After my first time as a speaker last year, my objective for my talk 'We Love Change? Change Is Scary!' was to improve my storytelling skills, stage presence and confidence. After the early feedback session for EuroIA, I was keen on getting myself in front of an audience for my dry-runs. To make the most of the time colleagues and friends spent listening to me, I introduced feedback cards.
Your feedback is my learning. Thanks, people!
Facilitation makes feedback more valuable. Inspired by agile retrospectives, the feedback cards have a plus and a delta column. When preparing for the talk, I asked the audience to capture what their take-aways and what I did well, and what could be improved. Handing out the same cards at the IA Summit itself allowed me to go back and check if I managed to improve on issues that came up in the dry-runs. I'm happy to say, I did! The story seemed to work, and I felt more confident on stage (even improvising a little song and dance). I've uploaded not only the presentation, but a slidecast of my session. The audio is one I recorded for practice (I listen to and occasionally also watch myself), and not the live session - so worth checking out the podcast when it comes out.
Resources
If you want to find out more about change management, here's a resource collection from Harvard Business Review. HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change is a collection of articles, eg by John P.Kotter. If you like a short overview as an ebook, Managing Change and Transition (Harvard Business Essentials) is a quick and easy read.
The philosopher I mentioned is Eric Hoffer, who wrote The Ordeal of Change, which discusses change in the context of society.
There are several versions and adaptations for Virgina Satir's change model. I relied on online resources like this article or this one, and a family trained in therapy. If you want to learn more, Virginia Satir has written several books on family therapy, change and communication.
Feedback cards allow people to share further resources, ideas and questions with me.
A book that got mentioned is 'Managing Transitions' by William Bridges.
Carolyn Snyder (@csnyder) wrote that she'd like to understand more about the 'transforming idea' part of Satir's change model. How to help people to get to this stage, what does occur in a person's mind and feelings? I will chase my family for more on this, but someone else mentioned the Kubler-Ross stages of grief on their card: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. As change involves grief, this could be worth looking into to find out more.
So, what do I want to do better next time?
I need to speak slower, check the quality of the projectors at the venue, and include a slide with references and resources. It would have been good to present the experience architecture and value map with a fictitious case study, and to show photos of the tools in action (meeting room set-up). I will continue to collect examples, and read some of the recommended literature, to add new material in case I give an updated version of this talk some time.
If you have feedback for me, please post it as a comment.