheel where industry/sector/function topics are chosen at random for outline and approach
• Anonymous Feedback – anyone who has seen a training presentation can give anonymous feedback and score out of 100
• Videoed practice – attendees record 5 minute virtual sessions which are previous cohort assessed out of 100
• Best in show – show a short video of a brilliant presentation and ask people to identify why and how it is so good.
• AMA video meetings – organisational ‘best’ presenters can answer any queries
• Masterclasses – external presenters produce a 15 minute session and answer 30 mins of questions
• Audio presentations – record presenters in audio only to understand how they’re presenting with no visual aids
• Presentation Roulette – presenters have to exclude one of visuals, audio, questions, formal content, etc from their presentation and redesign and redeliver
• Devil’s Advocate – arguing for uncomfortable statistics
• Win of the week – presenter cohorts from previous weeks showcase their biggest successes
• Co-design a diplomatic defence toolkit – users can add to with techniques they use to manage difficult situations

It’s still learning but not the formal contrived approaches we’ve tried in the past. Would you be happy to learn this way? What’s missing?