Scott Berkun on Public Speaking

People who read and write about technology often find themselves giving talks about it as well. If you find yourself in that situation, you owe it to yourself to pick up Scott Berkun's Confessions of a Public Speaker (O'Reilly, 2009). The book takes a practical, engaging, fun, personal—at times painfully personal--look at public speaking. Berkun offers the vantage point of someone who has begun to speak professionally—earning a living giving paid keynotes and other lectures for a fee. I suspect that readers of this blog who occasionally speak at conferences, regularly do formal trainings, or take part in team project presentations will find it fun and useful.

The lessons of Confessions for technologists are more implicit than explicit. Snap-shot-sized chapters walk you through stage fright, “bad rooms,” hostile crowds, tiresome questioners and more. Much of it common sense reminders probably not dissimilar from those of my high school public speaking teacher, Mrs Buckwald. Here, they are usefully updated for the latest in conference speaking environments.

While Berkun keeps his observations, he comes from a tech background. He first caught my eye with The Art of Project Management (O'Reilly, 2005). We wrote this after exiting Microsoft having worked as a Microsoft program manager for Internet Explorer versions 1 through 5.

Reading the book from the tech vantage point made me wonder, does speaking or writing about technology have the same challenges as speaking or writing about anything else? While geek knowledge has a certain unavoidable vogue these days, I suspect most of us would say that tech oriented presenting, popularizing, planning has special obstacles and opportunities. And so after breezing through Berkun's short book, I went back through it looking for implicit lessons. I suspectyou will as well, and they are there. I'll leave you with one:

Berkun spends a bunch of time on speaker and workshop evaluation forms. He opens by sharing what seems like a pretty good score for himself at some speaking engagement. He then dissects its false objectivity. His discussion of typical formulaic evaluation forms rang true.

What interested me is that he then drops in three sets of questions that might give more useful feedback to and about a speaker. The first two seem general enough to apply to any speaker on any topic, including wonderfully transparent questions like, “Was this a good use of your time?” and “Are you considering doing anything different as a result of this talk?” (p122).

He later on suggests a third set of questions (p 136) as something a speaker might send out by email a few days after the event. I liked these best (paraphrased a bit here) because they homed in what matters most in a tech presentation:

• Do [you] have any new questions now that [you're] back at work?
• Did [you] use anything [the speaker] said? What happened?
• Is there a topic that now, since [you are] back at work, [you] wish [the speaker] had covered?
• Can you suggest ways to make the experience … more active, engaging, or interesting?

Tech workshop presenters often imagine that the real value of the talk will only when participants return home and try to do something. These questions came alive for me, and I'll probably try to adapt them.

Talking or writing about technology (including in this blog) risks just making up for deficiencies in technical documentation. There wouldn't be the catchy O'Reilly “Missing Manual” series name if this didn't strike a chord. Yet gathering 20, 30, 100 people in a room to hear and see how the basics work on something is neither that efficient or environmental. At the other extreme, tech talks can become so trendy abstract that a day later when you try to explain them to someone else, they seem to be intentional or unintentional marketing pitches for things at best in beta. Or maybe they’d be better suited for science fiction conferences (though nothing wrong with that).

Drawing my own conclusions, seems useful to think in terms of striking three balances in presenting technology to busy people trying organize projects, make intelligent software choices for this year or otherwise work on:

• Instructing on a mix of some key basic things to help beginners get started (the Missing Manual) while also giving intermediate to advanced users a few joyous ah ha moments to also go home and try.
• Providing a manageable set of new information directly while also offering a resources and options for further learning.
• Speaking or writing to the here and now while also providing transformative insights that motivate commitment and excitement for the long haul. (See Berkun's chapter on "The Clutch is Your Friend").

Check out the book and Scott’s blog at http://www.scottberkun.com. I think you’ll appreciate it. And if you want to get a taste of him speaking, check out this or other videos out there.