Ringing Bells

This is taken from my recent speech at a Toastmaster's meeting.

Welcome. Thank you Toastmaster, fellow toastmasters, and honored guests. I’m pleased to present to you today.

I have a question for you to ponder - How many times have you facilitated a workshop or made a presentation– and at the end, despite all your preparation and practice, things don’t go according to plan and you wonder what went wrong?

I found myself asking this question after our recent workshop.

Here's the story --

Recently, Eric and I presented our workshop at the Greater Cincinnati Chapter of the American Society of Training and Development’s Fall Conference. It did not go as well as we had hoped or planned.

When we applied and were accepted to be one of 9 workshop presenters – I was excited for the opportunity to present our workshop, Powerful Complaining – Revealing Your Immunity to Change” – My hope was we would do a wonderful job, everyone would want to attend our workshop, and that after the workshop we would be overwhelmed with offers to come present the workshop for their company or coach them individually.

Warning Bell #1 – the first indicator of trouble (and one of many we ignored) we were told we had 75 minutes for our workshop. Wow! How to reduce a workshop that should be at least 3 ½ hours (210 minutes) into 75 minutes, but we knew we could do it.

Warning Bell #2 - our practice workshop that ran 105 minutes. Looking at that realized that we needed to cut 30 minutes was a little troubling. But, we thought if we just reduced the amount of time we gave for each small group activity, and harvesting feedback, we could get it under 75 minutes. Not perfect, but it would work.

Warning Bell #3 – my anxiety began to increase when a few days before the event the organizers notified us that the last 5 minutes of our time would be used by participants to evaluate our presentation with electronic response cards. And also a reminder they would be introducing us – another few minutes chopped off of our valuable time.

What had seemed like marginally doable at 75 minutes – now began to seem impossible.

However, still living in denial, we moved ahead with our plan in tact thinking we would shave off a minute here and there and it would be alright.

Warning Bell #4 - The night before our workshop Eric and I attended the Organizational Development Networks’ monthly meeting. We watched an experienced presenter take us through her workshop in 75 minutes. I was exhausted by how fast it moved and how much information was packed into that 75 minutes AND I realized also that she had a full 75 minutes.

Did all these ringing bells trigger me suggest to Eric, we rethink our presentation?

NO!

Would there have been time to redesign the presentation – maybe.

You may be wondering what happened the day of the conference?

Reality – the person before us ran late and cut into our time. People were late arriving in the room.

Our time which was to start at 2:45 began at 2:55 and had to end at 3:55 – we eliminated some of the experiential aspects of the workshop. As we neared the end of our time and only had 15 minutes left - we delivered the remaining content to them without any small group activity.

We delivered this content and ran over by about 2 minutes.

The good news was that somehow within these time constraints, people got it. People came up to us afterwards and asked good questions. One person said she was going to recommend to her company that they hire us to present the workshop to them.

What were are learnings?

1. The big learning for us: in the future when we are asked to present a workshop in such a short time frame to think outside the box and not be married to “what we want to do” vs. what we can do.

2. And if the bells start ringing, stop what we are doing and re-examine our plans.