Curiosity Might Have Killed the Cat....

But it is without doubt one of the most important states that you can create in your audience before any sort of training, meeting, presentation or event.

How do you create curiosity?
I'll tell you in my next post............

Dare you go Handout-free?

I have been pondering the issue of handouts of late. Handouts are something that many people ask about - what do you handout, and when do you hand it out (at the start, or at the end?)

I worry about the folders of training courses that just gather dust on shelves, never to be opened again. It seems almost criminal to be printing full colour pages that use the world's valuable resources if they are not going to be used.

Have we created an expectation that handouts MUST be provided?
Have we taught our learners to want and expect handouts - so they have something to doodle on or flick ahead to see what is coming?

What if we dispensed with handouts all together?
What if we relied up powerful presentation from the person at the front?
What if we spent much more time helping people understand the story or flow to the information - going back to our aural tradition?

I am on a mission to wean us all (trainers and attendees alike) off handouts, wherever possible. Let us save the trees for something more important that looking good on shelves before being finally recycled years later.

Save yourself hours of preparation too.
So who is with me - are you ready to go handout-free?

Humour in Creating Groups

One way to lighten the mood, open people's minds and de-stress people during presentations and workshops is by using humour.

There are very gentle, subtle ways of encouraging a playful or light-hearted attitude during your workshop that don't rely on telling jokes or things outside your natural personality.

It is an essential element of learning that everyone gets a chance to apply new knowledge or practise new skills. As they say "you don't learn to ride a bike by reading a manual."

When using interactive exercises, you will need to create pairs, or small groups for these interactive elements, and in doing that you easily add humour. Here are some suggestions for creating groups:

1) Using sweets - especially retro ones that cause a stir and get people talking. Have a bag with different kinds of sweets (say four of each kind if you want groups of four) and hand them around as a lucky dip. Things like refreshers, lover hearts, gob stoppers for example. If you do this at the beginning when people arrive, you can then ask them to remember the sweet they have already eaten!

2) Using badges - by badges of 70s, 80s, or even 90s bands (ebay is the perfect place to find them) and do a lucky dip again, or lay them out for people to choose. Choose the decade depending on your audience - some will remember swooning over David Cassidy or the Bay City Rollers and some would just go "who?"

If you have created pairs and want to determine who goes first, instead of just asking the group to decide, why not use the following statements to determine who goes first:

* the person with the most vowels in their full name
* the person with the longest fingernail (any finger on any hand)
* the person who has the most nieces and nephews (aunts and uncles etc)
* the person with the biggest watch
* the person with the most unusual thing in their pocket or purse

Think of some unusual methods to form groups and pick who goes first and you will add an element of surprise into your workshops, that automatically raise them above the run-of-the-mill expectations.

Good luck and please share your own ideas for forming groups here on the light the spark facebook page....

Making PowerPoint Powerful

Where are people going wrong when they design slides that result in the muttered phrase "Death by PowerPoint"?

There are two basic mistakes:

Mistake 1 - Designing Slides as Handouts.If you have enough information on your slides for them to work as handouts, then your slides are wrong. Why not simply print out the slides and circulate them, instead of becoming the voice in your audience's heads as they read them?
These slides are Death by text.

Mistake 2 - Designing Slides as an Autocue.The next mistake, is to design your slides to help remind you what to say. Your audience will still read your slides, as you fill in some extra gaps.
These slides are Death by Bullet Point.

Research has proven that it is more difficult to process information if it is coming at your both verbally and in written form at the same time.

So your audience should not be both listening to you and either reading handouts or reading slides. If they are, then they will be doing neither well.

The point of slides is that they provide a strong visual backdrop to complement your words, with the audience focussing on listening to you, your passion and knowledge. They are the stills and you are the narrator.

To avoid these mistakes, you must design your slides, your prompts and your handouts as separate items. You can use PowerPoint for all three, but they are likely to be separate files not the same one.

Next time you are designing a presentation, see if you can think of the slides as a visually exciting film, which you are narrating.

Leave Your Comfort Zone behind

The most amazing events that I have ever delivered were the ones when I felt nervous. I was going to do something new, something different, something outside of my comfort zone.

I was excited about the possibility of finding a new, even unique, way of creating a learning zone, whilst still nervous about it all going rather wrong.

For one event, I wanted to teach my students about communication through real experience. Instead of some dry exercises about words, or tone, or pace I wanted them to have a direct experience that impacted on their minds and challenged their perspectives. Before a break, I asked them to clear the room and place their seats in a circle then come back in silence.

Even those instructions changed their mood: they came back curious, attentive, charged up (which is no mean feat at 8pm after a very long day). We started with silence and darkness. And I let that experience be savoured before adding in anything else.

I then added in elements gently, one at a time. They listened to some music. We handed around a torch for them to shine beneath their face as they shared what they had experienced. Gradually we built in new elements - for them to feel first hand the impact of various elements such as light, music, images, video, sounds and language.

I gave them no handout for this session, asking them only to write a reflective piece for their own records. The results were amazing - their reflections showed how inspired they had felt and how it had shown them new and different ways of thinking about their impact on their learners.

I challenged every single element of this event - no plan, no notes, no slides, no light even, nor much discussion at first, as I wanted each of them to feel and be fully involved in their personal experience not that of the others in the group.

If you never feel nervous, never feel that you are taking a risk, never wonder if your new exercise will bomb or boom, then you are probably not being creative enough.

Creativity is a risk - but whatever happens you will gain greatly from taking that risk - in learning, in new skills, in new confidence, in a whole new approach.

So next time you are designing a learning event, don't ignore that amazing idea that you have (that gives you butterflies). Embrace it. Go with it. Leave Your Comfort Zone behind and soar.

Yawnbuster - great idea, wrong solution

Today I read with a mixture of astonishment and horror about a new product that has been launched called Yawnbuster (visit www.yawnbuster.com to find out more)....

This product (costing several hundred dollars) is designed to help create a more interactive learning environment. They have (rightly) recognised that some presentations can bore for [insert country where you live]. But they have (wrongly) decided to design some add-in facilities so that you can use PowerPoint to run quizzes/ polls and so forth.

The principle is sound. People do need to interact with information, share their experiences, discuss and debate approaches to certain situations, and generally get involved.

But is reading more colourful images from a projector really the way to add variety and interaction. The most jaw dropping option is the "Show of Hands". For goodness sake!

When did you need a slideshow add-in to get people to put their hands in the air?
For me, that is time completely wasted on pointless pretty technology, which should be spent thinking about what your learners need.

I despair sometimes that trainers are like technological magpies - looking for the newest, shiniest answer to their problems, instead of looking to themselves for the answer.

Great training does not need any of this stuff.
It doesn't need technology.

It needs passion, enthusiasm.
It needs someone who cares about their topic and wants with all their hearts to pass that onto other people.
It needs consideration for your learners, for where they are, what they know and what they really NEED TO KNOW.

Step away from the computer.
Put the mouse down, slowly, on the floor.
Raise your hands up, tie them behind your back, and now design your training event.
Hands-free.

email me at emma@lightthespark.co.uk for a copy of my free ebook "Beyond PowerPoint".

Beyond PowerPoint

Today I have been pulling together some tips on Beyond PowerPoint. In mentioning creative training and the need to avoid PowerPoint, one person reacted by saying "I'd be interested to see what she does instead"....

Are we really so wedded to this software that we cannot think of anything else?
Do we really believe that the best way for people to learn is to absorb facts and information through their eyeballs?

So here are my suggestions when it comes to taking your training Beyond PowerPoint:

* firstly aim only to cover NEED TO KNOW information. Think about this in advance and you may find that your event is substantially reduced. The best trainers are ruthless editors.
* next get your learners to tell you what they need to know about the topic. Use a cocktail party style icebreaker where everyone stands up and when they meet someone else, shares one thing they would like to learn from the session. Combining all these at the end on a flipchart gives you a great focus for your session.
* next find out what people already know about your topic. So ask small group of around 3-4 people to brainstorm things that they know (perhaps about specific elements) and to write these on a flipchart. You may be amazed at how much they already know - one person within a group might know quite alot and they will have already taught their colleagues, and by asking each group to summarise their flipchart, they teach the rest of the class. Anything that is inaccurate or wrong, please correct at this point and add key missing items to.

Now you have a clear focus for your event and you haven't even touched your projector.

When it comes to covering the information that bridges the gap between you have a number of alternative options:

* Card Exercises. Here small groups (2-3) are given a set of cards with words or phrases on them. They then have to either put them into some sort of order (first to last, most important to least important) or categorise them (true/ false). Even with little prior knowledge of a topic, people will start thinking, discussing and will do most of this without help. You can then coach them on a few cards they are unsure about. This is a powerful way to interact with information and works for a wide range of topics.

* Case Studies. You provide some scenario or case study for small groups to discuss. If need be, you can also give them some summary information, books or reference material, where they can search for further help. This helps people get to grips with what they already know or don't know and you can provide the information or skills they need to improve dramatically.

* Stories. Find someone who has a powerful, emotive story relating to your topic. If you cannot actually invite them to the session, then video their story. Imagine the power of someone who has your widget keeping them alive in their artificial heart to inspire your technicians to tighter manufacturing tolerances. Imagine the impact from a mother who has lost a child to gang violence.

* Quizzes. By setting simple or complex questions, you can test and evaluate what people know. By providing clear answers, you can teach them a whole range of vital information. Quizzes are very flexible and you can ask questions aloud (preferred as you can alter the questions to suit your learners on the day), and then ask teams to hold up cards with their answer, move to somewhere in the room based on a multiple choice answer (a, b or c for instance) or write their answer down.

Here I have shared just a few techniques to help you go Beyond PowerPoint. I hope you are inspired the next time you are designing some training to step back from the keyboard, and write some cards, or a quiz and a case study, to inspire your learners in new ways.

Make Your Information Come Alive

When it comes to learning new information or skills, one of the things that any learner benefits from is knowing that people like them have already been there and done that.

Your learners need to connect with your expertise during any learning event. One of the easiest ways of doing this is to use names and personalities to create mini stories that help illustrate how other people (like your learners) have used your expertise in your own life.

In order to protect the innocent, I would recommend having a composite character who you name and talk about.

If your audience tends to be mainly female, then use a girl or woman's name, such as Agnes, or Amelia or Annie.
If your audience tends to be mainly male, then use a boy or man's name, such as Arthur, or Adam or
Alex.

After you have decided on a suitable name, then flesh that character out - with an age, a business, a lifestyle that relates to your ideal learners.

If you tend to talk to retired people about financial planning, then use a 65-75 year old character called Agnes or Ethel who is worried about how she will manage if her arthritis gets any worse.

If you talk to young people about career choices, then use a hip-hop boy called Dizzle who would like to emulate his hero (say 50 cent) and go into the music bizness.

Then use this character throughout your seminar or workshop. You can use them to introduce each new section - at the start the character has a similar problem to the group you are teaching. As you tackle and resolve each issue, then your character moves on and is curious about what comes next. At the end, you can finish the story with what happens next. To make that ending really powerful, if you can then show a photograph of the real Dizzle or real Ethel and give a little more information on how successful their lives have been, that would be fantastic.


There are two main reasons to use a named character:
1) It is far more personable - your learners will feel like they can relate to someone with a name, a background, with the same problems or issues as their own. By showing how that character has benefited, they can see how your topic will transform their own lives.

2) A character can be used to introduce subtle humour into your event. For instance, if your event is around business finances and you wish to illustrate a calculation of your hourly rate, you may introduce a character named Ms P Hilton, who wants to earn one million pounds/ dollars a year, but only wants to work 20 hours a month, 10 months of the year. How much does she need to charge to do so?

So think about your area of expertise.
What sort of character will be most similiar to your ideal learners, those who attend your training events?
What name would they have? How old would they be? Where would they live? What problems might they be facing? What story might they follow from where they are now to where they want to be?

If you have some real case studies, then feel free to borrow from these, whilst protecting the personal information of your clients or customers.

So bring your topic or expertise come to life using real characters, real people, real stories to really connect with the people listening to your information. Capture the journey in a simple story and you have a powerful tool to help people remember and help inspire them to use your information to transform their own lives.

Let's Start at the Very Beginning...

If we are on a mission to design and deliver fantastic and awesome training, then we need to design every step to inspire and engage our learners.

So think about it - what is their very first experience with your learning event, be it a workshop, presentation or seminar?

In many instances, you first chance to inspire your learners is with the invitation you send, or any advertising you do.

So you could just send out a blanket email, giving the time and place of your event.
But is that really creative? Does that really say to them: "This event is going to be different"?

Here are some ideas of ways in which you could make that first impression really stand out:
1) Send out personalised invitations, with handwritten names, by snail mail, that look like an invitation to a wedding or a party. Give your event a sense of occasion or fun.
2) If you have an event for people who work together, why not put up some posters that hint at what is to come, before anyone is even invited. For example for a session on Work/ Life Balance, you could print out posters of different aspects of Work and Life and ask people to choose which are most important to them.
3) Send out a small item that is related to your event - a photograph, a map, or a quotation perhaps. Before an event on creativity, you could send out a large brightly coloured paperclip, with the words "can you think of a thousands uses for this?" on a piece of paper. That will get people thinking and curious about it.
4) Use a quotation or cartoon to associate your event with fun or laughter - why not use Dilbert cartoon strips to get people talking about great leadership or bureaucracy for example?
5) Use a powerful, emotive poster. The "Your Country Needs You" poster would work well in a number of different circumstances. If you are running an event on Health and Safety, you could use a photograph of a spanner falling over the head of someone and point to the person below with the words "She/He needs you".


Think about your next event or workshop.
How could you do something different in the way you both advertise and invite people to your event?
What prop or item could you send them by post that is related to your topic?
What could you ask them to bring to the event, which would get them thinking or curious about what will happen?