This week, my 60 seconds of WIP is from the speaking book.
Enjoy!
Video:
When I let social media know, I only included this blog post, not the video. Here's the video on my YouTube Channel.
The Transcript:
I’m Johanna Rothman, and this is 60 Seconds of Johanna’s WIP for March 15, 2024, where I read an excerpt of just a minute of some writing in progress.
This excerpt is from the speaking book.
We often think that all professional talks need to be forty-five minutes to an hour. Sometimes, the best length talk is just twenty or thirty minutes—especially if the program is late.
Martin Fowler, well-known in the agile community, once told me he purposefully created keynotes that were combinations of three fifteen to twenty-minute talks. That way, if the conference started late, or the people introducing him took a long time, he could still deliver a talk that satisfied the audience.
I thought that was quite clever and I stole that idea. Feel free to steal it from me, too.
While workshops often require some time where you talk, you can choose to design a workshop, so people mostly work and learn from debriefing.
There are lightning talks, where the speaker chooses one topic and expounds for a limited time, such as between five and ten minutes.
Then there are pecha kuchas, where the presenter speaks to twenty slides, just twenty seconds per slide. Most often, the slides contain just images.
Experience reports tend to have a timebox of twenty to thirty minutes. They often require a paper that goes along with them.
While each type of talk can be professional, each of these forms offers different value to the audience. That's why clarifying your ideal audience is the first step.