Teach us something, but make it quick. Part 1.

On Thursday 1 March I spoke at the DisruptHR Conference held in Cape Town at the cool Travelstart offices in Kloof Street Studios.

The opportunity allowed me to do 2 things: 

1. Reflect on my personal journey from the advertising industry to product design, and 

2. Practice public speaking (once more, after a hiatus of, say, a few years). 

If you’re unfamiliar, the DisruptHR format reminds me of PechaKucha in that it’s focused, timed and self running. Each presenter has 20 slides (no more, no less), slides rotate every 15 seconds automatically. You don’t control them. This makes things very interesting. It’s also fun. But terribly difficult to master.

I felt that I had a particularly interesting story to share as a creative practitioner whom found himself in a world he did not recognize or understand. During that experience, I sometimes felt that I did not know who I was. I had lost my 'sense of self', as it were. In order to survive, I set out to learn as much as I could (and as quickly as I could) about these new rules, patterns and paradigms. So I got to work on the speech.

The narrative came relatively quickly, and easily. Acknowledgements, the setup, the lessons learnt) or principles), and a quick conclusion. It felt authentic enough. In terms of presentation design, I did my best to steer clear of Google images and PowerPoint bullets. Instead, I asked our resident visual anthropologist Gregor Rohrig, to document our way of working. The results are quite breathtaking.

After a few edits the narrative was working for me and I spent some time working through the story on the way to work and back home. In between though, at work and at home, I rarely found any quiet time to reverse aloud, or record myself. This proved somewhat problematic. 

The moment I decided to playback the slide deck I had prepared on self-play mode and rehearse aloud I was utterly crap at it. And I did this the day before the event. The added dimension of a self playing slide deck is just too much for my single brain to accommodate. I found myself captured by the auto rotating deck anticipating when the next change would be and completely lost my logical story flow. It was a disaster. I also found that each point I was making took much, much longer than 15 seconds I had to heavily edit down. Chop the lot.

The next day I did my commute rehearsal. It felt a bit better. I had no opportunity to visit the speech during the day.

Time came for a sound check and I made my way to the Travel Start offices at about 5pm. On arriving, a few of us gathered at the conference hall and Lee chatted us through the proceedings. I was pretty nervous, knowing that my attempt at choreographing the narrative alongside the visual story was entirely unsuccessful. Added to this, I had not addressed an audience on stage and with a microphone for quite a number of years. Plus, we were being televised. And .. I was the first speaker on the evening’s agenda. The task was large.

I chatted to some of my fellow guest speakers and was reminded how much I do enjoy meeting new people and hearing their stories. I decided to have a beer and try relax. In no time at all we were being asked to take our seats, the introductions and house keeping notes were being announced. The next moment I saw my name up on the big screen, and was being introduced to almost 100 people … I took a deep breath, walked on stage, grabbed the microphone and said ‘Thank you …’.

In Part 2 ... 

I'll unpack the content my speech. I decided to call it "I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. 7 Observations from a new work frontier."