I'm reading a book at the moment by John Medina called Brain Rules. I encourage everyone to pick up a copy and have a read as it contains some fascinating facts about the brain, and things you can do to improve the use of your brain. Medina has a great style of writing which keeps you interested in the topic, and he also has a dry sense of humour which has caused me some embarrassment on the train while laughing out loud.
There is lots of information about the book at www.brainrules.net, and a simple youtube search for "John Medina" will find you hours of recorded lectures which are delivered in a manner similar to his writing style.
This morning I was reading a chapter in the book about attention span in presentation / class room / learning environments and a startling fact came to light. On average, where the subject matter is not too boring, not too exciting, people usually lose interest after 10 minutes.
This one fact got my mind racing back to all the presentations that I have given in the past. Demonstrations of software that have lasted 2 hours. The 40 odd training courses I've presented which have taken up a full day. It shocked me to think that all of the people I was presenting to had started to tune out of what I was saying not long after I'd instructed them on where the toilets are, and what we're having for lunch.
I was stunned by this thought. I've always strived to be a good public speaker. Whenever I'm speaking to an audience, I diligently prepare my material so that all the facts are covered. Each presentation has an agenda to follow which achieves a certain objective.
I've been approaching it all wrong......
It's that old communication conundrum. I've created the message. I've delivered it. There are people in the room so I'm pretty sure that it's been received. But I haven't ensured that the message was understood. It may seem a little dramatic, but I've now drawn a line through every presentation I've ever given as being completely in-effective.
My job as a project manager calls for me to present to people all the time. Customers. Managers. Team Members. I need a new approach.
Enter John Medina and his book.
John talks about how he decided to break up all the university lectures he was giving in to 10 minute blocks. Each block would have cover a broad topic which he would define in the first minute, then add detail to explain the concept in the remaining 9 minutes.
The challenge is at 9 mins and 59 seconds to move to topic 2 without losing the interest of your delegate. John talks about hooks. Bait to keep people interested in the next 10 minutes. John says that hooks should:
- trigger some emotion with your audience
- be relevant to the objective of your presentation
- provide a smooth transition between the topics
As John Medina is a teacher, he talks about lectures of 50 mins in length. Therefore you'd expect to have 5 blocks of 10 mins in a lecture, and 4 hooks. Interestingly John has found that once he's deployed 2 or 3 hooks in a session, no more are required. He manages to keep everyone's attention.
What can the Project Manager learn from this?
Like many professions, project managers are constantly on a stage in front of people. Most of the time, we need to be on that stage for longer than 10 minutes. We now know that we're most likely going to lose the attention of our audience after 10 mins.
To effectively get our message across and achieve our objectives, we need to maintain the attention span of our audience.
This 10 minute concept is new to me so I'm going to start experimenting. For each presentation that I do from now on, rather than devise my own agenda which I think will achieve my objectives, I'm going to break my show up in to 10 minute blocks. Each block will have a broad topic which I'll describe in more detail right up to 9 mins and 59 seconds. At this point I'll have defined a hook to move in to the next 10 mins.
I'll let you know how I go.
