Been reading Nancy Duarte’s book: Resonate. https://www.duarte.com/presentation-organization-different-structures/ Quick reference for structuring your presentations: These four structures have contrast inherently built into them, and work for persuasive presentations: Problem-solution: Arrange information by stating the problem and then the solution. Establishing that there’s a problem helps convince people of the need for change. Compare-contrast: Arrange information according…
Category: Communication
Been thinking and reading (again) about the real challenges with trying to solve problems in a group. Thanks to these two tweets, which I stumbled upon, two days apart. https://twitter.com/mscccc/status/1430986038252654600 https://twitter.com/seanjtaylor/status/1430369389602217994 Rabbit hole, here I go. They say if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. My…
I’ve shared some practical tips about how to prepare for, lead, and participate in meetings in my other newsletter. Now let’s look at some principles and frameworks to help us think about meetings. Why can’t we have good meetings? One reason is because we’re still spending time sitting in bad meetings. Cancel that meeting if…
I am learning to be less efficient in my communication. Lately I realised I am too obsessed about communicating efficiently that it hurts the effectiveness. I am not getting my message across as well as I could. My tendency is to distill what I want to say into the most precise and succinct set of…
Let’s now take one extra step and attempt to distil everything we’ve learned so far into 16 sins of Modern Communication. 1. Not aware of your Intent (change behavior, change mental state, change emotional state) 2. Not documenting before conversing (missing Context) 3. Not documenting after conversing (vaporising Content) 4. Diverging aimlessly (false Maturity, likely…
Stumbled upon the idea of “radical listening” on Twitter. It complements the Three Types of Listening I learned the other day, so I decided to share it here today. First, what is this “radical listening” thing? Dr. Jason Purnell, an esteemed community leader, professor, and researcher at Washington University, said this: “[Radical listening is…] listening…
https://twitter.com/buster/status/1182390032671203328 Buster Benson’s book “Why Are We Yelling“ was one of my favorite books last year. I personally believe that everyone in this digital era of information torrent and opinion floodgate could benefit from learning and practicing the skill of arguing productively. It’s a light read filled with real stories and 100 of Buster’s illustrations.…
In her interview in The Knowledge Project Ep. #84, Jennifer Garvey Berger shared the idea that there are 3 types of listening: Listening to fix Listening to win Listening to learn Win: I think of this as the most surface-level listening. Dismissive. You listen in order to collect just enough data that you can use…
Welcome to the fifth part of Practical Phrases and Scripts for Non-Native English Speakers Working in Tech. This time I will share with you a framework and checklist you can use to write effective business emails. Grab attention, get the action or information you need, and do it swiftly — saving your and other people’s…
Perfect communication is HARD. We can only make it less bad. We can communicate better by fixing one bad practice at a time. In the first part of this series, we dissected the belly of modern communication and got to know the Pieces. Then in the second part, I looked at how they relate with…