The post “Breakfast with Barb: Understanding what people watch” – chaired by Nadine Dereza appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

Babaco Media is the new face of PS Programmes. Our transformation reflects a new reality and shift in how we’re communicating and presenting ourselves to the world, with a strong focus on virtual interactions alongside our face-to-face experiences.

What prompted the change?

The change has come about because we have always been led by the principle that we coach on what we know from experience. Our team originally came together as a group of industry professionals who made a living as presenters, media spokespeople, journalists, speaker agents and producers.

Our whole industry is experiencing a shift in thinking and is coming to terms with a new reality about how public communication and interaction could and should happen. Last year, there was a dramatic swing from presenting ‘live’ events, including presentations and interviews, to more virtual experiences. Babaco Media’s revised approach to coaching reflects our clients’ new needs.

We decided to act now to ensure that we are on the front foot. It puts us ahead of the curve, as we open up new possibilities for our clients. This is enabling us to guide, advise and coach them as to how best to communicate and present themselves to their own clients and audiences. Although the tools and the platforms may have changed, we are still remaining true to our roots of giving people new skills and boosting confidence where it’s needed most.

A new name for a new direction

As to why we chose the name ‘babaco’, we were hooked from the moment we saw one. The babaco is a fresh, zingy fruit from Ecuador. The tongue tingling taste earns it the nickname ‘champagne fruit’ – very appropriate for those of us who have lived and breathed the events industry for so long. Cut through the middle of a babaco, and the cross section reveals a star, much like those moments where the coaching ‘clicks’ with a client and they find themselves delivering a performance they are proud of.

Keeping reputation at the core

If we once thought of a computer as our window on the world, the camera now gives the world an intimate look into our lives. In 2020, we saw presenters, politicians, experts and businesspeople addressing the nation from their homes. Audiences have forgiven shaky internet connections, poor lighting, and questionable book choices in the background. During 2021, however, the demand for professionalism will be on the rise.

Babaco Media’s core offer is to help businesses manage their public image through media training, crisis communications and presentation skills. In the new media landscape, we have heard and responded to the need for a greater emphasis on how to present in high-pressure environments under the unforgiving eye of the camera.

Such high-pressure environments include parliamentary committees and public inquiries, which can have a significant impact on reputation. A good reputation, which we have always helped clients to safeguard, is the ‘money-can’t-buy’ factor that can carry a business through bad times.

Virtual coaching: convenient, flexible and relevant

As for how we deliver this training, our team’s background in personal communication and television gives us the edge when it comes to the new reality of virtual rather than face-to-face communications. Babaco Media is able to help companies prepare for interviews, hearings, conferences, webinars and crisis communications online.

Apart from the convenience of sharing a URL rather than dealing with the logistics of in-person meetings, remote coaching is a good fit for the work that we carry out. When we are talking about how to present on camera, we are able to have a professional opinion on the equipment already in use and advise on how to make the best of it, or whether upgrades are necessary. A further advantage of coaching virtually is that the practice sessions are a closer reflection of how things will be on the day of the event itself, reducing the likelihood of something unexpected happening during the ‘real thing’.

Making the practice as close as possible to the real-world event is also part of our refocus on crisis planning. Preparing for the unexpected is a key component of leadership, whether it relates to a sudden slump in performance, a cyber-attack, an environmental matter, a tragic accident or other unforeseen circumstance. Our extensive experience in crisis media management points to controlling the flow of information as a vital part of the picture in a genuine crisis, as without a strategy, misinformation will quickly eclipse reality and a reputation that has taken years to build has been destroyed in moments.

The team at Babaco Media have years of lived experience that we share with clients whose media and presentation skills are under the spotlight. The move to digital has increased the opportunity for more people inside a business to talk to more people outside it than ever before. The expectations on teams can be daunting. Our coaching aims to make the task comprehensible and manageable.

Having an expert coaching your team’s performance will give your people the same tools as professional presenters, enabling them to get the best out of their workspace, their camera and how they present themselves.

We have unsurprisingly seen a dramatic shift from live events to virtual conferences, webinars and awards ceremonies. Babaco Media now offers a dedicated virtual and hybrid service too. Over the last few months, we have worked either directly with clients or through creative agencies, to design, create and shape impactful content for virtual events. We have found that virtual experiences deliver all of the benefits of a live event.

Lessons from our experience of virtual events

We have also been requested to host and facilitate virtual conferences too. Last May, Babaco Media founder, Nadine Dereza took on a presenting assignment which involved her setting up a fully operational studio in her front room, complete with stage set, remote-control cameras, lights and monitors.

Directed remotely by technicians from their own homes, Nadine laid cables, positioned cameras, connected the sound desk and plugged everything into the computers that linked her with the crew.

As for the event itself, a great deal of thought had clearly gone into the speaker line-up, interactivity for the audience and much tighter curation of the content: the difference between an in-person event for a captive audience and a virtual event for participants who can switch off at any time was huge.

The viewing figures were higher than we would have expected if the event had been held live in-person. It felt like live TV, with all the attendant expectations and need for speakers to adapt for the medium. The experience cemented the idea of reviewing our priorities, as the millions of cameras embedded in phones and computers around the world have been called on to step up to the task of connecting us for business.

The events landscape for 2021 and beyond

The events industry as we once knew it, is facing a new future: some organisers will take a ‘digital first’ attitude towards events as a way of streamlining costs and logistics and reducing their environmental impact.

There will be an expectation that when live events return, there will be an option to participate digitally, either as a delegate or a speaker, and we are looking forward to seeing how such ‘hybrid’ events will change the industry further. This could be the moment that Virtual Reality finally breaks through for the industry, as it’s more cost effective to send a headset to a delegate than it is to get that delegate to the venue. ‘Pure’ in-person events without a digital element will still happen in the future, but these are likely to be smaller, more exclusive and much rarer.

The whole communication landscape has changed, and Babaco Media is our response, building on our own reputation for excellence in coaching. Connection, by whatever means we achieve it, is what we need to do, and that need has never been greater. We are at our strongest when we work together and as 2021 is just underway, we are looking forward to enabling our clients to connect with their audience in this new landscape with purpose, enthusiasm and confidence.

This article appears on Babaco Media’s website, as well as on Nadine Dereza’s website.

The post Babaco Media plants a flag in the new events and media landscape appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

And the demand for these Awards was clearly there, they attracted the best in book publishing with 36 authors shortlisted from 150 entries initially received, all from a variety of publishers. In fact, seventeen different publishers made it through to the shortlist, with entries ranging from independent publishers such as The Authority Guide, through to household names such as Wiley, Penguin Random House, Kogan Page and Bloomsbury.

The entries were judged across seven categories: Startup Inspiration, Selling the Dream, Leading the Team, Embracing Change, Thought Leader, Self-Development, and the Judge’s Choice.

I relished the opportunity to be one of three judges on the ‘Leading the team’ panel, along with Peter McKay and Martin Norbury: Peter is Chief Executive of The Publishing Training Centre, and Martin is an award-winning entrepreneur and author of ‘I Don’t Work Fridays.’  (Presumably, our Friday night award ceremony doesn’t count as ‘work’.)

After judging Campbell MacPherson’s ‘The Change Cataylst’ as the winner of the category, it turned out to be an excellent choice as it went on to win ‘Book of the Year’ overall. And I got the opportunity to share my judging comments on his book with the audience…’Campbell’s generosity of spirit and many years of experience, shone through and he not only thoroughly explained why change fails but also analysed practical solutions for change, as well as how to lead a team to get the desired result so change can be implemented successfully. The Change Catalyst’ is very well-written, insightful with spot on anecdotes to help us transform for the better.’

The category winners were:

Startup InspirationIt Takes a Tribe by Will Dean (Portfolio, Penguin Random House) – whose thank you speech referenced his experience as co-founder and CEO of Tough Mudder.

Selling the Dream
Strategic Tendering for Professional Services by Matthew Fuller and Tim Nightingale (Kogan Page) – clearly an excellent read, as the judges won business from following tips in the book.

Leading the Team
The Change Catalyst by Campbell Macpherson (Wiley) (Also overall winner). Campbell’s Book was the result of ‘a presentation from Bain & Co that said “88% of change initiatives, strategies and merges and acquisitions fail” – and I thought “goodness me, there’s the hook for the book.”

Embracing Change
Futureproof by Minter Dial and Caleb Storkey (Pearson) – collecting the award, Caleb pointed to the future as it would unfold for his infant daughter, whom he is home schooling (when Alexa has the answers, he argued, facts become secondary to how you interpret the world).

Thought Leader
The Startup Way by Eric Ries (Portfolio, Penguin Random House) – Eric adds another fine book to his oeuvre which includes the million-selling New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup.

Self-Development
The Leader’s Guide to Presenting by Tom Bird and Jeremy Cassell (Pearson) – the need to speak well in front of audiences and in the media remains as relevant as ever.

Judge’s Choice
Client Earth by James Thorton and Martin Goodman (Scribe UK) – demonstrating that sustainability really is of core concern to the business community.

So what is the benefit of having an award ceremony?

You had to keep reminding yourself that this was the first ever Business Book Awards, with the event being a huge success – hats off to ThinkFest who got it right first time. I have witnessed many events which have started in a broom cupboard and can take years to gain traction, not this one.

But there’s more to an awards ceremony than getting the champagne chilled and booking a Four Poofs and a Piano (though that’s a great start).

Credibility really is the name of the game. There is no point in running an awards ceremony if people don’t think it’s a fair contest. The business book awards were run properly in this regard from the very beginning. With the high calibre of entries, expertly guided by Head Judge, Alison Jones, all the judging panels took the task very seriously. As you might expect from this kind of contest, my fellow judges had fantastic credentials from the world of publishing, as authors in their own right, and as business people: it’s easy enough to write a book, rather more difficult to write one that’s going to be of use to someone whose livelihood may depend upon it. For every judge turning the pages in the hope of discovering a beautifully turned phrase, there was an entrepreneur who had learned the hard way and was looking for solid content. And many of the judges, including Martin Norbury, have seen the industry both from a business perspective, and as an author.

There was a real sense of being among industry movers and shakers in the judging room, and if anyone felt they weren’t up to the task of choosing a winner, the wisdom of this highly qualified crowd was sure to prevail.

So, it wasn’t easy – and I found myself reading through a stack of books whilst supposedly on holiday. But as Noel Coward so memorably said, ‘work is more fun than fun,’ and this was time well donated to a worthwhile endeavour.

What are the rewards for organiser of getting this event right?

Well, the usual story with industry awards is very simple: publicity. Once you have created legitimate awards, the winners will go off and publicise your brand as being the arbiters of excellence. In this world of reputation management, being seen as a thought leader is more important now than ever it was. And indeed, if you can set your organisation up as providing a benchmark of quality, people will come to you because they know that you are trustworthy and reliable.

Lucy’s aim with this event was not, however, to set herself up as an authority, so much as it was to shine a spotlight on this growing area of the publishing industry. Indeed, as the awards website says, ‘We hope that the Awards will allow short-listed and winning authors to publicise and sell more books; that the event will instil aspiration in entrants and pride in winners; and that the ongoing process will inspire other budding writers to come forward and publish their work.’

Lucy really is about encouraging people to tell their story. There was one thing that shone through at the event on Friday night, it was that so many people wanted to impart the knowledge to others. Established writers were keen to help first timers. Publishers were looking for new talent. The authors themselves wanted to pass on their business knowledge and help other people set up and run successful companies. And at the heart of it all, Lucy seem to be the ‘queenpin’ (new word alert!) that held everything together: this vast network of support, encouragement and mentoring.

The Awards will go on from strength to strength, and we may have had a 50/50 gender balance amongst the judging panel, but next year I hope to see more women write, publish, enter and win. Special mention to Eve Poole for her brilliant ‘Leadersmithing’ book entry which received a Highly Commended Certificate, narrowly missing out on the top spot in the Lead the Team category, which as we know was awarded to ‘The Change Catalyst’!

All the judges gave up their time for the awards, and by co- hosting the event too with Simon Da Cintra, I had one of the best seats in the house! Entries for 2019 open in July 2018, start writing now…(special thanks to @Social_Frames for great pics).

The post The Business Book Awards 2018 appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

You really need to get these three things lined up – if your authority wobbles, you’re in trouble. If your message is directed at the wrong audience, it won’t land as it should. And as recent events have shown, if the public thinks your message is less than authentic, it can be catastrophic for your reputation.

So how have two organisations KFC and Oxfam, who have both had their communications in the spotlight recently faired?

KFC, whose supply chain let them down, resulting in closure of hundreds of outlets, have managed quite the trick: apologise for their closed shops in a way that answers the needs of their two audiences: their customers, and the managers. And so, franchisees and the serious papers got a fairly straight analysis of what went wrong with the supply chain, a promise that it would be fixed.

To customers, who care less about the niceties of supply chain logistics, the messaging was simple: a ‘mea culpa’ – my fault! We messed up, and we’re sorry, and we’ll fix things as soon as we can. (They may have kept favour with their customers, but how KFC’s attempts to get staff to take holiday during the shutdown will affect morale is another matter.)

‘FCK’ was a smart response which didn’t lessen the serious nature of the incident, but it also understood where the message was going to land: social media. For all the grumbles about #KFCClosed there were a good many positive retweets of the #FCK graphic. Damage to the brand, we felt, is limited, because often we only see a company’s true colours when things go wrong, and the ‘we’ve had a hell of a week’ line is deliberately in tune with a non-corporate audience. We’ve seen a bit of pushback on the messaging, but only from PR professionals, who probably aren’t the target demographic for the apology.

No, damage is likely to hit DHL who were responsible for the delivery failure. Even if the general public haven’t noticed this, DHL’s big customers probably are all too aware of where the blame really lies. Within days of taking responsibility for deliveries on 14 February, the company ran into difficulties: ‘By 16 February, KFC had started to shut down locations after managers complained of delays to deliveries and by 18 February only 266 of 900 restaurants in the UK were open.’

Oxfam’s problems are more serious, and not just because allegations of widespread sexual abuse are harder to take a superficial ‘we messed up’ approach with.

If the allegations weren’t bad enough, Chief Executive of Oxfam, Mark Goldring, went on to make a glib comment about ‘murdering babies in their cots.’

Given the #MeToo movement, this struck precisely the wrong note for a nervous public, not to mention the people who donate and the aid workers who are grafting on the ground. Their good faith has been given a severe bruising. Further down the line, it’s harder for Oxfam to take the moral high ground on issues such as Fairtrade and justice.

When the story of sexual exploitation in the aid sector became big news, Chief Executive of Oxfam, Mark Goldring, was among several to speak on the matter to a Parliamentary Select Committee.

His opening statement was an apology for the ‘murdering babies’ comment but by then, the damage was done. Talk of ‘seeing a company’s true colours when things go wrong’ is profound here because things rarely go as wrong as they have for Oxfam. The whole incident had shades of BP’s Tony Hayward wanting his life back about it. The result of that incident was a fine in excess of US$20billion.

The BBC has reported that over 7,000 regular donations to the charity being stopped in the wake of the scandal. These may be the tip of the iceberg.

Jokes are not, contrary to popular belief, lies. Jokes have a truth about them. Jokes often say something about a subject that it is too painful or difficult to address directly. Beware the joke: if the underlying message of the joke contradicts the press release, it will be taken as the truth, and the official version will be taken as a cover up.

Given two competing narratives, do not be surprised if the media seize on the less flattering version of events. Shoppers, when browsing the charity shops on a high street, could be forgiven for giving Oxfam a miss.

The lesson is, when you’re the spokesperson for an organisation, nothing is off the record. If you can’t trust yourself to say something, perhaps it is better to say nothing at all. ‘No comment’ isn’t always a great first response, but if there is already a statement available to the public, it doesn’t necessarily need elaborating on unless events change.

Meanwhile, a printed apology on A4 is tacked on the door of our local Oxfam shop. Soon, KFC branches will be buzzing again. Oxfam may now be a name that is permanently tarnished. (Charities do change name; the Spastics Society, which we don’t even like writing, changed to Scope when they felt their name was ‘holding them back’.)

But it would be a real tragedy if the legacy of this week were the damage to Oxfam’s reputation ultimately impacted in the people who the charity was set up to help. Mr Goldring’s unthinking comment may be felt hardest by some of the people in the world most in need of aid.

This article appears on Nadine Dereza’s website as well as PS Programmes.

The post Kentucky Fried Crisis appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

It’s tempting, especially for those of us whose skill set falls in what might broadly be called ‘the creative industries’, to think that we are immune from the onslaught of smart machines: who wants a robot to present their conference? Or design their logo? Or write a restaurant review (‘I started with a delicious WD40 before moving onto the main course…’)? But the reality is that nobody is going to fail to feel the touch of artificial intelligence in their lives, and that means in their jobs.

The usual technology rules apply: what starts off as a niche idea in a lab on top of the cost mountain today, rolls quickly down, getting cheaper and gathering applications along the way. By the time it hits the village at the bottom, it’s unstoppable, and everyone gets hit by the avalanche.

The Japanese seem to be the culture with the greatest capacity for enthusiastic adoption of robot technology – such as a humanoid robot plastic priest Pepper has put itself up for hire as a Buddhist priest for funerals.

Which is slightly reminiscent of Douglas Adams’s Electric Monk (who believes in all the things you don’t have time to believe in yourself).

The Artificial intelligence snowball has been rolling down the mountainside for some time now, and is beginning to bounce off the chalets of the companies that can stand the cost – and want the edge that the technology promises.

Narrative Science based in Chicago, takes data and turns it into natural language. What does this mean? An early iteration of their software generated newspaper reports of Little League games based on the data fed into it: ‘Friona fell 10-8 to Boys Ranch in five innings on Monday at Friona despite racking up seven hits and eight runs. Friona was led by a flawless day at the dish by Hunter Sundre, who went 2-2 against Boys Ranch pitching…’

Feed in data from a stock market, and get out a clear picture of what’s going on, and you can make informed, human decisions about which stocks to back while your rivals are still pouring over a spreadsheet. Feed in data from an Ebola outbreak and you know where to direct resources. So what does this mean for our line of work – presentation, crisis media management, live events? The mantra of the AI industry is that the technology won’t be stealing your job, but it will change it.

Does this mean we will soon be settling down to watch a robot deliver a keynote speech at a conference? Unlikely. Instead of worrying that technology is going to make your job obsolete, think instead about how it will be made different. The potential is for data itself to change. Computers won’t be calling the shots, but they may decide what information to put in front of the human who makes the final decision.

At live events, technology has been most evident on media screens and audience polls. But let’s consider just one data-driven part of the events industry: feedback is always the vital part of an event that the organisers are keen to capture. If there were an easier, more natural way of gathering this data – an eavesdropping robot that understands natural speech springs to mind – this could have an impact on how the next conference is put together. Another application, purely from the presenter’s point of view, is that there is often a lot of audience feedback, some of it written, some of it spoken, and some of it on social media. Part of the presenter’s job is to sort out relevant information from a lot of noise – and do it under pressure, whilst providing a balanced representation of reality. AI would be able to pull out the main points being raised across more channels and from more sources than the human brain can manage, and deliver it with relevant facts or statistics to the presenter via a tablet or earpiece. This is just one way that AI could lift some of the weight without the audience necessarily being any the wiser!

We can all think of the benefits, but what are the risks? Once you’ve discounted the Terminator scenario, in which machines realise that all the world’s problems really are human-shaped, the downsides of AI are the same as with any other technology: using it wrong, and blaming the machine for not doing what it was supposed to do. The greatest danger is in our own biases and beliefs: consider the Dunning-Kruger effect which is a known and demonstrable cognitive bias in which a person with low ability or knowledge mistakenly believes they have a much higher ability or knowledge than they do in reality. You know you’re feeling the Dunning-Kruger effect when you start a task with confidence – and then find it’s harder than you thought. You might also have been frustrated by meeting someone who knows nothing of your job but assumes it to be easy.

Couple that with cognitive dissonance which is our ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time – for example, that medicine works, we can split an atom and land people on the moon, but that 97% of scientists are wrong about climate change. Combining these two – a belief that we’re smarter than we think we are, plus a belief that is contrary to all known data – and you have a potentially toxic mix of determinedly disregarding all the benefits that AI can provide.

This isn’t to say we should do everything the machines tell us to do; it does mean that we may be more confident than we ought to be about our ability to sort good advice from bad, and the great gift that computers may give to us may be a greater understanding of our own fallibility. The more computers talk like us, the more we are going to imbue them with human qualities. The danger down the line is that the sort of solid, dependable data on which we should base our decisions, becomes no more valuable than opinion. We may ‘feel’ we are right. And we may turn out to be very, very wrong.

This article appears on Nadine Dereza’s website as well as PS Programmes.

Our bespoke programmes are designed with your needs in mind; so whether it’s gearing up to speak at a large scale event, pitching for new business, or simply improving your one on one communication skills, we can help. Our team all have a hands-on connection to live events and the media, it’s our practical experience that will help you perform at your best.

The post ‘What AI means for leaders’ appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

The facts of the case are these: a United Airlines flight was overbooked and four crew members needed to be transported to make another flight. Passengers were offered money to give up their seats, and as none did so, passenger David Dao was selected to make way for a staff member. Dao refused on the grounds that he had patients waiting for him at his destination, and the matter was escalated to the point that Dao was forcibly removed from the plane by armed aviation police in an incident that Dao’s lawyer says left him bloodied, concussed, and with missing teeth.

The impact of the incident was a dramatic decline in United’s share price, a civil suit against the airline, and a huge hit to the company’s reputation when footage of the incident appeared on news websites, television, and social media. In the past, United might’ve got away with an incident like this, but in the days of Facebook Live, Periscope, and Snapchat, dramatic events are now nearly always captured on camera live at-the-scene, courtesy of the world’s growing army of citizen journalists.

Some stories are ‘sticky’ – the incident cannot be shaken off. When a Delta pilot struck a passenger on another flight on 21 April, less than two weeks after the United incident, the new story didn’t overtake the original; it merely dredged up the United incident again. United’s CEO Oscar Munoz reacted by, er, praising the actions of the employees during the incident.

Quite apart from hastily coming to the wrong conclusion, it was inevitable the letter would be leaked to the press – Munoz should’ve kept in mind that anything written down can and will end up being leaked to the media if it’s attached to a big story (and it was). By placing the emphasis on the employees rather than putting things right with the customer, Munoz gave the impression that United was taking a bunker mentality approach to the incident, and not looking out to the rest of the world. ‘Why do you hate the American people?’ one representative asked Munoz at the House Transportation Committee hearing, dangerous language in America’s currently jingoistic political atmosphere. This question came at a hearing held to discuss whether US airlines needed legislation to sort out customer service issues, or whether this could be achieved as an industry.

The United story has and will continue to create ripples, some of which circle back around in unexpected ways. For example, an unrelated story around a fast food restaurant gave the United board another cause for indigestion. When burger and chicken chain Wendy’s was approached on Twitter with the question ‘Yo @Wendys how many retweets for a year of free chicken nuggets?’ the company responded with a sensible answer, ’18 million.’ Customer Carter Wilkerson gave them their publicity and a warm, fuzzy feel-good story was created. Wilkerson’s plea has now been retweeted more than 3.5 million times and is the most retweeted tweet of all time. When United decided to try and get in on the Wendy’s game – by offering a free flight to Wilkerson – their ploy backfired spectacularly.

Twitter smelled cynicism and United got another mauling. It wasn’t just a communications misstep; it was a complete omnishambles: the incident with David Dao was immediately brought up again and the United brand faced further criticism. Why?

Our three golden principles of communication at PS Programmes are authority, authenticity, and audience. The airline has the authority to make things happen, whether that is a free flight or an out of court settlement – or doing the thing that you’ve paid them to do like honour the details on the ticket. The authenticity part of the equation is a bit more nebulous, but essentially, the actions and the words have to match up: you cannot say one thing and do another. Finally, you must take the audience reaction into account. United’s actions were an open invitation to the Twittersphere to turn the knife.

United was a classic case of the butterfly effect: the idea that seismic events can spring from small causes. ‘Businesses run complex systems so a small error in one part of the system can have an unpredictable large impact elsewhere,’ says Eric Priezkalns, a former Deloitte consultant and editor of Commsrisk. ‘Customers are more informed, more powerful than ever before because they can connect and act together like never before. United carries 143 million passengers a year but social media means one terrible incident can be global news – the butterfly effect!’

So what went wrong? A couple of things: while Dao may have settled out of court, the long-term damage for United is yet to be reckoned. The incident has truly gone viral, escaping the original context and appearing in other places to tell other stories – such as the front cover of an issue of the New Yorker.

Even if United’s settlement prevents Dao from being the voice of disgruntled customers, his bloodied face could be a lazy photo editor’s illustration of hostility in hospitality for years to come.

And by offering Wilkinson a free flight, United looked as though they were being excessively nice to one person, and excessively nasty to someone else. Twitter has seen the footage of Dao being dragged away, and an image paints more than 140 characters, let alone a thousand words. The free flight offer was too little, too late, to the wrong person, and in the light of Wilkerson’s tweet being one of the most retweeted of all time, too exposed. This hits the company’s authority and makes them look out of control, which is bad for a brand, and disastrous if you’re an airline.

United also looked like they were piggybacking on someone else’s success to remedy their damage. This is a gut punch to all ideas of authenticity. United needs a campaign that is original, gets traction, and puts things right with the customer – not necessarily Dao, but something that speaks to people like him. It needs to come from the heart. Think about why Wilkerson and Wendy’s are doing so well. He’s 16, and is cheekily asking for a freebie. Wendy’s has laid down a challenge, and he’s accepted. There are no great stakes here – it’s a bit of fun with a teenager with chutzpah (and we all know someone like that) and a fast food place that most people are familiar with. When United offered to throw in an unasked for free flight, it felt like a figurative smack in the face to customers like Dao who have paid for a ticket and been treated badly.

To top off this perfect storm, United crucially misunderstood the audience they were reaching. Travellers don’t want to be pulled from their seats, and they don’t regard being beaten up as something that can be put right in a playful Twitter game. United’s future customers don’t want to see a faceless big business cynically wooing their dollar with a freebie flung at someone who only seems to be getting it because they’re momentarily famous.

United have to do a lot of work to rebuild their reputation and it won’t happen overnight. They need to face their responsibility (authority), and make genuine reparations (authenticity) in a way that speaks to their core customers (audience). Or they can hope it all goes away and people forget about it. A risky strategy… even the self-acknowledged king of the PR gaff Gerald Ratner never got things THAT wrong.

This article appears on Nadine Dereza’s website as well as PS Programmes.

The post The butterfly effect: United Airlines in a flap appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

Seventy-five years since Desert Island Discs was first broadcast we’re sure its creator Roy Plomley could never have imagined how his simple idea for a radio programme would go on to become one of the BBC’s longest-running and most loved programmes.

We’re huge fans of Desert Island Discs at PS Programmes so to celebrate its 75^th Anniversary this year, I have decided to (temporarily) cast away members of the PS Programmes team over the next few blog posts.

But before I introduce our first cast away, for anyone unfamiliar with the format of the show (perish the thought!): in each episode a guest is invited to choose eight recordings they would most like take with them if they were to find themselves stranded on a desert island. Guests are also given the Complete Works of Shakespeare and either the Bible or another religious or philosophical work. They are then invited to select a third book and one luxury item to take with them.

Our first PS Programmes castaway is… Ian Hawkins

Writer turned-comedian, presenter, award-winning public speaker Ian Hawkins is our first team member to be cast away. This much loved PS Programmes coach has written for BBC One’s Politics Show, Channel Four’s The 11 O’Clock Show, Loose Ends, The News Quiz, and The Treatment for BBC Radio (“Quite simply, week in, week out, the best satirical show on the radio” – Heat Magazine). Ian has also written for high profile comedians over the last twelve years and for five years he worked as an agent at one of the UK’s biggest specialist speaker agency, working with speakers including as Sebastian Coe, Eliza Manningham-Buller and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Ian’s eight Desert Island Discs are:

Mahler: O! Mensch (from Symphony 3, sung by Jessye Norman)

Ian says: “It has to be Jessye – she was soloist at the first big gig I ever did at the Festival Hall. You haven’t really heard this piece until you’ve sat behind the timpani and can hear the creak of the violins and rattle of the brass.”  

Emperor Yes: Cosmos

I think “each star may be a sun to someone” is a quote from Carl Sagan. On my desert island I’ll certainly need a bit of a perspective – and some first class drumming to boogie to. 

Bach: Prelude 1 in C Major

It’s incredibly simple, but it underpins how music is structured. I love Bach for his ability to press the “reset” switch on a busy mind. I never fail to be calmed and cheered by this piece.

Kirsty MacColl: Soho Square

There are so many Kirsty MacColl tracks to choose from but this one wins because it showcases that amazing voice and paints a picture of the Soho I’ll be missing from my desert island. A reminder of appointments not kept and the people waiting for me to construct a raft to paddle back to civilization. 

Kingmaker: 10 Years Asleep

If you were at Club Art in the 90s on £1-a-pint Tuesdays, you won’t need this explaining to you. And if you weren’t there, you wouldn’t understand anyway; I’m not going to pretend to care (when I don’t care). Anyway, I’m going to brew rudimentary alcohol with tropical fruits and coconut water, crank my gramophone up LOUD and dance around the camp fire to this in the remnants of my plaid shirt. 

Vaughn Williams: Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis

This is one of those pieces that is entirely impossible to put into words. One for a quiet night watching the sun setting on a watery horizon. Music can really take you places, and if I’m going to be stuck on an island, this will be my escape. 

Stephen Sondheim: I’m Still Here (sung by Shirley MacLaine in Postcards From the Edge)

I had to pick a Sondheim, and I loved this from the first time I saw it. If I have to endure living on this desert island, I’ll still be here when the rescue comes – complete with high kicks. Whatever life throws at you, you have to ride with it.  

David Gilmour: Rattle That Lock

Not Comfortably Numb? No – this is off Gilmour’s last album, and is a reminder you’re never too old to rock. Freedom is a state of mind, baby – you’re as free as you want to be. I saw this live at a tiny gig recently, and it has some very happy memories. 

If Ian could pick only one of these records it would be Kirsty MacColl: Soho Square

Ian’s book and luxury item selection

In addition to the “Complete Works of Shakespeare” Ian would take “On The Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin and his third book would be a big book of songs for buskers. His luxury item would be an electric guitar with a huge amp, (which is technically two items, but I’ll let Ian off just this once!).

Join me next time when my cast away will be PS Programmes Head of Communications Tom York.

This article appears on Nadine Dereza’s website as well as PS Programmes. Nadine is the co-author of the best selling book Insider Secrets of Public Speaking.

The post Desert Island Discs at 75: A PS Programmes tribute appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

In my third and final instalment of my series on charisma, I’m going to give you some tips and tricks on how to inject more charisma into your stage presence and suggest an approach to speaking that may be new to you.

The story so far…

I’ve explored what makes speakers charismatic and impactful. I’ve considered how charisma can be both a positive and negative force, and I’ve examined how charisma is brought about in a live event. In summary, charisma is not so much a judgement on the speaker, but rather a comment on the relationship between the speaker and the audience; for the successful speaker to master the tricky element of charisma, he/she needs to understand the importance of controlling this relationship, and calling the shots without turning the audience against him/her. (Part of this is realising that you can’t please all the people all the time!)

I also observed that charismatic speakers have status, and make sharing this status accessible to others in an inclusive fashion, sometimes in the face of overwhelming jeopardy. It is, above all else, a powerful bond between speaker and audience.

Let’s look at a few ways of first, gaining status as a speaker, and second, making that status accessible.

Gaining status as a speaker

There are many things that give you status when you walk onto a platform – and many things that can take status away. Preparation is absolutely key: things like checking the microphones don’t feedback when you start speaking, and that you’re properly lit are vital.

When you walk on, you want to look as though you’re supposed to be there. I know of one comedian who specialises in ‘MCing’ (the act that warms up the audience and introduces other acts). Before he goes on, he repeats to himself, ‘I am in charge! I am in charge!’ before stepping in front of the rowdy mob. Your audience might not be rowdy, but it’s a good way of bolstering your mood before you walk on.

Illusionist and performer Derren Brown is particularly good at telling people he’s in charge with his gestures and body language. In Brown’s Evening of Wonders programme Brown’s eye contact with the audience member doesn’t wobble, his arms are wide, expansive, and he looks very confident for someone about to do something apparently impossible.

What to wear

When it comes to presentation of yourself, of course you need to think about what you are wearing. Do you want to fit in with the rest of the audience – or be ‘apart’? I’ve seen comedians at black tie functions performing in black tie (they feel like they are part of the event), I’ve also seen some wearing a smart suit (which manages to convey they are separate from the event but respectful of it), and others wear street clothes (which looks a bit disrespectful, particularly if they are not a ‘known’ comedian). A call ahead can make sure you match what the other people are wearing – and if in doubt, it’s sometimes wise to have a change of tie or accessory that can make an outfit more or less dressy.

Whatever you wear, you will be sending a message, so make sure it is the message you want to send. If you’re sending out unintended messages, the audience will pick up on these rather than the message you want to send, and you’ll look as if you’ve lost control. Your status will slip, and the audience will leave with a different impression to the one you were trying to convey.

Demeanour

Your demeanour is also important. I occasionally show clients a clip of zoologist Dr Tristram Wyatt talking about human pheromone analysis (over a million views, but not all of them from us) to critique.

I like this because unlike what most people think about presentation training, at PS Programmes we’re not about getting people to ‘show off’. Dr Wyatt’s demeanour is laid back, under-played, almost awkward, but above all, quietly confident as he takes a scientific look at a subject some of us might feel awkward about. We feel, as an audience, that we are getting authentic and hard-won knowledge from Dr Wyatt: everything he does underlines and reinforces his message.

Managing your nerves

Getting on top of your nerves is helpful to make a first impression. I often counsel that an audience should be on your side – but not worried about you. I don’t think it’s a complete disaster to be a bit nervous when you go on – it gives some speakers a vital spark of pep and energy – but you should avoid the temptation to apologise for being nervous. Nerves are a fact of life, and you can control them to a certain extent. What you can’t do is communicate to the audience that the nerves are in charge of you.

Here’s a tip you can deploy on stage and elsewhere: imagine you are the host of a fabulous party. Champagne in the fountain, Elton John playing the piano in the corner, the great and good nibbling canapés. Just imagine yourself welcoming people to this party, and you will find yourself playing the role of the host: shoulders down, ready smile, hospitable and friendly, yes, but ultimately in charge. This is exactly the attitude to adopt on stage, and if you’re a naturally nervous performer, channeling the energy into giving people a good time is an excellent strategy to go from nervous wreck to actually enjoying your time presenting/speaking.

Back to the practicalities: how are you going to be introduced? You may or may not have control over this. Whoever is introducing you onto the speaking area, whether it’s a big stage or a square of carpet in the corner of the room, should end with your name so that you walk on to applause – but if they fluff this, ask the audience to applaud the person who introduced you and have a punchy, positive introduction for yourself, throwing in a bit of ‘feel good’ for the audience.

For example ‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you Rachel… such a busy programme, so I’m grateful to have your time today. My name is John Smith and as CEO of the world’s biggest widget company, I’m delighted to be speaking to you today…’

If things go wrong

Step up and be in charge as much as possible. I once saw a presenter struggling with a malfunctioning autocue (a screen which scrolls through the presenter’s script so that he or she doesn’t have to look down at their notes). He went off, and brought his paper script on from back stage. It didn’t exactly get him an applause break, but there was a clear sense of relief that from now on, the event would run more smoothly (and it did). If you know the name of the person in charge of the tech desk (and you should), it’s far better to thank them for getting things back up and running, rather than blaming them for things going wrong.

Think back to the party host tip above: if you’re playing the host, deal with the problem and move on. Nobody wants you to keep bringing up that spilled glass of red wine – or the crackling mic – time moves on and so should you.

Not blaming others is a clue to the other element of charisma: even as the speaker is walking to the centre of the stage, they need to signal to the others in the room that they are all part of the same group. Being nice to the sound desk for fixing your mic is not only magnanimous, it shows your willingness to collaborate with others in an open way, which in turn encourages others to drop their guard. To be truly charismatic, you need to build a strong rapport with the audience – look again at how Derren Brown does it: he is explicitly inviting the audience to join him in a role play game in which he is the mind reader and the audience are the helpless subjects. It’s safe, clean fun, and if everyone believes it, everyone enjoys it. Contrast this with Donald Trump, who built his entire US Presidential campaign on encouraging the people in the room to oppose the ‘other’ which moved into dangerous territory when the use of status and power got physical. This is the dark side of charisma; where the status and power turn into something far less positive.

I’d like to leave you with a final, positive example. Princess Diana was one of the most charismatic women to have lived, and was in the habit of sending ‘thank you’ cards to people she had met or heard from. These thank you notes were long enough to require her to write on both sides of the card. I think this is a very good metaphor for doing that little bit extra for audiences and others: what are you going to do that’s the equivalent of writing on both sides of the card? Sometimes, working out how to be a better speaker can help you to be a better person when you carry the lessons over into real life – going the extra mile, thinking about what the other person really wants (rather than what you want them to want) and leaving people feeling uplifted and motivated rather than back on the starting blocks.

I think these are practical, powerful approaches to take into account ahead of speaking in public: thinking less about what you are giving to the audience and more about what you are sharing with them. Too often we see speeches that are delivered like pronouncements from on high; I think that a good speech is really a dialogue that builds a relationship. This may be an entirely new approach to you, but a good relationship is better than your script’s best adjectives.

I also think that beyond the conference platform, you can use this knowledge to help your career and personal relationships – by building stronger and more collaborative partnerships, knowing when to lead and when to follow, and using your status to your advantage without treading on other people’s feelings. Use this new power wisely, and remember that your relationship with the audience is far more important than getting delivering the perfect line or sticking rigidly to the script. In the words of Maya Angelou: ‘I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’

For more advice and insight about how to nail your next speech or presentation take a look at the best-selling book Insider Secrets of Public Speaking by Nadine Dereza and Ian Hawkins.

The post The Power of Charisma (Part 3) – Hints, Tips & Tricks appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

We’ve been to plenty of the world’s conference centres, and the things we look for aren’t necessarily what the venues highlight on their websites. We want to know: does the wifi work? Will the venue manager panic when we say we want to plug a Mac into the projector? And how easy is it to get to?

Location is everything to the conference venue. In these times of ecological concern, a few hundred delegates catching a plane can put a dent in the most robust claims of carbon neutrality. It doesn’t matter how often you reuse your hotel bath towel, if you’ve missed out a carbon efficiency somewhere else, the carbon tally can soon add up.

Venues work well when they are at a hub, even if that means the London delegates complain all the way to Birmingham. Speaking of which, we were at Birmingham for the HBAA conference (which as you’d expect got all the details right) in which we found out the cost of a hotel room outside the capital makes events that last longer than a single day much more cost effective when they happen in the regions (and here’s a list of average hotel prices around the world: – believe it or not, London is not in the top ten).

Does Sydney count as a hub? Culturally more than geographically, perhaps. It is a profoundly international city with (unsurprisingly) a very strong Asian influence. And we mean ‘Asian’ and not ‘Chinese’: So Korea, Japan, Malaysia and India are all strongly represented in the city.

Sydney city centre is easier and faster to reach from the airport than most other cities – and indeed from many of Sydney’s own suburbs, many of which are most easily accessed by ferry. A pretty journey, but not necessarily a fast or efficient journey. The schlep to and from Gatwick has put a crimp in many an excursion, though we welcome the overdue investment of £120 million for the line. Heathrow is better, but we remember one harrowing occasion on which the Heathrow Express was overtaken by the slower Heathrow Connect service into Paddington. Credit where it’s due – we got an immediate refund on the ticket.

Sydney is 11 hours ahead, which from the British point of view puts it at a real advantage. In theory you can have a full day’s conference in Sydney before your London office has turned up on Monday morning. Or fly east across the International Date Line and catch the last of the weekend in a move that would have Doctor Who scratching his head and double-checking the control panel on the TARDIS.

But the other attraction of Sydney has a sting: China’s economic boom has come at the price of air quality. And while Sydney makes much of their sunny weather, the real selling point is that it is far away from the smog that makes many industrial cities in the east impossible to explore without breathing apparatus. The catchment area is so vast that getting anywhere means getting on a plane, so you might as well be brave and keep going until you reach Sydney.

All this is great news for Sydney, and although we travel the world, most of the work we do is here in the UK. What are the lessons for the conference organisers we work with the most? We always think that the best approach to deciding on anything is to ask the right questions and give honest answers. With that in mind, and putting the reliability of the Wi-Fi to one side, we think the major points for an organiser to consider are:

Is the conference a chance to get away from it all or a chance to plug into a wider world? We’ve seen the bunker mentality of a countryside hideaway work wonders on a business problem, and witnessed a bar crawl around Manchester masquerade as ‘networking’.

Is it important to be in a ‘landmark’ venue (such as Sydney Opera House) or would somewhere more anonymous serve your purposes better? Prestige can be a legitimate business need (we were particularly delighted to have our book launch in a venue as smart and stylish as King’s Place) but glamour can come at a price.

Is the event entirely business focused or is the opportunity to break out and get involved in other activities important? We are thinking particularly of the falconry at Gleneagles, but you might prefer the kayaks at London’s Excel, or Park Lane’s proximity to Harrods.

What is Plan B? The occasional North Atlantic volcano may put the kibosh on your best-laid plans once in a generation, but there are always strikes, engineering works, traffic jams and bad weather happening on a daily basis. Knowing more than one way to the venue may save your event.

Finally, can we make a last plea to conference venues all over the world? Many places get this right, but all too often, venues are fronted by gatekeepers whose reaction to being asked directions to join 6,000 delegates attending a three day international conference that is currently happening in their venue is one of disbelief. It’s the mark of a professional to be in the right place at the right time, but so often we find the first hundred miles to the venue to be the easy part, and the last hundred yards to the right suite to be much more challenging…

This article appears on PS Programmes website as well as Nadine Dereza’s website. Nadine is the co-author of the best selling Insider Secrets of Public Speaking

The post Coming Up Down Under: a new ICC for Sydney appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

We always endeavour to be politically neutral with this blog. Sure, we’ve singled out the occasional politician for praise, and sometimes criticism, but always (we hope) with the remit of PS Programmes foremost: it’s not the content that we’re concerned with, so much as the delivery. More than once we’ve highlighted a particularly skilful speaker with a slightly heavy heart, as we wonder why they cannot use their talents for the greater good. But that’s only our opinion.

Here, then, are a few ways of keeping solidly on the fence, however tempting the grass on either side might be. Fence-sitting, when done with panache and style, is essential for the professional interviewer. There are bound to be plenty of social gatherings between now and the announcement of the referendum result where keeping your opinions to yourself would be a wise choice. At best, by remaining neutral, you can keep in the good books of a host who realises with dread that the notorious bore who has found their way over to you is the worst company after six glasses of red wine.

Avoiding Arguments
The dullest of conversations often involve ‘True Believers’ flinging their opinions at one another. Generating plenty of heat and noise, and very little light. If you’re in the cross fire you’ll be invalided off the battlefield long before the real combatants have settled into a grouchy stalemate.

A good way to find out whether you are dealing with a ‘True Believer’ is to ask a very simple question: ‘What would it take to convince you that you are wrong?’ If the answer is ‘Nothing’, then you might as well talk about something else. You might investigate why they feel as they do, or how they would cope when things don’t go their way, and all of this can be discussed with a neutral approach.

So long as you are not moderating a debate in front of an audience, you can let two ‘True Believers’ have a go at each other for hours on end. They will have a fun time and quite possibly leave as the best of friends as barristers on opposing sides of a court case often are.

Measure your words
Does one side of the debate have a particular trigger word? In the EU debate, ‘bureaucrats’ is the word that springs to mind for the ‘out’ campaign, while the ‘in’ team is going with ‘safer’ and associated synonyms. Words and phrases can take on a life of their own, and come adrift from their original meaning. ‘Education, education, education,’ was all very laudable, but if you were critical of education policy at the time, you’d find yourself being accused of being ‘anti-education’ – even if you were in fact suggesting a better way of doing it than was being proposed.

Being aware of these words, and avoiding them wherever possible, is a good strategy. When moderating, it’s vital to keep an ear attuned for such words, as they are often used as a sort of code, and it’s sometimes more illuminating to drill down and find out what these words mean to the person who is using them. In the US elections, it’s currently in vogue for the Republican nominees to say that they are ‘taking our country back.’ We are not sure quite what this means: back from who? Back from where? Back from what? It’s vague – but vague can be useful if you’re trying to appeal to a broad group of people, as they can project their own meaning on a meaningless slogan.

Words and phrases like these can turn into cliché, and you can sometimes spot someone who has trotted out a phrase so often, they will parrot it on autopilot when it is out of context, makes no sense, or to make a completely unrelated point. While he was Labour leader in the UK, Ed Miliband seemed to respond to casual questions with responses honed to within an inch of their lives at Labour HQ, which gave the impression that… well it’s hard to say. Judge Ed Miliband’s performance for yourself.

A cliché always makes us think that whoever is using it has temporarily ducked out of responsibility for their own thoughts, and if you’re on the cusp of one yourself, it might be worth taking a moment to think about expressing yourself differently.

As George Orwell once said, ‘Never use a cliché unless you are coining one.’

When one side claims ownership of a word (like ‘bureaucrat’ or ‘safer’) they should be mindful of how they use them. If you’re being deliberately neutral, using one side’s words without clear inverted commas makes you sound as though you have picked a side.

‘I don’t follow football’
This is the nuclear option of neutrality, and familiar to anyone whose circle of friends includes a decent number of football fans: whenever discussion of teams is in full swing, someone will be asked, ‘who do you support?’ And will respond, ‘I don’t follow football.’ All within earshot will drop their jaws and a good many seconds of shocked silence will fall on those assembled.

We have never seen cricket fans, rugby fans or music fans react with quite such intense incredulity. * (See footnote)

‘I don’t follow football’, or whatever equivalent phrase you find yourself deploying, remains the gold standard when it comes to avoiding arguments, as declaring yourself independent from the entire debate forces whoever you are talking to into explaining why the debate matters in the first place. Very much like measuring your words, you can position yourself into talking about the debate rather than engaging in it. Two questions that are guaranteed to get interesting answers are: ’What do your opponents say?’ and ‘Why do they say that?’ Very occasionally, you’ll see someone entertaining a notion that they might not have previously considered.

Three quick don’ts…

1. Don’t… Attempt to lighten the mood with trivial arguments
Yes, the EU referendum ‘out’ campaign necktie is a hideous clash of colours that is upsettingly garish, but if you say that, you will get a face full of hard facts from someone who is taking all of this much more seriously than you.

2. Don’t… Leave your true feelings to the last moment
Either you have a horse in the race or you don’t. It’s better to kick yourself for not saying something you believed in all the way home than it is to leave everyone feeling (rightly) that you misrepresented yourself and only showed your true colours as you were walking out of the door – a bit like Michael Gove and Boris Johnson inviting speculation right up to the 11th hour before announcing their intentions in the EU referendum campaign. Experience tells us that this flash of opinion often manifests as a joke, and jokes can too-easily fall flat, be misinterpreted and occasionally backfire. You’ll be talked about after you’ve gone, and it won’t be complimentary.

3. Don’t… Get personal
Disliking someone whose opinion you disagree with is easy. The higher path is to find the likeable and admirable traits in someone whose opinions are different from your own. Seeing Jeremy Corbyn share a stage with David Cameron on the EU issue may make you think rather better of whichever one you currently like the least. Speakers are more likely to persuade people with their principles than by airing personal grudges against someone.

Finally…
Neutrality doesn’t have to be dull. Properly deployed, it can shed more light on someone’s opinion that a tough adversarial stance. You’ll often learn more about someone’s argument and their character by taking the softly-softly approach, and if you happen to disagree with them, understand why their choices are different to your own. You are more likely to spot the flaws in your own arguments – and if you find yourself saying, ‘this is my view and no evidence to the contrary will change my mind on it’, ask yourself why that view can appeal to you even if the facts themselves don’t?

The EU referendum on whether Britain should remain in the European Union is to be held on Thursday 23 June.

* I support QPR, if you must know.

This article appears on Nadine Dereza’s website as well as PS Programmes.
Nadine Dereza is the co-author of the best selling Insider Secrets of Public Speaking.

The post How to be politically neutral until the EU referendum appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

Only last week, an esoteric book on the art of performance was pressed into our hands, written by a very well-known entertainer currently preparing for a season in London’s West End. Careful reading of the book (currently available from Amazon at £139.99) revels that our three Golden Principles of public speaking are echoed in its pages, though they are directed at a specific sector of professional entertainers, and aren’t put in quite such explicit terms as you’ll find in our more modestly-priced volume.

We are resisting the urge to make ‘Insider Secrets’ ten times more expensive and much harder to get hold of.

So let’s start by looking at one of our three golden principles of public speaking – THE AUDIENCE. What have we been talking about with our clients this year when its comes to thinking about the audience?

Putting the audience first is the best way to not only tackle nerves, but also to make a start on deciding what to actually do in a meeting or on stage.

Nerves, the perennial issue that we face with coaching clients, are a self-fulfilling prophecy: you don’t want to look nervous, and so you focus on hiding it – which only makes it more distracting and unmanageable. Even speakers who don’t look nervous can worry about it. Recently, a speaker finished a brilliant and confident presentation, and told us immediately afterwards she felt nervous throughout. What could she do about her nerves? We counselled that if the 200 audience members (including a couple of professional speaker coaches) couldn’t spot her anxiety, perhaps it wasn’t a big problem after all. Getting the problem into perspective and changing the focus was, we felt, more useful than spending a long time tackling something that wasn’t, at the end of the day, making any difference to the speaker’s performance – except in her own head.

Another speaker really was having trouble controlling his nerves, and the audience knew it. From the back of the room, you could see that this was a nervous person, and so our approach was rather different. Rather than trying to fool the audience (which is a guaranteed way of neither relaxing nor connecting with the people in the room), we suggested that he told an anecdote about a situation in which he felt uncomfortable. The speaker’s next speech opened with a story about clashing cultures, and his genuine nervousness was interpreted by the audience as a neat bit of acting embarrassed by the faux pas he was describing. The speaker’s evident discomfort added to the storytelling, the audience was won over and on his side, and the speaker relaxed into the rest of his speech.

We often see speakers tackling their nerves head-on and telling the audience that they feel awkward in the spotlight – which at least avoids the problem of trying to hide their growing anxiety. Many people do this and although it isn’t always a bad approach to take, if you’re putting yourself out there as an expert or a leader, it takes away some of your authority which can be difficult to win back, so it isn’t something we recommend.

This focus on the audience’s reaction is a reality check for all of us who speak in public. Many performers would say that they couldn’t enjoy themselves if the audience didn’t have a good time too – so take care of the audience before you worry about yourself.

This leads us into content – another big worry for speakers. What are you actually going to talk about?

We took a call from a writer who had been asked to speak after dinner. Our questions…Who was at the dinner? Why were they there? Why had she been booked? They were all answered with ‘I don’t know.’ Our next conversation on the following day was a lot more constructive: she’d been in touch with the organisers and found out there were 80 local business owners, it was their regular networking event, and the last speaker had been a local politician who had been partisan and dull, so they wanted someone to be provocative but not divisive. Immediately we were able to start thinking about what the audience wanted: a few interesting anecdotes (interesting, not necessarily funny), which would spur some conversation, something about customer experience which the writer had some expertise in, and above all, getting off stage before everyone found their phones more interesting than the speech. Our speaker threw in the idea for presenting some jokey made-up awards to people she knew would be in the audience and up for a laugh – and her ‘after dinner’ turn virtually wrote itself.

When the speaker thought about herself, she had no idea what to say. When she thought about the audience, she realised that she had all sorts of fascinating and insightful experiences to share that they would enjoy.

Having a conversation with the audience is really what it is all about. If you were speaking to one person you’d moderate what you said to engage and hold their interest. An audience is no different, and while there is some truth in the line about not being able to please all of the people all of the time, putting their needs first takes you a long way down that road.

We’ll be looking at our other Golden Principles in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, the book that shows you how they work in real-world situations is still available at Amazon.

This article appears on Nadine Dereza’s website as well as PS Programmes.
Nadine Dereza is the co-author of the best selling Insider Secrets of Public Speaking.

The post 3 Golden Principles of Public Speaking: #1 – The Audience appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

Whether you’re speaking at a conference or spearheading a political campaign, you need to be aware of these takeaway moments. Politicians like a sound-bite (‘Education, education, education’ anyone?) but the best wordsmiths of all create pictures that stay with the audience. Think about Churchill with nothing to offer but ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat,’ or even ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ – a sort of boiled-down wise answer to a naive question. Coined in 1992, it’s being wheeled out to this day in the run up to the US Presidential Election

Few politicians have more than one defining characteristic, so when Ed Miliband failed to shake off a resemblance to the human half of Wallace and Gromit, inelegantly eating a bacon sandwich turned out to be a photo op he couldn’t recover from.

Sometimes a single picture redefines a situation.

The tragic and heartbreaking photograph of Aylan Kurdi’s body washed up on the beach was, for many, the point in the Syrian crisis that the mood changed. A quick look at the front pages of the national press before and after publication of the picture show how this affected the way the news was reported, when immigrants became refugees, which in turn prompted a grassroots aid effort, and shocked European leaders to temper their voter-friendly ‘tough on migrants’ stance with some human compassion.

Those of us with children were also caught in a quandary: could we protect them from seeing the picture? Should we? And how do parents explain something as complex as the refugee crisis to their children when their own understanding of it might not go much beyond the pictures?

Whether to publish or not to publish was something the Guardian considered carefully.

The media – both print and broadcast, are increasingly playing catch up to citizen journalists who distribute their content via the internet. If people are accessing information online, the decisions made by editors in newsrooms are becoming less and less relevant. This online content is the stuff that alerts us to tragedy and need, and the better part of human nature reaches out to help those who cannot help themselves. These are the same pictures, however, that cause radicalisation, the growth of terrorist organisations, and spark the sorts of situations that refugees are trying to escape.

Of course the press should be free. But there comes a point when the facts get lost under an avalanche of data. The internet allows users to spread their search wide – too wide, in fact. So often people look for sources that confirm what they already believe, and the evidence for that is the growth of creationism in the United States – a view that fifty years ago was profoundly niche but which is steadily growing if not in popularity, then certainly in noisy social media memes.

Too much data renders the viewer exhausted. The latest disaster can become wallpaper for all but the most compassionate. When something terrible happens closer to home, the locals often appear on the television to say that ‘this sort of thing doesn’t happen around here,’ even though they read about this sort of thing happening in other places over their cornflakes every day. But suddenly, this crisis is different. It’s different because it now has a name. And although Aylan Kurdi was not the first child to die in this developing situation, he also won’t be the last. But he was the one who was photographed. Let’s not also forget his brother Galib and their mother, Rehan, they too suffered the same fate as Aylan.

Donations to the Red Cross can be made by clicking on this link.

This article appears on Nadine Dereza’s website as well as PS Programmes.
Nadine Dereza is the co-author of the best selling Insider Secrets of Public Speaking.

The post Picture Power appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

There are a few things we have been discussing that we think are going to make a big difference to enterprise, and sure enough these were covered in depth during a day intended to give a boost to those attending.

The most important thing is that big organisations create a friendly working environment for smaller ones. Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude has already set the target that by May 2015, 25% of all government spending should be through small businesses. Government currently spends £230bn every year on products and services so when Lord Young re-affirmed Cabinet Office’s aspiration as the opener to the event it appealed to everyone in the room.

The problem, however, is that ‘small business’ is defined as a business of up to 49 employees. We’ve been in some pretty substantial small businesses and although we applaud the government’s commitment to directing 25% of total spending to them, don’t hold your breath that Number 10 will be getting their windows cleaned by Barry the Mop from ‘down the road’ any time soon.

It’s not until a company has more than 250 employees that a business is classed as ‘big’, which means that the overwhelming majority of businesses in the UK are SMEs.

But things are moving in the right direction. Another issue that affects SMEs, present company included, is prompt payment (or lack thereof). PS Programmes make a point of responding to invoices sooner rather than later, and we were delighted to learn that we weren’t alone: Jenny Nolan – SME champion at Fujitsu – spoke of being a signatory organisation of the Prompt Payment Code. Again, a crowd pleaser, as everyone has had experience of a large organisation suddenly becoming a faceless brick wall as the due date comes and goes.

On this theme, Sue Colbeck, Head of Procurement (pictured above), Aintree University Hospital NHS spoke on selling to NHS Trusts. Sue wins the PS Programmes Award for ‘Speaker of the Day’ (it’s a mince pie with our logo on) with her clear, concise and warm style. One of the key points of our book Insider Secrets of Public Speaking is finding out what the audience wants and making sure they get it. Sue spoke about how small businesses can best navigate the NHS minefield, her talk was peppered with great tips, and there was plenty of note taking in evidence. It’s this sort of practical advice that really makes these days worthwhile to those attending: one tweak to a pitch might win the business and change the fortunes of a company.

This, along with the online procurement catalogue G-Cloud (described by Stephen Allott, Crown Representative for SMEs, as ‘the Amazon for government’) has revolutionised the way government buys IT services. Evidently, the public sector contracts world is awash with bid writers who spend all day every day pitching for government contracts in the sort of language that would give Sir Humphrey a headache. Clearly these services will be beyond many SMEs, who ought to welcome the G-Cloud’s offer of a slightly flatter playing field.

‘Presentation Team of the Day Award’ (they are sharing the PS Programmes mince pie) was, for us, on the sales space/ pop-up revolution – a great double header with Transport for London (TfL) and Appear Here talking about short-term retail space lettings. Appear Here bills itself as the leading marketplace to book short-term retail space. It was the instrumental organisation that worked with TfL in the redevelopment of the retail spaces at Old Street Underground station. Smaller, more affordable spaces are key to enterprise and give fledgling businesses a chance to put out some roots. These pop-up spaces, combined with card readers that can take payments for goods and services through a mobile phone are truly revolutionising the retail experience. We remember a time when HMV had two big stores on Oxford Street, and a concession in Selfridges. Now they have pulled their horns right back to their ‘original’ space by Bond Street. At the other end of the scale, well-reviewed food vans are moving into pop-ups, and pop-ups are expanding. No other industry comes close to the start-up failure rate of the restaurant trade, so any route that takes such an enterprise and grows it organically rather than remortgaging the house and hoping for the best has to be a good idea.

Finally, good news (we hope) for all those SMEs hoping to pitch their business to the government with the introduction of Contracts Finder. This is the government’s new, all singing, all dancing service, which lets SMEs search for information about contracts worth over £10,000 with the government and its agencies. Philip Sinclair from Cabinet Office presented on this, and although £10,000 might initially look like the arena in which big businesses are more comfortable, almost all government contracts are for five and six figures. If you find you are just shy of the threshold, your next step really should be to examine your offer and see what you can change to get the government interested.

SMEs like nothing more than a challenge. This open approach, coupled with the government commitment mentioned earlier really does open the door for the SMEs who haven’t had a look in until now.

Now that’s a nice little something for the Christmas stocking…

This article appears on Nadine Dereza’s website and PS Programmes website

The post All I want for Christmas is… a Contracts Finder appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

Is there a difference between freelancers and entrepreneurs? Entrepreneurs are portrayed as being bombastic risk-takers, while the soft-spoken freelancers get on with creating intellectual property. Our experience is more along the lines that the success stories – whether they call themselves freelancers or entrepreneurs – are people who first and foremost make things happen. Visiting a school brought home the thought that league tables worry so much about defining success by exam grades, that we risk forgetting some of the brightest entrepreneurs get by on this can-do attitude.

At the National Freelancers Day #NFD2014 event, organised by the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self Employed (IPSE) and hosted by legendary broadcaster Sue Lawley (pictured above with Tom), delegates were treated to a keynote speech from business journalist Declan Curry and a panel debate with LBC’s Nick Ferrari, Enterprise Nation brainchild Emma Jones MBE, Minister for Skills, Enterprise and Equalities Nick Boles MP, Shadow Small Business Minister Toby Perkins MP, and David Morris MP. David was a last minute addition to the panel, prompted presumably by David Cameron’s announcement earlier in the day that Mr Morris is the government’s newly appointed self-employed ambassador.

High on the agenda for most of those attending was the question of how to make life as a freelancer more straightforward: there was a real appetite for tax breaks that don’t take more trouble to claim than they are worth. As many freelancers outsource their accounting as soon as they can afford to, making money easier to deal with should be a priority. The other key trend in self employment is that although many businesses started at the kitchen table, a good number of collaborations now mature in coffee shops. As one woman told us: ‘When I was employed, my old office was so big, it had its own Starbucks. Now I’m self-employed, Starbucks is my office.’

For our money, there is a major impediment to young people considering self-employment, and that is the whole issue of whether or not someone decides to get a degree. The PS Programmes team is lucky enough to be of an age where going to university or a further education college after leaving school was an unalloyed great idea. Today, eighteen year-olds are seriously asking whether that piece of paper is worth three years (or more) of study, thousands of pounds of loans to pay back, and all to compete in a market where having a degree, apprenticeship or vocational qualification is the norm rather than the exception.

There is a reason why we keep returning to the statistic that 40% of undergraduates want to start their own business, yet less than 1% of graduates actually do it: most businesses start with a couple of people coming up with a good idea, building a product, selling it, and growing organically. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says that today’s students leave university with an average debt of £44,000. How many fledgling entrepreneurs can dedicate time to getting their businesses off the ground while they’re servicing that sort of debt? Answer: the rich ones.

All the major political parties have got their hands dirty over this issue: the Liberal Democrats went back on their election promise, the Conservatives put the prices up and it was Labour who introduced the idea of tuition fees in the first place. Unfortunately they have created an ideal scenario for the bright-but-broke to think that university or further study might not be for them. Graduates, at the perfect age for leveraging their social networks, fresh ideas and energy, are instead having to take jobs to pay back the sort of money that used to get you a decent flat.

Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by the likes of TV’s The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den: the entrepreneur is at risk of becoming an endangered species.

This article appears on Nadine Dereza’s website and PS Programmes website

The post Smells like entrepreneurial spirit appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

Forbes themselves evidently aren’t entirely sure what to say about her, as on the event website, the line up of speakers all have a line of explanation under their names: Questlove, musician, Sean Rad, Tinder, even Malala Yousafzai is tagged The Malala Foundation. Monica Lewinsky, however, is just Monica Lewinsky. No explanation required.

So I got Ian, our man in Manhattan to ask around what the public thought about Monica’s return. ‘She must be looking for money,’ says one of the blue collar workers waiting on line for a coffee in a deli on 8th Avenue. ‘It’s a bit odd. Coming out of the woodwork. So to speak.’ And a taxi driver who arrived from the Punjab less than three years ago knows her name and clicks his tongue in a manner that oozes disapproval.

‘My name is Monica Lewinsky,’ she says early on in the speech. ‘Though I have often been advised to change it, or asked why on earth I haven’t. But, there we are. I haven’t. I am still Monica Lewinsky.’

Cyber bullying was Lewinsky’s subject, and her qualification for addressing the topic was that she considers herself to be the first person to have their reputation trashed online – and this in an unimaginably distant past, a time before Twitter, Instagram or even Google (a frisson of amused half-panic rippled through the room as the young audience imagined what such a prehistoric lifestyle might have entailed). Lewinsky’s downfall came in the heady early days of the internet, and you don’t need to spend all day on Twitter to know that the internet can encourage some pretty female-unfriendly views.

It wasn’t always like this. Women caught up in scandals that were written about in newsprint rather than pixels came out of their experiences rather better than Monica did. Celebrated brothel-keeper, Cynthia Payne, whose clients included politicians, celebrities and high court judges is a folk hero. When Lord Astor denied having an affair with Mandy Rice-Davis, in the fall-out of the Profumo Affair her response – ‘He would, wouldn’t he?’ – made us think rather more of her and less of him. And in John Major’s ‘back to basics’ government in the 1990s, the powerful men who strayed were the ones who were caught out and punished. It is since the internet took off, that infidelity per se stopped being a cause for politicians to lose their jobs.

Back to Monica: is this speech the beginning of a new, public chapter in her life? We watched the speech with a critical eye, and were struck by a couple of things. Well written and slickly presented, we instinctively felt the invisible presence of a fellow coach. If you’re making your first public appearance for a decade, you want to get things right, keep your message clear and tell your side of the story. The most powerful part of the speech was indeed her re-telling of the major events that occurred when the story broke – the threats from the FBI, the name calling in the paper. ‘How would you feel?’ is the unspoken question.

In ‘Insider Secrets of Public Speaking’ we have Three Golden Principles, and Monica Lewinsky nailed them in her speech:

Authority – speaking from a direct and unique perspective. Who, apart from Monica Lewinsky, is as qualified to discuss this subject from personal experience?

Authenticity – we see the story through her own eyes, and she isn’t afraid to show the emotional impact the experience has had on her.

Audience – Lewinsky makes direct appeals to the audience, acknowledges their experience, and gives them an action point to take away with them.

The one thing that we would have avoided was the apology at the top. ‘It is only my fourth time delivering a speech in public… So if I seem nervous, forgive me, because I am.’ The problem was that her speech was then delivered without an ‘um’ or an ‘er’ – the usual signifiers of nerves – in sight. There is such a thing as being too polished, and anyone looking for an ulterior motive might find this an contradiction a bit jarring. We will give Monica the benefit of doubt, with the apology reasonably well justified – she did move close to tears at one point – and she was sensible, having said sorry for her nerves once, not to do so again.

We hope that this is the beginning of a more public life for Ms Lewinsky. Her speech was not only from the heart, it was timely. For every celebrity who’s had their iCloud account hacked, or for every unfortunate schoolgirl being bullied on Twitter (a big story in New Jersey is currently breaking about exactly this) – Monica Lewinsky’s story is the one that puts things into perspective.

Finally, she addressed the critics who didn’t want to see her in public again: ‘There are those who say, Monica, why don’t you just shut up? Why don’t you just go away? They said it in June, after a piece I wrote in Vanity Fair, my first public words in over ten years. And they will say it today after this one, my first major public talk, ever, and they will say it tomorrow and the day after that.’

The reason why she shouldn’t shut up is because even if you think her affair with Clinton made her a ‘scarlet woman’ and a ‘home-wrecker’ (both of these antique phrases taken, incidentally, from readers’ online comments recently), it is right that we should see the public rehabilitation of someone who, in her words, regrets ‘falling in love with my boss in a 22-year-old sort of a way. It happens.’

She shouldn’t shut up because she is right when she says that online behaviour and bullying is often far more extreme than anything that happens face-to-face.

And lastly, she shouldn’t shut up, because it takes two to tango, and if one party in the affair can continue to have a life, why shouldn’t she?

This article appears on Nadine Dereza’s website and PS Programmes website

The post Out of the shadows: Monica Lewinsky speaks appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

Authors Nadine and Ian descended early on Kings Place to set up The Battlebridge Room, a beautiful room overlooking the Regents Canal. Aided and abetted by our PR guru Tom York and friend Katherine Eyres (whose can-do attitude was the perfect match to our couldn’t-do reality) we had the books artfully stacked, the film crew briefed, and the pull-up banners, er, pulled up.

With everything in place, we then had that terrifying moment of eyeing the dozens of wine glasses being methodically filled by a bartender and hoping that people would show up to drink them.

By the end of the hour, the concern about getting through the wine was overtaken by the concern of getting around to say hello to everyone, which of course we couldn’t. The best view in the room was from the stage: family and friends and colleagues and clients all gathered together to launch the book, and this contrived metaphor was all the excuse (if excuse be needed) for getting rising stars on the comedy circuit, Jollyboat, to kick off the evening with bare chested songs of a piratical bent.

Nadine and Ian took questions from the audience about public speaking, and we answered them by taking on board our own advice, and concentrating on our ‘Three Golden Principles’ that have formed the basis of all the tips we give in the book. And if book sales are an indication of how the Q&A went, we were on the right track.

Learning outcomes: you can get a laugh from an audience by mentioning the words ‘deficit’ and ‘Ed Miliband’ in the same sentence, and Ian, armed with a roving microphone, makes a reasonable substitute for Anneka Rice in her Treasure Hunt heyday.

Nadine’s son, James, demonstrated that beneath the cherubic eight-year-old exterior lurks a fledgling Alan Sugar, whose sales pitch – ‘Buy the hardback, it’s more expensive!’ – worked like a charm.

At the end of the night, we were delighted to pack the car with considerably fewer copies of ‘Insider Secrets’ than we brought to Kings Place.

So what happens now? The PR juggernaut continues with Ian guest speaking at networking events over the weekend and Nadine booked to appear on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour this coming Wednesday.

If you’d like to be part of the journey of making ‘Insider Secrets of Public Speaking’ less of a secret, then follow Nadine (@NadineDereza) and Ian (@SmartMrHawkins) on Twitter for the latest news and updates and join in the conversation using the #ISOPS hashtag.

A selection of pictures from the night are available at Flickr

The book is available to buy from Amazon and reviews are a great help in keeping the momentum going on sales. Here’s the link: http://tinyurl.com/pokamot

If you know of (or find yourself watching) a speaker who you think could use some pointers, a recommendation of the book will be much appreciated. It could be the perfect Christmas present for the colleague, friend or prospective Best Man/Woman in your life.

Finally, we think ‘Insider Secrets of Public Speaking’ is good enough to earn a place on the shelves of every library in the country. Putting in a request at your nearest school, college or local library, will cost nothing, but will help inspire and nurture the employees and leaders of the future.

This article appears on www.nadinedereza.com and PS Programmes

The post Insider Secrets of Public Speaking Book Launch – Kings Place London October 2014 appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

We conducted an online survey to dig a bit deeper into the established findings that public speaking frequently tops people’s lists of scary things. Worse than clowns, spiders, and even death. But why? What specifically are people afraid of? The answer was unequivocal: 72% of people questioned, dread standing in front of others and forgetting their words.

There is something primal about his fear. We know a very established comedian who has the occasional dream that he is onstage and cannot speak. What’s strange about him having this dream is that he has never experienced something similar in real life. ‘I’ve always got something to say,’ he told us, ‘getting tongue tied is just completely inconceivable.’

By forgetting your words, you are losing status, and people are perhaps most afraid of making a fool of themselves. Speaking from a stage feels like an artificial situation, and in such unfamiliar circumstances, it can be hard to know what to do. The audience is looking to you to lead the way, and being able to convey a message to an audience – whether they are your staff or your clients – can instil a profound confidence in your leadership abilities. If you get it right.

Ed Miliband is smart enough to know that modern audiences need more from a speaker than someone who can read his entire speech from autocue or a script. He attempted to connect with the audience, doing the big speech from memory, to try and show us the real Ed Miliband. Unfortunately, the real Ed Miliband seemed to have forgotten about the deficit.

The last time we checked the reviews for our new book on Amazon, the top comment made particular reference to the section in which we discussed memory techniques. Briefly, we cover using cue cards or notes and some mnemonic systems – tricks to help you remember a speech. Just recently, we saw post-it notes stuck strategically around the stage but out of sight of the audience to prompt the speaker.

Our friend Dr George Fieldman, a respected cognitive behavioural therapist, often treats patients with phobias. ‘The key to overcoming fear is to know what you’re up against, to demystify it, and to put in practical steps to change your attitude towards it,’ he tells us.

We believe that above all else, practice is key. You might not ever get rid of your nerves, but you can control them, rather than letting them control you. Going back to the theme of leadership, self control will help the audience to feel comfortable listening to you, and the real you will come across which in turn adds to your credibility and authority.

After all, it was Michael H. Mescon who said “the best way to conquer stage fright is to know what you’re talking about.”’

Our book, Insider Secrets of Public Speaking, is available on Amazon priced £14.99.

To meet the authors at the book launch in London on 8th October, drop us a line at info@nadinedereza.com 

PS Programmes deliver presentation skills, TV and radio media training and crisis media management, tailored to the needs of our clients. This article appears on www.nadinedereza.com and PS Programmes

The post A Roaring Silence appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

Surveys – be they on issues of vital importance or profound triviality – are a seemingly endless source of intrigue: are you in or out of step with how others feel about the EU, do you hold the majority view on capital punishment or the favoured flavour of ice cream? Are your opinions reassuringly in line with others – or proudly independent? Does the rest of humanity shock you with their lack of taste and common sense, or have most other folk got it about right?

Following public opinion is a double-edged sword. Leaders who lean too heavily on focus groups are said to be wanting a clear ideology, while those who ignore public opinion are out of touch. Trying to strike a balance is a bit like keeping hold of a live salmon, especially when the answers you get can be self-evidently daft: in one survey, when asked to name ‘something made of wool’, the second most popular answer was ‘a sheep’.

What is the value of a survey, anyway? If they only tell us what we already knew, the results will only be published (if at all) under a sarky headline. When the results are surprising, we might need to do more to convince the reader that the figures haven’t been cooked. And sometimes the figures are dressed up to look more weighty than they are. Take this example from correlated.org: ‘In general, 42 percent of people would rather attend a small college than a big university. But among those who did not have their own room for most or all of their childhood, 64 percent would rather attend a small college than a big university.’

By the time you’ve mentally unpacked those sentences and worked out what they mean, you’re half way to thinking there might be something in the study. The research almost sounds significant. Until you think again, and realise that it really isn’t – that is assuming you’ve got enough time for the luxury of a second thought. Many statistics are presented at face value, and if you’ve ever heard two politicians debating, you will know that figures can be picked and chosen to agree with almost any point of view.

So, why are we launching a survey ourselves? Our survey aims to go beyond finding out that people are nervous about speaking in public and asking, ‘why are you nervous?’ One of the aims of our book, ‘Insider Secrets of Public Speaking’ is to help people overcome their fears with practical tools. Getting specific about the problem is, we think, the first step towards a solution. You can only take specific steps to tackle something when you know what it is: when you say ‘nerves’ do you mean ‘I don’t know what to do with my hands’?

You can help us to find out what it is about public speaking that people find frightening by going to our survey:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/86S2NGJ

As a thank you, we’ll invite you to our book launch in September; just remember to give us your details at the end of the survey. And watch this space for the results – whatever they might be.

This article appears on http://www.nadinedereza.com/ and http://www.presentationskillsprogrammes.co.uk

The post Our Survey Says… appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..

Dividing the time zones on land is more straightforward than the problem of working it out at sea, and the 200th anniversary of the original Longitude Prize has been commemorated with a £10million award to whoever solves one of the big problems facing humanity here in 2014. The people have spoken and from a list of big issues from climate change to the search for extra terrestrial intelligence, suggested the money go towards finding a new generation of antibiotics as the ones we have are becoming less effective, leading to MRSA and others claiming lives.

We think this is a bit of a missed step. Not that MRSA isn’t a problem – but it’s being worked on by pharmaceutical companies who are used to spending money on R&D, and for which £10million is a drop in the ocean. It also misses the post that the Prize should go towards smaller, more entrepreneurial outfits. Drug resistant bacteria is a problem that needs to be solved, but it will only be solved in a well funded lab.

One major problem facing humanity is the issue of communication. As Karl Popper said, ‘no sentence is incapable of misinterpretation,’ and as the Voyager spacecraft hurtle out of our solar system, some dissenting voices are beginning to suggest that it might not be such a good idea to advertise the location of our planet in a rather unsophisticated manner to vast, cool intelligences that might be greater than our own.

Before we worry about little green people from outer space, we should think more about how we communicate down here on earth. It’s tough to pitch a friendly-yet-professional introduction to a conference when everyone speaks the same language, let alone when there are some in the audience from a different culture. The French, for example, have a word (‘comme’) which covers ‘like’ and ‘as’. You will appreciate there is a big difference between ‘working like a horse’ and ‘working as a horse.’ And that’s just the tip of an unknowable iceberg.

With big international conferences, there is one major hazard to crossing time zones: jet lag. It’s bad enough when an entire section of the audience keeps nipping out for triple espressos and even then falls asleep in a stairwell during the lunch break. It is perhaps even worse when the facilitator feels the icy hand of sleep gently pushing down the eyelids in the middle of someone’s presentation. Armies across the planet and through history have experimented with substances to keep soldiers alert and fighting for longer than can be expected of a normal body. How long before these products trickle down to the conference room?

To leave you with a little food for thought: ‘circadian rhythm’ is the fancy word for ‘body clock’. We wake when it’s light, sleep when it’s dark, and get hungry in the middle. Virtually every species on the planet has this 24hour rhythm of rest and wakefulness. We only have this because we have evolved on a planet with a 24hour day. Can you imagine the diplomatic nightmare we would face if we encountered an intelligent alien life form with a six-hour day? How will our diplomats cope when the Martians doze off in the middle of our welcome speech? How will the Venusians respond when our diplomats return to their beds eight times a day? ‘These humans,’ they will say, ‘how do they get anything done?’ (Venus has very long day, equal to 243 Earth days!!)

Perhaps the events industry need their own Longitude Prize. If we can solve the jet lag problem now, we may find the technology useful when we make contact with unknowably strange creatures from across the galaxy.

This article appears on http://www.nadinedereza.com/ and http://www.presentationskillsprogrammes.co.uk

The post E.T. – Extra Time appeared first on Nadine Dereza is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, conference chair, live events host, keynote speaker, and moderator..