These episodes confirmed what I knew all along:
Forget the artwork, the story, the anecdotes, the techniques, the performance. Even forget the feedback, the invitations to other conferences, the interviews, the awards. They are either means to an end or basic (if not vanity) indicators.

The reward for crafting an outstanding presentation is your enhanced ability to inspire change.

But no matter how hard you try, even an outstanding presentation can only accomplish so much. It can create awareness and strong desire, not skills.
What I truly discovered however, is that people you touch will not only begin their journey but they’ll often ask you to join them.

So, consultancy work aside, I faced a new problem as I began asking myself a crucial question:

How would I craft a truly outstanding workshop?

Given the level of sophistication that I’m reaching with my latest speaking performances, you’d be forgiven if you assumed that I’d know exactly how to craft a stellar training experience.
Contrary to common practice, however, a day-long string of lectures (with the occasional exercise) does not lead to anything resembling an outstanding workshop. Not even close.

That’s too bad. How am I going to deliver my next Pragmatic A3 Thinking Workshop this Autumn? Why should anyone deserve anything less than an out of this world experience?

So I started again from scratch. Almost.

My journey began with a book some of you may have been exposed to: Sharon Bowman’s excellent “Training from The Back of the Room!“.
If you deliver any form of training and you haven’t read it (or actively used it), please respect your future learners  (and your craft) and give it a solid try!
Sharon illustrates a very effective instructional design model (4Cs) for very participative workshops:

• Connections
• Concepts
• Concrete Practice
• Conclusions

I won’t go into the details (you haven’t ordered the book yet? I’m waiting.)
To orient myself with all the ideas, I created a series of mindmaps for my own use and I thought I may just as well share them with you. They are unlikely to make any sense without the book, so you are warned.

Today, I’ll begin by publishing the Connections mindmap (PDF).

It’s to be printed on an A3 paper or larger. I quickly created the small drawings with my finger on my ipad as memory aids, so don’t expect a sophisticated work of art.
Enjoy!

Just think about it. Most of us are in that situation most of the year. We often make wonderful plans and resolutions at the beginning of the year and then we walk into a storm of data, events, people. We then get overwhelmed and we end up walking aimlessly in every possible direction. So I ask: What are you going to do differently this year?

I don’t know if what I’m going to share is right for you. Frankly, I feel like I should not tell anyone. During the Christmas holidays, I spent quite a bit of time rethinking about my business development strategy and what it means be successful in my business as a consultant.

After days, I still could not articulate what “success” meant to me. Nothing, at least, that could capture the accomplishments and the sense of contribution that I felt while helping my communities and clients last year.

Finally, I decided that a good indicator of success for this new year will be measured by how well I will help more individuals & organizations to vastly improve their performance in 2012. If I keep that central goal in mind, good things will happen.

I’m sure you would have your own ideas about how to do it. Normally, I would create a mindmap and start branching out ideas. From there, I would make some resolution, write down long lists of tasks and continue my lifelong search for a better tool to handle them.
Almost every single year I give up.
All my important-but-not-urgent tasks – the key to personal effectiveness – are soon forgotten, and I find myself lost in the storm of everyday things.

But something is already different this year. It’s too early to draw conclusions, but I’m reaching a level of sustained clarity that I’ve never achieved before. All thanks to my new toy: Goalscape!

I wrote my central statement and then I began exploding my goal into subgoals. At first, I wrote down traditional categories called Sales & Marketing, R&D, Administration, etc.
Does it sound boring? You know, I’m an independent consultant who always believed that, to help others and be successful, all you need is to build knowledge and experience in your chosen field.
Then I realized that my view was way too narrow. In particular:

• I never developed an explicit Sales & Marketing strategy in the past. But the truth is that I can’t help more people if they don’t know what I can do for them.
• I never developed a product development strategy in the past. But the truth is that people won’t have an easy way to use my unique talents to their advantage if I don’t package my products and services better.
• I never enjoyed dealing with the financial aspects of the business (and yes, I have an accountant to ease the pain). But the truth is that – as any cabin crew will confirm – ”you need to put your own oxygen mask on first before you can help others.”

So, I refined my headings a bit, but what you see is my emergent business development plan, neither complete nor final. It’s a baseline for improvement. Now I can visually see how each subgoal is contributing to my success (as I defined it) and the progress I’m making towards it. Are things going to evolve and change? Drastically. These are my first steps in a fast Build-Measure-Learn cycle.

Finally, let me share my new daily routine with you:

1. Check email to see if there is anything that requires my immediate attention
2. Launch Goalscape to see the bigger picture and strategy
3. Write down on a plain text editor my daily todo task list
4. Execute tasks, using time-boxing techniques to focus

Note that I apply time-boxing techniques extensively. I fancy the 48 minutes rule when at home, shorter time boxes when I’m with a client. I’ve used variations of the pomodoro technique for years. It works for me.

On my larger projects, I also began using Goalscape to track progress towards shared objectives with my clients.

Now, once again…
What are you going to do differently this year?

Download in PDF format

Download in PDF format

I once learned that Alfred Hitchcock used to sketch on storyboards to pre-visualize the shots of his movies. What if I could apply cartooning and storyboarding techniques for my Zen-style presentations? With acceptable results, I thought, I could use those sketches as first-class citizens and incorporate them in my slides. Can you imagine the possibilities? No more frenetic searches for decent stock images, guaranteed originality and unlimited possibilities for further improvement.
This is one of the super crazy “what if” scenarios that I played in my head for quite some time but never had the courage to try – until recently.
Ladies and gents, I’m proud to unveil the making-of The Rise of the Lean Machine, a presentation that I just premiered at the excellent Lean & Kanban 2010 conference in Antwerp.

As many of you know, I’ve been obsessed about visual storytelling for many years. I developed a pretty good process to structure a story-driven presentation, borrowing techniques from screenwriting and creative nonfiction. As my Crafting Outstanding Presentations illustrates, Story, above everything else, is the main device that I use to render dry information memorable.
With all that focus on the power of Story, however, I never anticipated I could take my script further and create the kind of artwork you saw above, particularly at the crazy fast pace I had to deliver it. Heck, even my mum was as surprised as I was.

It all started a couple of years ago when I decided to pick up a new hobby: drawing cartoons. Inspired and guided by Robin Hall’s excellent “The Cartoonist Workbook”, I soon learned how to turn my scribbles into something believable. I even bought myself a beautiful (and expensive) Wacom Cintiq 12WX to draw and color directly on screen. I can safely say that I could easily match the artwork that you see in typical cartoon strips in newspapers. You need tons of wit to succeed in that business, but that wasn’t my goal. Creating cartoons was relaxing, fun and… easy! So easy, in fact, that I’m almost certain that anyone can do it. All you need is that book, practice and simple observation.

But it wasn’t until I picked “Visualizing Ideas” and “The Storyboard Design Course” that I began to think that I could eventually apply those techniques for my presentations. I was daydreaming, however. Personal and professional events – some with catastrophic consequences – forced me to re-assess my priorities. My beloved cintiq quickly started to collect dust.

Fast forward to recent times.
I committed to present the Rise of the Lean Machine at the conference in Belgium because I had a genuinely good story to tell – a story that deserved to be told right. But all I had were vivid episodes which I captured by instinctively filling my whiteboard with post-its covered with scribbles rather than words. Could I translate them into comic art? It was a nice thought, but could I finish on time for the conference? Time was tight, so I run a quick feasibility experiment.

Embarrassingly, it took me almost 2 days to complete the first drawing. Using a photo as loose reference, I sketched “It was a dark night in Dublin” on my tablet and painstakingly colored it. At school I did quite a bit of technical drawings, so I have no problem designing inanimate objects in perspective. But this time I wanted to add strong cinematic drama: bend the horizon, exaggerate the perspective, curve the buildings, choose a dark palette, hint at details with few color strokes. It was a completely new style for me altogether.
I published that first picture on my flickr account for my own inspiration. I remember telling my wife, Irene: “I love it, but there is no way I can do 70 slides like that, there is just not enough time”. “Can you do only the key frames?,” she replied. “I don’t know. On the narrative side, I still need to work out the essential plot of the story”.

I didn’t know what to do and I was really worried. I posed a worthy challenge, but I was simply running out of time. My rational brain knew I couldn’t do it, my heart was telling I had to. You could cut the tension with a knife.

Our baby Matteo was born last year. We never had a break since. It might appear irrational, but despite the time bomb I was sitting on, we decided to put family first and go on a last-minute holiday break. Three weeks before the conference, I still had to tighten the structure of the story – something I knew I could do in a sunny Spanish island. As for the pictures, I just gave up on the whole idea of drawing them.

Well… I almost gave up.
Surrounded by Mediterranean pine trees facing a beautiful sandy beach, I started sketching images on a plain notepad. I sketched for 2-3 hours a day using a simple pencil, a sharpener and an eraser. Damn, I needed a ruler too! At the end of the week, I had quite a bit of work done – enough to let me believe that, perhaps, I could actually pull it off.

On my return at home I scanned each image and imported it on a 1600x1200px canvas in ArtRage Studio Pro. Then, using my tablet, I traced all the edges with a (virtual) ink pen. I don’t have a defined technique for coloring, but I generally color-block shapes first and then add light and shadows. I just pick one or more sources of light and give depth to shapes by coloring over the existing texture.

Frankly, my technique is instinctive and I’m only at the beginning of this journey.
As I always do when I’m under pressure, I set up a personal Kanban board with a simple TO DO, DOING(1), DONE workflow and 48 minutes timeboxes (12 minutes break) to work non-stop all day long. I honestly didn’t think I was going to finish on time, so I reduced the scope as I went along. I kept thinking about the conference, saying to myself “it’s only an hour, it’s only an hour”. I tweaked the story and slides until the last minute. There are a few slides with bullet points that I would like to rework, some images I would like to include, some sentences that I would like to clean up, some concepts I would like to further highlight (e.g. the role of Lean Enterprise Architecture). But hey, I had to constantly remind myself that there is a difference between being a perfectionist and an achiever.

The presentation has been an instant success. I received a lot of praise for the content, the story and the artwork. I paid a huge price too, however. Beside the sleepless nights during those frenetic 2 weeks, I had to decline working on a sizable business opportunity with an unmovable first deadline. That, my friends, hurt.

Was all this worth it? I don’t know.
But time, for sure, will tell.
Tick… Tock… Tick… Tock…

I attend a few sessions and listen to other entrepreneurs sharing their expertise.
I can’t help but feel like I don’t belong.
Those sterile exhortations to “be more creative” end up irritating me. No! Being creative is not about your inner motivation or how you decorate your place. It is about learning how to think. I wonder what Edward de Bono, Roger von Oech, Michael Michalko and other creativity masters would say.
I roll my eyes. I swear, I want to scream.

I expected to meet can-do business warriors full of ideas and fire to spare. All I see is goldfish, scattered on the floor, gasping and squirming.

My turn to speak comes. I panic for an instant, then I let the story unfold. Crafting Outstanding Presentations unleashes all its persuasive power and, somewhat, captures people’s imagination.

But playing with emotions has unintended consequences: Today – three weeks after that event – I’m still receiving feedback, support and even some extraordinary business opportunities.

All this unexpected attention, however, is creating havoc to my existing business plans. You see, the problem is that I found a new sense of purpose. I discovered that I can make a difference, not because of what I achieved in the past, but because I can now warp time and space through a simple story.

I haven’t figured out what I should be doing next. All I know is that “what do you do?” is a tricky question, and I still have no satisfactory answer.

Some things in life are bizarre though – like the fins and scales that cover my body.

On the surface, the slides below illustrate pretty pictures and practical storytelling techniques. Look beyond the means, however, and you’ll discover how a single presentation can powerfully influence people and, maybe, even change someone’s future – including yours.

Thanks to everyone for the overwhelming support; you are the reason why, today, I’m reopening this blog.

This approach comes from the realization that, although important, rational thinking has its limits. Even if we have facts that prove that we are “right”, it doesn’t mean that people listen to us.
By framing a subjective point of view, however, a story can influence perceptions, reinterpreting and directing what those facts mean to our audience.

If you happen to believe that stories are just for entertainment, think again. Stories are powerful, even frightening, weapons of influence. They have been used for thousands of years to persuade masses to join religions and wars, to unite and divide, to discriminate between “right” and “wrong”.

I’m often told that storytelling is too difficult. Yet, we unconsciously tell stories to others and ourselves on a daily basis. We tell who we are, what we have done, what we value, etc. We strip out all the unnecessary details and use stories to package our experience, or the experience of others, for easy consumption.

Aristotle observed that traditional narrative is structured around a dramatic story told in 3 acts: beginning, middle, end. I was surprised to discover that, after thousands of years, Hollywood-style screenwriting is still firmly grounded around this structure.

In a future post I’ll examine it in more detail, but for now, I’ll just state the obvious: a good story starts with a good idea.
What’s a simple definition of a good story idea (to be told in 3 acts)?

Someone wants something badly and goes after it against great odds.

I learned this definition by heart (and I wish I could recall where I found it). This simple sentence embodies three key elements of a good story: Character (“someone”), Desire (“wants something badly”), and Obstacles (“and goes after it against great odds”).

Implicitly, this definition also elicits the dramatic question: “Will he/she succeed?”

I’m just scratching the surface here, but watch a movie tonight and see for yourself.

It might seem obvious, but the story ends when the answer to the dramatic question is revealed.

When I performed my “Agile Tales” presentation in Stockholm for the very first time last year, I distilled a story from my own experience. Back then I didn’t know anything about storytelling.

Coincidentally, I had a character (me), plenty of obstacles (IT project from hell), and strong desire (I didn’t want to fail!). It’s a classic case of something that works without knowing why!

The story was about overcoming obstacles using agility, effective communication, and deliberate creativity.
Early in the presentation, I explained that I was involved in this impossible IT project. All the odds were stacked against me.
The setup was excellent, wasn’t it? But then I said:
“Amazingly, project from hell was a success. Maybe this is why…”

Do you see what I did? I made a rookie mistake.
I resolved the dramatic question too soon, effectively releasing the tension I created.

Several months (and more than 50 screenwriting books) later, I said instead:
“Project from hell was threatening me. This is what I tried…”.

The facts were exactly the same, but I plotted the story differently. This simple modification allowed me to preserve the tension until the end.

Next time, I’ll continue this fascinating exploration into the world of storytelling by revealing a technique I learned from a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.
Stay tuned.

I met Chris at a software architecture workshop in South Africa early last year, and we kept in touch ever since. Every time I visit Sweden he always surprises me with something different. His fearless approach to creativity and love for experimentation is truly inspiring and reminds me that, although we may fail, we ought to really try nonetheless.

I really couldn’t refuse to write a duoblog post with him this week, especially since the question he proposed to develop is so close to my heart:  “What is the secret of a great presentation?”

I have a definite opinion on the matter but, for fun, I did a quick research to see what others say. Among the top Google results, I found gems such as “sustained eye contact” and “be charming and knowledgeable”. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yep, rubbish.

If you’ve ever attended one of my presentations in the recent past, you may expect me to take this chance to talk about the importance of Zen design, the need for relevant images and my dislike for bullet points. You would be wrong. As in many things in life, the most visible aspects are not necessarily the most important.

Arguably, many presentations fail simply because have absolutely nothing to say. Like special effects can’t save a movie if the script is poor, pretty pictures won’t save a shallow presentation either.
Presentations that dump mountains of data equally show lack of respect for their audience. People crave meaning. At least I do.

For some time, I thought I could do better. I would research my topic deeply and, assuming that I had something worth saying, I would structure my presentation around a logical outline.  In a typical presentation, I would quickly make my main point (the “lead”) and I would generally follow it by 3 key sections to elaborate on the subject (“supporting details”). Finally, I would conclude my talk by restating my main point (“summary”).

Assuming the subject addressed my audience needs, this structure had a fairly predictable outcome: clarity.

One day, however, I realized that, irrespective of the technology/process/idea I present, my key role is to inspire change.

To succeed, I had to go well beyond clarity. I had to emotionally engage. Why? Because it turns out that people make choices based on emotions (and use data to justify them). If you were really rational and objective, wouldn’t you eat better and exercise regularly, for example?

Some people say that passion is all you need. Passion, however, is like a raw diamond: even if you have it, you need to learn how to make the most out of it. I know I can be really passionate. But how can I focus that passion to truly inspire change?

I found the missing piece while shedding tears watching a movie. Since then, I observed and studied many works able to inspire, influence and persuade; all of them tap into the art of storytelling.

I lost count on the number of books I read on screenwriting and creative non-fiction. I’ve been obsessed by it in the last couple of years. I learned and even developed my own tools to help me leverage the power of Story. I’d have so much to share: structure, dramatic outline, moral premise, character transformation, worse case scenarios, etc.

I now structure my presentations around a dramatic compelling story (not just anecdotes) in which the technology/process/idea plays a key role. The story is a device that I use to engage the audience and introduce the concepts I really care about.

That’s it. Simple but not easy.

Last year I asked a colleague to give me feedback on a script (based on factual events) for a 1-minute presentation teaser I was about to develop over the weekend. Since I communicated with him through instant messaging, I had no special effects to support it. I wasn’t even physically there. He read the text, line by line, as I was typing it. After a short pause he replied: “Wow Claudio, I’m hooked. I want to know more about it.”

This is what I wrote:

you are a talented software developer
your technical skills make you feel invincible
until one day...
everyone turns against you.
your career and self esteem are put in great danger
by the single IT project
you can't run away from.

For your convenience, I put a link to the teaser as well (http://vimeo.com/1825440 ), but I would like you to think hard on the power of text alone.

My dear Chris and readers, were you “hooked” like my colleague was? I’m curious to read your reactions and opinions.

Next time I will introduce the key elements of a dramatic story and show you a simple but effective device I created to design captivating scenarios.

By the way, this is a duoblog post, remember? I’m looking forward to read Chris’ view on the same subject here.

How does it feel to take part in a local user group right at its launch? New people come together for the first time, full of curiosity, enthusiasm and hope for what lies ahead. Imagine what it could be to combine our experiences, to study and explore together what it takes to design and develop superb software.

I always loved the idea of a local study group, where peers meet monthly in a quiet venue, discussing ideas and sharing knowledge in a non-threatening environment.
I find this format attractive, albeit simple in concept and aspirations, probably because I’ve been subjected to formal sermons for too long. I seek interaction, different points of view, real-world experiences… and a decent pint!

Like in other parts of the world, I must confess that the need for an ALT.NET group in Dublin has grown out of frustration: although it is common to be lectured on most of the latest Microsoft products and technologies nowadays (e.g. Silverlight, SQL Server, SharePoint, etc.), there are too many key areas that are completely neglected by the mainstream circuits. Have you ever wondered about how to employ the above technologies to design for maintainability, for example?
How about alternative tools and frameworks on top of the .NET platform? Any methodologies, patterns and principles? What have we learned from other platforms?
It seems like no one ever attempts to answer the hard questions. Silence. Nothing. Complete dark. Scary eh?

I may be too harsh but sometimes I get the feeling that too many community speakers live in a sealed cubicle, too busy polishing their valuable badges, diligently regurgitating their school homework. Not surprisingly, evangelists and product groups also have their own not-so-hidden agendas, a natural consequence of the extreme fragmentation of a company as large as Microsoft. It is rare to hear from competent practitioners these days, developers in the trenches willing (and able) to speak in public. I need more than superficial product demos to help my team in writing the sustainable, non-trivial applications that our business needs.

Few citizens of the ALT.NET community believe that there is a deliberate conspiracy, a “system” designed to control the mainstream by keeping people somewhat ignorant.
For as much as I would like to “rebel” to such system, I doubt that there is any oppressor or secret plot; studies on the way humans learn (e.g. Dreyfus model of skills acquisition) tell us that, if we consider each skill separately (from cooking to object-orientation), most of us are novices or, at best, advanced beginners. In other words, for most skills:

• we follow ready-made recipes (novice)

• we perform our own tasks by seeking reference information quickly, as needs arise (advanced beginner).

It appears that we rarely reach a stage where we can be more resourceful and form our own conceptual models of how things work (competent), we seldom seek the big picture and reflect to improve the way we do things (proficient) and are unable to filter irrelevant details and consistently rely on intuition and pattern recognition to perform our tasks (expert).

So, we are complacent ignorant beasts, often confidently unaware of it.

Rather than keep complaining about what is wrong with the world though, I’m more interested in moving forward. Raising awareness seems like a decent starting point. We are learners in need of each other.

Ireland is a strange little country. The population is small and yet so resourceful. To accomplish greatness (or even survive) we need to seriously change the way we tackle problems, particularly since the worldwide economy is threatening our jobs and families. If you live in Dublin and you are a developer with a genuine interest in improving your craft (and marketability), what are you going to do next? More of the same stuff that you have been doing until now? Maybe it is time to try something different and consider joining us.

ALT.NET Dublin is an experiment, one that can easily fail without your help. To take part you don’t have to be an expert, you just need to overcome your inertia and show up. Be open and ready to share. This coming Thursday, if you choose so, you’ll make a difference.