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What a great cost-effective training investment! The Top 10 of Everything 2006 ($12.95, Amazon.com) is packed full of statistics, trivia, facts, and cutting edge trends. Russell Ash, the book’s author, makes a pretty good living compiling list and hats off to him because he’s compiled the lists that are sure to spice up your training efforts.

The most the least, the first the last, the largest the smallest, this book is an endless resource for fun trivia. It’s my great little training tool for getting participants back ontime from breaks.

Hers the way that I use it: if the classroom is set up cluster style, each table competes throughout the day. I might start the competition by asking the training group a question from the book: (i.e., What are the top 10 foods consumed in the US?). Each table competes and receives 10 points for each correct answer. After each break, only the table with all of the participants present can compete. It’s fun, it draws on the adult learners experience in the world and most importantly—it works!

Consider choosing topics that tie into your industry. For example, the healthcare industry might choose the Top 10 Healthiest Countries. Guess what number 1 is---Japan! Also consider choosing topics based on the theme of the training. A sports theme might ask for a list of the Top 10 Most Successful Super Bowl Teams. Or you might choose the interesting, the wacky, and the farfetched. The best sessions are prepared in advance and tie into the training somehow.

The least effective sessions occur when the trainer stands up front with the book and arbitrarily chooses an interesting list.

The lists won’t be the only interesting refresher that you use during a training session but it’s a darn good one. Participants love it; it works. It’s a great fifteen-dollar investment.

Speaking of Top Tens...The Top Ten Reasons a Presentation Flops

1. A disregard for time.
2. Unclear purpose
3. Inadequate preparation
4. Failure to capture attention.
5. Pomposity
6. Boredom
7. False endings
Credit: 7 Reasons Speakers Flop by Mark Sanborn

These three are my additions to the list:

8. Ignoring the need for breaks
9. Reading directly from the slide or PowerPoint
10. A lack of audience participation

My colleagues and I were composing a top ten list of the reasons speakers flop based on our own experiences speaking and training new trainers to speak and facilitate. Our list was a little different from Mark’s, however fundamentally the lists were pretty similar. We topped our list with lack of preparation. New trainers often feel because they know the subject matter so well—the subject matter will be easy to articulate in front of a group. It always takes a good solid bomb to completely erase that notion.

Starting with Reason 10: A lack of audience participation. Adult audiences learn more and respond better when you engage them—get them to interact. Ask questions, generate discussions, etc.. It takes a powerful and entertaining orator to speak on a topic and engage a group without audience participation. There are some trainers who feel that they do this quite well. They usually don’t. Unless you are Wayne Dyer or Tony Robbins—I recommend building audience participation into your training sessions.

Reason 9: Making your notes your slides. I’ve seen this one more than I’d like. PowerPoint makes it so easy to develop slides with bullets that guide your discussion. It’s easy to forget that the main purpose of your visuals is to engage your audience. Go back through your slides and ask yourself if a picture, a provocative question, or an interesting statistic can replace some of those “three bullet points” slides. And if you show a slide up and comment, “I know you can’t read this”, reconsider showing the slide—please.

Reason 8: Your participants need a break. A good rule of thumb: break every 90 minutes to 2 hours. Plan your breaks and end your breaks at the designated time. Use your breaks to enhance your productivity as a presenter, not diminish it.

Reason 7: False Endings. I haven’t seen this as a reason for flopping as much. What I have seen, are trainers who look for approval by telling participants that the session will end early. When I took over the training team in Canada this was a hard habit to break. “I’m going to get you out an hour early.” The trainer would announce—to smiles, cheers, and nods of approval. That trainer has just undermined the value of his or her session. That’s what I call a false ending and although my meaning is slightly different from the intended one—it is yet another reason presentations flop.

Reason 6: Boredom—If you read your presentation, you’ll bore your participants. If you ramble and jump from topic to topic—no transition—no order, you will bore, confuse and annoy your participants. If you don’t seek audience participation, unless you’re incredibly dynamic and interesting, you will bore your participants. Boredom is easily fixed with just a little effort. There is no excuse for boring your participants.

Reason 5: Pomposity. Google’s informal corporate motto is “Don’t be evil.” Good presenters adopt a similar informal motto: “Don’t be pompous,” “Don’t be selfcentered,” “Don’t be braggadocios,” “Don’t be a know-it-all,” “Don’t be condescending.” You get the picture. You can be the most knowledgeable subject matter expert in the world and as soon as you are any of the above descriptors you diminish your credibility.

Reason 4: Failure to capture the audience’s attention. The all-important first impression comes into play here. Start strong. Seek to capture the attention of the group as soon as you’re out of the gates. If you start your presentations with a, “how’s everyone?” “How did you sleep/” “How was your flight?” “How was your breakfast, lunch etc.?” You lose a prime opportunity to capture the group’s attention. A consultant at Brody communications once coached me to start my presentations with a question, a provocative statement or a story. He told me I could always follow the story with my credentials and my how’s everyone questions. It felt a little awkward at first; I was so accustomed to my routine. I must say however it worked and it worked so well I’ve stuck with it. Engage the audience from the start and prepare your session with exercises
that engage the audience and encourage participation and you can wipe this reason and reason number six—boredom right off the list.

Reason 3: Inadequate preparation. This was number one on my list. There is absolutely, positively, no excuse for winging it and shame on you if you do. I will go as far as to say that inadequate preparation is the root of most presentation flops. Allow me to clarify; I have seen individuals prepare to the hilt, have all of the notes, references, facts, and figures and still flop. Want to know why? They didn’t practice aloud. So inadequate preparation was still the culprit. When new trainers would pilot their sessions for me or when I leader certify someone for a training session. The part that causes the most angst is when I ask them to go through the presentation, or portions of the presentation, just as they would for a group of participants. The excuses start to flow like a river. I need more time, I’m just going to discuss this part, and I’ll practice and do great in front of the group. No you won’t—and they usually don’t. When I require that trainers present to me before presenting to the group, the main purpose is not to critique and evaluate them. The main purpose is to make them aware of the pitfalls of presenting without practicing aloud. When their thoughts get all jumbled up and their message comes out fragmented and disjointed, good trainers are jolted into the realization that a part of
preparation is practicing aloud.

Reason 2: Unclear purpose. I truly believe that this reason ties into inadequate preparation. When the facilitator’s purpose is not clear, 99% of the time that person is winging it. Rambling, jumping from topic to topic without a clear transition or link—chances are the speaker didn’t prepare.

Reason 1: A disregard for time. If you’re a facilitator and you want to make a group of people really mad, end your session a half an hour late. Keep going after the designated ending time and appear unconcerned—just for good measure. If the audience is fidgeting and squirming and frowning and yawning—ignore it. Whenever I see a speaker who does this I have one fundamental question. Why? Doesn’t that person know that all of the information given after the designated ending time is processed with a bitter pill of resentment? I go back to blaming inadequate preparation. When you prepare and practice—you are a lot more cognizant of time. When you wing it, you run your sessions late and you alienate your audience.

I remember someone telling me that, people don’t argue with their own data, twenty-one years ago when I was a young, enthusiastic, novice trainer. The person was subtly trying to give me feedback on my facilitation style, which was to teach the class and not to facilitate discussion. I was a true subject matter expert and had the awards and credentials to back me up. I couldn’t wait to teach the newly hired sales representatives everything I knew. My main problem was—I didn’t know everything. I didn’t know that adults learn differently from school children. I didn’t know that thirty participants brought thirty different references of experience into the classroom. I didn’t know that one or two of those thirty neophytes would have the gall to question me openly and that five or six others would question me privately. I didn’t know that my credentials as a subject matter expert were not enough to change the behaviors of a classroom of adults. I didn’t know that I needed to facilitate and sell more than I needed to teach.

In my mind, a trainer was a teacher. And so I taught. The way that I taught my class was quite similar to the way a middle school teacher teaches eighth graders. "I know the answers—you don’t. So listen up."

Although I was a novice, I understood the value of engaging and interacting with the audience, so of course, I asked questions to try and draw the participants into participation. Most of my questions were quizzical, rhetorical, or downright condescending—(especially if I was being challenged). If someone answered one of my on-the-spot pop quizzes correctly—I nodded my approval in keeping with the schoolmarm personae that I’d adopted. I was in a sales organization and at some point, I’d taken off and retired my selling hat and replaced it with my teaching hat. I wasn’t alone; most of my training colleagues had done the same.

The "people don’t argue with their own data" remark got me thinking. I knew that there was some constructive criticism hidden beneath those words and I ruminated on it for a long time. I tweaked my facilitation style a little and began to ask more discussion generating questions.

There is a skill to generating discussions that bring people around to specific conclusions about a topic. Not only do you have to know how to generate a discussion, you also have to know how to facilitate and manage the responses. You have to recognize when the discussion is going downhill and becoming unproductive. You have to identify the participants with dominant behavioral preferences and those with more reticent behavioral preferences. You have to learn to leverage the participation of both types for the greater good of the whole group. Facilitation is a lot harder than teaching. Over the years, I’ve come to understand why teaching is the default method of trainers. It’s easier. It’s just easier.

Because adults enter the learning arena with certain experiences, competencies, beliefs, values, habits, and behavioral preferences, most have to be allowed to form their own conclusions based on the information that you give them. So the way that you give them the information dictates the level of success that you will have with a particular group. I have seen trainers expect their credentials to be the salient motivator. I have seen training initiatives touted as being an important goal of the company’s President or Vice-President. You should embrace this training because I say you should or you should embrace this training because the big guy in the corner office says you should rarely influence long term behavioral changes—yet training organizations employ these techniques time and again when rolling out company wide training initiatives.

Behavioral changes occur when there is a fundamental shift in the participant’s beliefs. In lieu of that shift in beliefs, participants will simply go through the motions and never really embrace the behavioral change that the training is meant to bring about. Traditional training methods focus on changing actions. Training that motivates adult learners focuses on changing beliefs. In most cases, the content of what is taught does not have to be changed. The way that content is presented is what distinguishes the most effective trainers.

When designing presentations and developing facilitation techniques, look at the subject matter and determine:

• What is best presented as a discussion question and what possible conclusionsmay be drawn?
• Are there interactive classroom exercises that will guide participants to a particular conclusion?
• How can you best sell, (yes sell) the information to your adult audience?
• How can you leverage the experience of the group?
  

And so the advice that I received all those years ago that people don’t argue with their own data has been an invaluable communication tool professionally and personally. I’ve heeded that advice and polished my facilitation techniques to participants and stakeholders. Whereas, it might be a career limiting move to tell a senior executive that his knee-jerk training request is unreasonable and unfeasible. I have learned that guiding that individual to his own “aha” moment is far more influential than a pile of facts, figures, opinions or statistics.

Twenty-one years ago, someone put a bug in my ear. She didn’t browbeat me, she didn’t embarrass me, she didn’t claim to know best, or tell me how it should be done. She simply said, “people don’t argue with their own data,” and she changed a fundamental belief.