Brian Marick on Conference Speaking and Presentation Skills | SCNA 2012

So, I think that the way to think about it is the two kinds of talks that I do are, one is an explanation of something. So, for example, I just did an explanation of logic programming and test data generation here. And the other is more a way to, I guess, stick memes in people's heads. So, the goal of the how to do something talk, which is most technical talks, is to tell people something with the expectation that at the end they'll be able to repeat a good amount of it back to me. So, I'm trying to give them an explanation of something that makes logical sense to them. So, it sticks in their mind as a sequential set of explanations. And usually the way that works with that is to cast it as a story of some sort. So, we are, we're beings, we live in time. So, when we think about explanations, we tend to think of, we should think of them as sort of logical consequences of one fact and another. But what we actually do is we think of, we tend to think of them more as things moving through time. So, you tell a story where things happen and then another thing happens and then another thing happens. And you lay that over the logical argument that you're making. And so, since we're so built to listen to stories and tell stories, that helps people tell the story back to you. So, that's my goal in a technical kind of, yes, in a technical kind of talk. Now, the other kinds of talks are more sort of mean implantation talks. So, for example, I've done a series of talks where I keep hammering away at the question of what are the values that didn't get written down in the Agile Manifesto. So, there are some, the latest version has something like seven of them. And so, the purpose of that talk is to get words really stuck in the heads of the listeners. So, one of the words is ease. For example, an argument of mine that I make is that when I look at Agile groups, people are very focused on making their work. Not easy, but with ease. So, for example, my wife is a surgeon or has been a surgeon. And she describes the process of surgery when you've got a really good surgical team working with you. Is you're sort of talking through what you're doing. And you reach out your hand and the right instrument magically appears. And you just move it. So, there's that sense of ease. And the idea of giving examples of ease and using that is that when people run into problems, I want things like ease to pop in their mind. So, you know, when we're solving this problem, we should think about ease. Or we should think about being reactive rather than proactive, which is another characteristic of Agile projects. So, that's the goal of the kind of non-technical talk. It's to make things stick in people's heads. And I also do keynotes. A keynote has the same sort of property of making things stick in people's heads. But the real goal of a keynote is to force speakers who come after you to refer back to the keynote. To set a theme. Yes. The thing with the setting, you call it the meme, is I just wonder, is it because these ideas are often hard and esoteric. But having one thing you can kind of hold on to gives you an anchor. And then you can work back from that or use that as a point of reference. Is that... Well, the main thing is, I think, just getting people to think of it. You're in a situation, there's an idea that would be useful. How do you get... How do you program people such that when they're in a situation where that idea is useful, they actually think of that idea.

So, that... To do that, you have to have... You have to have the craft, I guess, of telling stories, visual representations stick in people's minds. So, if you're presenting an idea both visually and auditory, it sticks better than if you're only doing one of them. Jokes, work. Lots of different methods to get that word or that simple concept into their head. And then such that it'll pop out when they need it. And when they need it, then they can go and figure out what that really means in their situation.

I was just thinking about earlier today, I saw a tweet that some study discovered that by introducing humor into education, test scores in that experiment went up. Because, for whatever reason, I haven't read the article yet, but for some reason, humor helped with the lesson. And that people remembered it better and were able to synthesize whatever information, so at least that way they could determine it, regurgitate it or whatever on a test.

They were able to retain it. But also when you talked about the symbols, humans tend to think in a symbolic. That's why with Sarah's talk when she was showing how she introduced symbols and visual metaphors into the teaching that she's doing or the mentoring, that it seemed like people were better able to wrap their heads around these topics and understand them. But as far as speaking to an Agile community, you've gone and you've spoken at user groups. Are there other, like, Agile user groups, are there, like, things that were, people who are doing these Agile planning, Agile coaching, do they get together and have user groups? They certainly have. I've drifted away from Agile, per se, being an Agile coach of the past, I guess, now three years. So I'm not sure of the current state of things, but at the Agile Alliance web page, there used to be a whole page full of user groups with contact information. I assume at least some of those user groups are still existing and still running. Were they, basically, I've not been to those user groups. I've mostly been focused on a technical user group, but have you gone back and forth between those over the years and seen how they handle their teaching and learning, uh, together as a community, or, or even at the conferences? Uh, not so much, because I, I live in the middle of nowhere. Uh, so it's not like I live in Chicago, where I can go to users groups. Uh, my going to a user group pretty much has to overlap the time I'm on a trip and being in the user group. So, I don't have a lot of useful things to say about user groups. Well, at the, at the conferences, though, um, an Agile conference versus a technical conference, is there a difference in the way the communities interact with each other, or how do, how do they, is there been any marked difference, aside from the general topics of the conversations, um, between the two different groups, the two communities? Um, I don't think so in the particular case of the Agile groups. Um, the Agile groups were, especially in the beginning, pretty heavily, uh, programmer dominated. Uh, uh, uh, Pete McBreen said way back in the beginning of Agile, uh, the buzzword, that the Agile methodologies, or methodologies created by people who like to program.

So, it was dominantly programmerish back then. And I think, to whatever extent there's a, uh, unique programmer culture, the Agile culture tended to, to pick up that. So, there's a certain playfulness, for example, uh, that appears in both groups. I don't get invited to speak at, like, sales conferences, or things like that. So, I don't, I, I'm not sure that the two communities are, are really that far apart. Okay, and, and just one thing about the way, uh, uh, you, you craft your presentations.

Um, it's somewhat random, uh, in, in the, the, sort of the same way. I mean, one of the reasons why I became sort of an early advocate of Agile is that that matches my style. Uh, and, like I said, one of the values of Agile is you react to information rather than proactively do things. That is, you, you do little experiments, you try things, you see what happens, you get good visibility into what's happening, and you react to that. So, a lot of my talks, uh, start out with a basic idea. I don't write outlines, I haven't written an outline for anything for, since I was in high school. Um, and my talks are very, very low on word count, very high on pictures, but not just the random picture, but a picture that's actually used in the explanation. And I gotta admit that the, the way my talks happen is I'll be, this is what I want to talk about, here's, uh, my theme. I go to YouTube or Flickr looking for a, you know, Creative Commons picture along those lines. I get a picture, I fit it in there, and the content of the picture, since I'm talking about abstractions in some way, uh, the content of the picture will change my talk. So it's almost, in some ways, this is for the less technical talks, in some ways it's almost kind of picture-driven development, whichever picture I find. And then, um, then it's a matter of, of practicing it, and becoming fairly sensitive to the, to the rougher spots. Um, and it can be hard to notice those, but you, you talk about it, you talk about it, you talk about it, you keep talking, you keep practicing it, and you see the rough spots. And I go through lots of revisions of moving things around and throwing things out, and so on and so forth. So, for example, a talk I just gave is on its ninth revision. Twelve or fourteen revisions of a talk is not unusual.