“Webinar Master” on the way

My e-book “Webinar Master” is due to be published on November 16th by British e-book specialist Canelo.

The book is based on my experience coaching speakers for, hosting, and delivering hundreds of webinars since 2007, largely for the Learning and Skills Group (LSG), an international community of about 8,000 learning and development professionals.

It will make you a webinar master – if you put it into practice.

I’ve had the good fortune to work with some wonderful, experienced speakers, and had the delight of coaching some first time speakers to deliver tremendously powerful sessions. I’ve seen what works and have built up a methodology for delivering great webinars, consistently. The fruits of that experience are distilled here for you.

As well as the triumphs, I’ve also had my share of disasters – from the time the webinar service failed 2 minutes before we were due to start (and me in a New York hotel room in my pyjamas at 5 am) to the time both my broadband internet feeds at my home office failed and we ran the session through my mobile phone’s Wi-Fi tethering. In all the hundreds of sessions I’ve been responsible for in that period, we’ve only once been unable to get on air.

It’s been an exciting journey, and the thrill hasn’t gone yet. I still get excited before we kick off one of our Thursday LSG sessions, and still feel that buzz when a presentation and the ensuing Q&A have gone particularly well. And after every webinar, I want to do it all over again.

I hope that after reading this book you, too, will enjoy presenting through webinars, and that you will find the same energy and excitement in using this vital modern medium of communication.

Click for more information, and to register for a message from me when the book is out, visit my books page.

3 L&D lessons from Australia’s cricketing collapse

Cricket, a long drawn-out slogging match. Unless you’re Australia in the first innings at Trent Bridge in the 2015 Ashes.

For Australia, yesterday’s crushing first innings defeat in the Ashes at Trent Bridge was a subject for national soul searching, typified by the response of The Sydney Morning Herald: England humiliate Australia on a first day that will live in infamy. (North American readers can just jump from here to the bullet list below.) All out for 60 before lunch? It’s unheard of – almost. You have to go back to the 1950s and ’40s for equivalent batting collapses.

So what lessons can L&D learn from this? Here are three I would suggest, two here and one at the bottom of this post:

• Training is not always the answer. The Australians have spent their lives since boyhood training at cricket and dreaming of beating England, in England. A few more hours in the nets would be pointless. They have the skill. For various reasons they did not apply it yesterday morning.

• Knowledge without application is useless. Do the Australians know the fielding positions on a cricket field? Of course they do. In fact, they found the slips quite easily yesterday morning. More knowledge is not the answer.

I have talked widely about the training ghetto. In the training ghetto, the L&D team is usually responsible for just three types of training: compliance training, on boarding training, and fix-my-team training.

The last of these is when the manager appears in the training department doorway and says, effectively, “my team is broken, please fix it.” Usually they ask for something like time management training across the team. Of course the manager is abdicating responsibility for his or her role as manager. Training is never the answer here. The answer is to be a better manager.

John Purcell of Bath University was fond of this equation defining performance:

P = f (A, M, O)

Where:
P = Performance
A = Ability, can they do it?
M = Motivation, do they want to do it?
O = Opportunity, are they able to do it?

Of all of these, the part that L&D is traditionally responsible – Ability – is arguably the least important. After all, only 11% of contracts are terminated because of a lack of employee ability. We know Australia have the ability.

So where did they fall down yesterday? It was not Opportunity, because after lunch England came into bat and did very nicely, ending the day on 274 for 4.

It must, therefore, have been Motivation.

I am not saying that the individual players did not want to win. But there was among them something fans of any sport will recognise – a sort of dazed shellshock. When your team is like that it cannot rely on individual motivation. Only leadership on the field and in the dressing room can rescue matters, which brings me to the final L&D lesson:

• Exceptional performance demands leadership. We are fond of saying – rightly – that L&D is all about performance. But while L&D is necessary for performance, it is not sufficient. Exceptional performance demands leadership, leadership that inspires external motivation to push you to greatness, especially when times are tough.

We cannot in L&D expect to solve all performance problems and – crucially – we should set the expectation with others that we cannot. Sometimes, we must say that a performance problem can only be solved by better management and better leadership.

PS – I fully expect Australia to have rediscovered their internal leadership and to come out fighting today.

PPS – If you’re from North America and have been left a little puzzled by this post, please read Not everyone reads American on the use of sporting metaphor in writing.

Memory is more than Ebbinghaus

This blog is inspired by the #blimage blog series.

“Dante Alighieri01”. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

In February my wife and I visited Florence in Italy. It’s an extraordinary place – go for the art, go for the leather shops, go for the food, but if you ever have the opportunity, just go.

Walking past the Uffizi we paused in front of a statue. Recognising it was Dante Alighieri, we fell into a collective fit of the giggles. Then we recited together:

Dante Alighieri
Seldom troubled a dairy.
He wrote the Inferno
On a bottle of Pernod.

It’s a Clerihew, named for its inventor Edward Clerihew Bentley. All Clerihews follow the same four-line format and contain some ridiculous biographical nonsense.

My father – who is fond of all forms of poetry – recited this Clerihew to me when I was a young teenager:

Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

I heard this Clerihew once, and remembered it. In contrast I had to ask my dad several times who the author was before I could remember his name – Clerihew. The picture of Davy suffering at the hands of the mob for his science was at once ridiculous and vivid and formed a dramatic picture in my mind.

Years later, living in Turkey, I purchased The Complete Clerihews at a British Council library sale of excess stock. A quarter century later, it remains a treasured book, always guaranteed to produce a laugh with its combination of Clerihew’s text and illustrations.

It is from this book that I read Dante’s Clerihew. Again, it stuck at one reading – it was so deliciously absurd, how could it not? At some point in our near two decades of married life, I recited it to my wife who laughed, appreciating in particular the sly innuendo of ‘Never troubled a dairy’ and it stuck with her, too.

And so, a few years later, we found ourselves in Florence, laughing at poor Dante’s statue.

All this says something about memory. Two different people hear 15 words in a particular order and remember them perfectly at one sitting.

Why?

Unlike my memory of Sir Humphrey Davy’s, I have no strong mental image of the Dante Clerihew, so this isn’t about pictures. Its appeal is purely in the sheer delight in the words, the absurdity of the situation, the portrayal of Italy’s leading man of letters as a lush, the anachronism of the drink Pernod. Together those 15 words form a coherent whole that stuck a vibrant chord with my mind – and my wife’s – and stuck, seemingly forever.

Now contrast this with what is often repeated about what we know about the human memory from the experiments of Herman Ebbinghaus. The ‘Forgetting Curve’ has been a standard inclusion in L&D presentations for many years now (including my own):

The Forgetting Curve

The common interpretation of this curve is that memory automatically decays after we are exposed to something new, and it needs several repetitions to remember the new thing.

It’s actually more complex than that.

Remember how Ebbinghaus did his experiments – by reading new, nonsense syllables and attempting to remember them. All subsequent experiments to explore this phenomenon have taken the same approach. The syllable sets are carefully sifted before they are given to people to ensure that each individual non-word has no meaning.

This is entirely right, if you want to explore people’s memory properly, you can’t have some people better able to remember their syllables because the syllable (let’s say ‘BRIK’) sounds more familiar than another group’s syllable (say ‘ZIK’).

In memory experiments, the content you learn is meaningless.

But in real life, much of what we learn is not meaningless. When my father rattled off the Humphrey Davy Clerihew, I already knew who that famous scientist was; I knew he had discovered sodium, and I knew what odium meant. There was very little entirely new meaning that I had to take on board. Only the arrangement of the words was new. The Forgetting Curve did not apply.

Let me be clear here. I am not saying that the Forgetting Curve is wrong. Quite clearly it is right for a great deal of what we learn. In fact, the very word Clerihew required me to do some spaced learning (going back and asking my dad repeatedly what that bloke’s name was) until it stuck. Why? Because the word by itself had absolutely no meaning. There were no hooks in my mind ready for it to latch on to.

In contrast, when I read the Dante poem I knew all the words, and they made me laugh. If I had been asked to remember this, instead:

Dairy the Alighieri
Pernod troubled on he
a bottle Inferno
On wrote a Dante bottle of seldom

I would have once again required spaced learning – repeatedly testing myself until I got it right.

Not everyone is a fan of Clerihews. But everyone has a memory that is particularly attuned to learning some things very easily. For me, it’s song lyrics, the origins of words and useless facts like the speed of light in miles per second and the capital of Mongolia.

In addition to these idiosyncratic traits, people develop the ability to memorize certain things faster and more accurately as a result of their work. Famously, Chase and Simon (1973) showed board positions from chess games to a range of players from beginners to international masters for about 5 seconds. When asked to recall the location of the chess pieces, the beginners could manage on average 4 pieces, while the masters could recall virtually all 20 pieces.

This was not a matter of super memory but of meaning. When shown a board not from a game, but with randomly arranged pieces, the masters fared no better than the beginners. They were unable to use their immediate appreciation of how the pieces related to each other to make sense of the position. It was like trying to memorize a poem with jumbled up words.

This knowledge can be used in learning and is. Sometimes spaced learning is the right choice. Sometimes it is the only choice. Sometimes we make content vivid, we use humour, contrast and absurdity to make it need less repetition. But as well as these tricks of the trade, the best content designers do something else.

They go to where the person already is, and use what they already have, to make the content coherent, resonant and easy to remember. They present their chess players with a real game position; they give their poetry lovers words with rich meaning, because they know the best language – the only effective language – is the language of your audience.

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If you’d like to know more about spaced learning, read Dr Will Thalheimer’s excellent research piece.

If you’d like to take up the #blimage challenge, pick one of these photos and see what it triggers in your mind:

Do you want to make a difference in L&D, or do you want to be liked?

June is an important month for Learning and Development (L&D). It’s Debunk Learning Styles month. It’s important for the profession, and it’s important to each of us individually in L&D because it brings up a key question.

Do you want to be liked, or do you want to make a difference?

The limits of Twitter – trite, glib and lazy

We can expect lots of Twitter activity in the run up the UK election on May 7th. Here’s an early shot in the skirmishes:

An interesting factpic.twitter.com/zPffCnz7sX

— Fake News (@Fake_Newsfeed) March 23, 2015

Shocking, right? The problem is, it’s not true. Not in the literal sense of the words.

30% of nominees to the House of Lords contribute 97.9% of donations to political parties.

Literally, that means that the vast majority of money given to political parties comes from 30% of nominees to the House of Lords. A moment’s reflection told me this couldn’t be the case, so I went back to the source, a 33-page paper from Oxford University: Is there a Market for Peerages?. I also scanned reports on this paper in the press. Here’s how the Guardian put it:

That left 92 “others”, who donated between them 97.9% (£33.83m) of all the donations coming from nominees to the Lords

That’s clearer. It’s still pretty shocking. As the Daily Telegraph summarizes: 92 nominees to the Lords had effectively bought their way in. (Got the cash? Interested? Best bet is the Tories, accounting for almost half the 92 nominees.) However, the point is also that this is not all money donated to political parties. The 97.9% only refers to the share of money donated from among those nominated to the Lords.

The problem for Twitter is this: the Guardian’s phrasing may be clearer, but it’s 5 words too long, and a little too complex. What to do? Cut. Never mind the accuracy, feel the brevity.

This is why I’ve been using Twitter less recently than I did in the past – it’s just a little too noisy and a little too inaccurate.

To be precise: there is always noise, but the noise to signal ratio seems to have increased significantly over the past year. Also, among the noise is too much of the glib and the trite. The glib includes motivational quotes that irritate more than they motivate. The trite manipulates the truth to lazily present an inaccurate picture of it, which is what @Election_HUB seems to have done with this fact about buying peerages.

And of course at the intersection of the glib and the trite is the misquote. Twitter’s favourite is probably this:

“Be the change that you want to see in the world.” Mahatma Gandhi pic.twitter.com/gR6vswlxxf

— Best Life Global (@BestLifeGlobal_) March 23, 2015

In the 9 hours since midnight today, this has been repeated and amplified 20 times. It’s an admirable sentiment, but as Brian Morton pointed out in the New York Times in 2011, Gandhi didn’t say it. If you care about accuracy, there’s no excuse for not discovering that when doing your fact checking … unless of course you don’t care about accuracy and you don’t do any fact checking.

I do hope that I’m wrong about this. I would love Twitter to be a friendly exchange of useful information, banter and conversation, and indeed, I continue to read interesting, sometimes challenging, Tweets from the more thoughtful people I follow.

However, lately Twitter seems to have become more of a haven for the lazy and the inaccurate, not to mention the hateful. I hope that in the run up the UK election we’ll manage to have some better informed debate than this. I somehow doubt we will.