Communication

This is the first of a trilogy of webinars. We’ll share our process for creating any presentation, from why we choose to speak, how we decide on a topic and approach, and what our ultimate goal is for our crafted presentations. In doing so, we’ll explain why we take sometimes more than 40 hours to create a one hour talk that passes in the blink of an eye.

We communicate all the time, mostly without thinking about what we’re doing. The problem isn’t just that we communicate casually, but that in doing so we believe that we have accomplished what we set out to do. Communicating is the most difficult of tasks, and the consequences of failure range from the trivial to the catastrophic. How do we share our thoughts with another and know—without doubt—that they now understand what we intended to communicate?

Write, and you could become influential, famous and fabulously wealthy. While that might happen, writing rarely pays off with any of those rewards. So why write? Peter has written more than a 1,000 articles. During that time he’s stumbled on a few secrets about writing that he was never taught in school. We learn by doing, so that might not be surprising. We also learn more about what we know by writing it down. In this session Peter will explore how to extract the most benefit possible from this solitary act.

Naming something gives us power to it. Names add information, but they also constrict our understanding. Names are an abstraction that help and get in the way. If we want to see the world differently, we need to confront how what we call things shapes our perceptions.

Words have power. The words we choose have a great deal of influence on the meaning that we create, and the meaning that we hide. Mark Mullaly looks past labels to explore how they are used—and misused—and what we can to create better meaning.

Story matters. While we recognize the importance of story, we also often downplay it. We are taught that data is king, that facts and rationality and objectivity are the way the world works. The problem is, that’s not exactly true. Facts do play a role. But story matters more. Crafting good story is an essential skill for anyone who needs to enrol others in a course of action. That would be all of us.