I listened to Leslie Shannon’s presentation on telco trends this morning. The energy and enthusiasm she poured through the screen was infectious, and had the virtual audience spellbound.
She is a seasoned presenter and storyteller. I hoped there may be some ideas she’s shared about her techniques, and so I did an online search. I was not disappointed. This particular interview was illuminating, and actionable too. One paragraph in particular stood out:
It’s really Find, Filter, and then File. That is the input hopper. Then once you have the file, familiarize, by reviewing; and reviewing to make sure that you haven’t forgotten anything either on the trivia side or what are interesting elements of my story here; because sometimes I put things in the giant 400 slide deck and I forget that they’re there, so when I’m just reviewing those, I’m like, Oh, that was interesting in the past but now it’s important, I’d forgotten about that one, bring it in. Then formulate, formulating the story that I’m going to tell whether it’s an external story to convince people about the credence of new technological developments and the importance of those or formulating a story so that I can remember key bits of information and random bits of information that I happen to come across. It’s the five F’s, Find, Filter, File, Familiarize and Formulate.
I’d like to give this a try. I do much reading, and file it away in my mind (ha!). The graph database in my head works okay when finding things. What I can (and want to) do is to Familiarize and Formulate.