🎤🎬 How to Speak

A professor's yearly lecture to his own university on how to give a talk, recorded near the end of his life and put online in 2019. An hour, chalk, no slides until he needs to show what is wrong with slides. I started it on Saturday 4 October, the evening of Noor's farewell, with a speech already behind me that day and a panel in Hamburg four days ahead. Finished it on Sunday and rewrote 📝 Panel notes - Exceptions as a product surface the same afternoon.

His opening claim is that how well you speak and write decides more of what happens to your ideas than their quality does. I would like that to be false.

What I kept for the panel

• Do not open with a joke. The room is still settling. Open by saying what they will know at the end that they do not know now.
• Say the main thing three times, because at any moment a fifth of the room is somewhere else.
• Build a fence round the idea: say what it is not, so nobody files it under something they already know.
• Mark the joints out loud. That was the first story. Here is the second.
• Ask a question and wait. Longer than is comfortable.
• An idea is remembered if it has a few handles: something to picture, a short phrase, a surprise, one idea that sticks out, and a story of how it was done.
• End on what you contributed, on the screen, while people ask questions. Not on a slide that says thank you.

What does not apply: half of it is about boards, props and the right room at the right hour. A panel has four chairs and a moderator. I had ninety seconds at a time.

For ♦️ Speaking to a room. The trip is ✈️ Hamburg for the Freight Tech Forum.

Panel Prep

• Cut the opening anecdote. First sentence is the promise: by the end you will see your exception list as a product
• One phrase to repeat three times: an exception is the process talking
• Fence: this is not about alerting, and not about dashboards
• Three stories on three index cards, each with its number
• A closing sentence that is a contribution and not a thank you
• Say it all aloud once, standing, to Jonas

Finished: 5 October

Concepts & Permanent Notes: 🎫 Freight Tech Forum panel · ♦️ Running a workshop · 💎 An exception is information about the process and not a nuisance in it