I’m afraid I can’t really share my overall impressions of the conference, much as I would like to, because the organizers scheduled this years conference (it runs every 18 months) the week before an annual event in government that tends to focus the attention of a lot of people, the Budget. Consequently I was only able to attend three sessions.

Fortunately, all of the sessions were recorded and are available as a rich media stream, so – provided you install the requisite proprietary software – you can knock yourself out watching some impressive presentations by the likes of Jon Udell, Tara Hunt, and Hans Rosling.

I was privileged to sit on a panel that discussed ‘Blogging in the State Services’ with Che Tibby, Hadyn Green and Matt Lane. We covered a bit of ground and, as people began to ask questions, moved into areas like OIAs and knowledge management (not stuff any of us are really qualified to talk about, but I don’t think any of us were game to disappoint an attentive audience).

I also spoke on the last day on Govt 2.0. The presentation is available on the Network site (it’s an s5 show you access via your browser), but it was under prepared and is pretty much just a ramble through some of the ideas I posted a couple of weeks ago.

One final observation: I am thrilled that all of these presentations are recorded, because it means they will be available to people who couldn’t make it, but the format is not exactly friendly. There are no URLs, so I can’t link to the individual presentations – you just have to find your way through the hideously inaccessible and not very usable list of all the presentations. Nice try, just not that innovative.

So, what did you say?

Most of you felt that the conference was a well-run, interesting and relevant event – and a great opportunity to network with your peers. The average rating for the event overall was about 3.5 (1 was “poor” and 5 “excellent”) – so I guess that we can officially declare comms@06 a success.

I have made up a dodgy Excel graph that shows you how you all rated the various components of the conference. I am not sure what the margin of error is but, given my aforementioned grasp of quantitative analysis, I would guess ‘high’ would be the correct answer.

In any event, the numbers are pretty conclusive: between 40-50% of you though that the presenters and the organization was excellent (5), and that everything else was around a 4.

The diversity of topics was great and provided a good balance. All the speakers were good at relating their content to the communications issues presented. I felt this was a real strength of Comms@06.
The good spread of attendees from across the government sector added to the value of the event.
Tony

There is also a graph depicting your responses to the individual speakers – which is not a ‘league table’, but it does give you an idea of how the different presenters were rated by those who chose to respond.

Again, the weight of opinion is solidly in the 4 region, with the exception of the remarkable David Slack who managed to rate as ‘excellent’ with 83.5% of the people who responded. Well, I guess that makes one of the decision’s about next year’s line-up a little easier…

I was impressed with all the speakers, who have a wealth of experience in their fields. In just one day I’ve learnt so much that will help me in my job. It’s nice also to have confirmation from the experts that I am on the right track in most cases.
Anon

Lessons we learned

Fortunately, through a combination of dumb luck and the good will of those involved, we managed to get quite a lot of it right. That is not to say that we can’t improve. More interaction was highlighted by a number of you – that might take the form of, for example, some break-out sessions or even a half-day workshop to complement the conference next year.

The whole ‘vegetarian incident’ is something we won’t let happen again: I can’t tell you how relieved I was that no-one went into anaphylactic shock; that is just what we need at a conference on issues management: an ambulance parked out the front.

You also made some suggestions around the small things, that actually make a conference really sing:

• Distribute a list of all the attendees
• More fruit for snacking
• Better audio/visual setup

…all of which we will do next year.

I think the final word (apart from any comments that you would like to add yourselves) should go to Kate, who -for me anyway- summed it all up beautifully:

An excellent, very good value event, head and shoulders above the crappy expensive ones we are constantly bombarded with invitations to!

It’s hard because, especially when you are writing for your Minister or Chief Executive, you often do not have the sort of access to that individual that affords the luxury of an in-depth conversation where you sound them out about the ideas they would like to canvass and the stories they use. So there is no real personal connection, which means that imparting some sort of humanizing quality into the speech becomes a real lottery.

David Slack, in his excellent session at comms@06, made the very good point that bloodless speeches (particularly in the public sector) tend to be a reformulation of policy papers, leavened with some ‘interesting’ facts and delivered in the house memo style: not an enjoyable experience for the audience (or indeed, judging from the pained expressions on most speaker’s faces, for the unfortunate presenter).

This predicament tends to be compounded by the fact that many of the people who request speeches from us also request accompanying PowerPoint slides. This, to me, is pretty much the death rattle for most speeches. Once you are entrusting your content to a medium that is positively hostile to it, you are lost. As David said:

PowerPoint routinely disrupts, dominates and trivializes content… (they) too often resemble a school play – very loud, very slow, and very simple.

Now I am not going to bore you with a tirade against PowerPoint (but if you are interested in the philosophy behind this view, I recommend you read Edward R Tufte’s essay on the subject), rather I would like to suggest a few ways that you can make Powerpoint a more effective tool, if you are required to use it.

First up, follow Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint: namely, 10 slides, 20 minutes and nothing smaller than 30pt font. You can use this rule of thumb to cull most of the crap that the policy people will send across – and believe me, the audience will appreciate it.

Next, never, ever, use clip art. I can’t remember how many arguments I have had with people when I have stripped their presentations clean of this junk. Almost every single one of them has said: ‘but I want to make the presentation a little more fun.’ They seem to be operating under the delusion that clip art will make them look like fun, interesting or happy people… Yeah, that is what the accountants would think.

Clip art looks cheap and it makes you look, at best, creatively retarded. Just don’t do it.

One of the other points that David made is relevant here (and I know he meant ‘advantage’ in a nice way):

The idea of a presentation should be to take advantage of the people gathered there, not to bore them.

Use the slides to force people to focus on what you are saying, not what is on the wall behind you. You could use a simple image, or a screenshot, that gives people a sense of what you are about to say – that primes them to listen more intently. I am a big fan of the completely blank slide for this reason. When it comes up people immediately focus all their attention on the speaker, as there are no longer any other visual cues to distract them.

In the second or two it takes them to process what has happened, their attention will be absolutely riveted to you. A surreal or bizarre image will have the same effect (although you would want to be a little careful around your choice of image here).

Similarly, if you have to include bullet points to, say, list the initiatives of an organisation, only use 3 bullets per slide (irrespective of the number of intiatives), and a maximum of 6 words per bullet. Use them as a prompt, a tease, not a complete list. The audience will read whatever you put up, and while they are doing that they probably won’t be listening all that intently (this may say more about my attention span than it does about your audience – but it is better to err on the side of caution).

Put everything else in the notes – if they are that interested in your content, they can read about it at their leisure. And if you don’t bore them to death with 45 slides in 40 minutes, they might just do that.
Finally, under no circumstances use those animated transitions. They are not cool. They are not even fun. They are just plain annoying. While your bullet points are flying in from the left of the screen, your audience’s attention is departing with the same speed in the opposite direction.