Clayton Christensen published an article in the HBR in the middle of last year.  I missed it at the time and only just came across it.  While the article itself is interesting, I found the opening story to be fascinating:

Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then the chairman of Intel. He had read one of my early papers about disruptive technology, and he asked if I could talk to his direct reports and explain my research and what it implied for Intel. Excited, I flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the appointed time, only to have Grove say, “Look, stuff has happened. We have only 10 minutes for you. Tell us what your model of disruption means for Intel.” I said that I couldn’t—that I needed a full 30 minutes to explain the model, because only with it as context would any comments about Intel make sense. Ten minutes into my explanation, Grove interrupted: “Look, I’ve got your model. Just tell us what it means for Intel.”

I insisted that I needed 10 more minutes to describe how the process of disruption had worked its way through a very different industry, steel, so that he and his team could understand how disruption worked. I told the story of how Nucor and other steel minimills had begun by attacking the lowest end of the market—steel reinforcing bars, or rebar—and later moved up toward the high end, undercutting the traditional steel mills.

When I finished the minimill story, Grove said, “OK, I get it. What it means for Intel is…,” and then went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy for going to the bottom of the market to launch the Celeron processor.

I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.

That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.

I find this fascinating because in good workshops you don’t tell someone the answer, but you frame the content up in such a way that leads them to discover it themselves.

Secondly this is fascinating because Clayton tells a personal story in order to get his message across.  He could have told this story in dry prose, but by making it real the message not only gets across, it gets remembered.

In my book Really Bad Workshops (and how to avoid them) I talk about these things (among others), and how important they are.  Never underestimate the power of people making their own connections, nor the power of narrative.

via How Will You Measure Your Life? – Harvard Business Review.

Recently I’ve been invited to a number of events, and made some observations that are relevant to my book Really Bad Workshops (and how to avoid them).

Firstly when organising a workshop, make sure that you spend some time coaching your speakers to ensure that their messages are in line with audience expectations.  If you’ve pitched a speaker to an audience the last thing you want is them turning up presenting something that they used last week on an entirely different audience.

If you get the chance, review speaker presentations and offer to help tune them.   Top of the list for review should be graphs and charts.  There is no surer way of curing insomnia than cramming charts full of extraneous information such as the reference for the data sources, ten trend lines and twenty data points over 25 years. In contrast if you concentrate on the key information on the chart the message is much stronger.

Speakers should not be given an hour to fill – a presentation or talk is far punchier if you leave the audience wanting for more, rather than shifting their weight uncomfortably hoping for the presenter to finish.  I usually ask presenters to go for twenty minutes.  If they are good they will stick to their time – if they’re not so good they still have ten extra minutes before the audience attention span starts to waiver.

Finally, never ever have your attendees sit in the same seats for two and half days.  Shake things up and get them to break out, go on field trips or even have lunch in another location a short walk away.

Got the fever to create an awesome workshop and want to blow the socks of your audience with your presentations? I mentioned some resources in the book and here’s two more places to look:

1. Presentation Zen – there’s both a blog and a book.

Blog : http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/

Book : http://tinyurl.com/2mbm26 (on Amazon)

2. Duarte – This is the team behind some very slick presentations that you might have seen some of their work running alongside some of the TED conference speakers. There’s both a blog and, well, you get the idea…

Blog: http://blog.duarte.com

Book : http://tinyurl.com/6zv3gs (also from Amazon)

Some years ago I was given a copy of a wonderful e-book by Seth Godin called “Really Bad PowerPoint (and how to avoid it)”. At the time I was working for a large corporation in London and subjected to weekly doses of death by PowerPoint. This little book was an eye opener as it addressed a very specific corporate sin – bad communication.

It was small, digestible and contained many pearls of wisdom that guided me in my presentation style. In essence it helped me put the power back in PowerPoint.

A few years – and a few organisations later – I began to reflect on another corporate sin: the bad workshop.  If you’ve experienced bad PowerPoint then it’s likely that you have also experienced a bad workshop.  The difference is that while a bad presentation might last for minutes (if you’re lucky), a bad workshop can drag on for hours (if you’re lucky).

However it’s not hard to create better workshops, and so I put virtual pen to virtual paper and wrote a eBook.  To be more precise I’ve written the shortest eBook (18 pages) with the longest title (24 words): Really Bad Workshops (and how to avoid them). Ten Tips to Make Workshops Work. By Roger Dennis (with acknowledgement to Seth Godin). It’s based on my experience running corporate workshops around the world for both the public and private sector.

If you use Twitter it’s virtually free and you can pay with a tweet for the book.  If you don’t use Twitter, it’s still virtually free.

You can download it here.