Episodes

  • How To Be A Star in Business Interviews

    How To Be A Star in Business Interviews
    Jul 28 2025
    Being interviewed by the media can be a high risk affair, depending on the publication, the journalist and the business zeitgeist of the moment. These types of interviews come up relatively rarely in business. More common are panel discussions at business events hosted by Chambers of Commerce and more recently interviews on podcasts. I have been on both sides of the microphone, so let me share some observations which may help you prepare for your interview. Chamber panels and podcasts are usually not “gotcha” interviews, as we will encounter with some journalists doing media interviews. Generally, we are going to be treated well and it would be rare that the interviewer really went after you. Having said that though, we have to expect the interviewer to want to dig down deeper into something you have said. This can be of two basic varieties. One is a high level statement you made where the context and detail is obvious to the speaker. This may not be obvious to the audience though, so the interviewer will seek more detail and clarification. In this case, that is not a problem, because we have the depth of mastery of the subject. The other variety is a statement that may be accepted wisdom or it might be something we have said without giving too much thought to it. This is when we will get into trouble, because as soon as the interviewer starts to dig in, it becomes plainly obvious we don’t know all that much about it and out pours fluff instead of substance. The answer here is to talk about things you have experienced, read about in detail, have researched deeply or where you have listened to experts. This sounds obvious, however we don’t know where we will go with the questions and we can be drawn to stray into areas where our intellectual coverage is pretty thin. There is nothing wrong with honesty. Just say, “I don’t have much to say on that subject because I am not an expert in that area. However something I do feel passionate about is…”. Don’t just end it with telling the audience you don’t know much, because we are starting to damage our personal brand. Avoid leaving the conversation hanging in the air with us having admitted we are babbling on about stuff we don’t know too much about. Immediately segue into an area where we are knowledgeable and talk about that. Always seek the questions in advance. With media people they will do that, but often they have a couple of silent assassins ready which they will hit you with unexpectedly, to throw you off balance, to gain their “scoop”. Business panels and podcasts are usually not like that. Generally, for panels, they will let you know, in general terms, what is the broad discussion they are looking for. In the case of a panel, it is unpredictable where the conversation will move, but at least there are broad rails bounding the subject matter. Again, it always better to say you don’t know, than trying to snow the organisers or the audience. Instead make a comment about some aspect you do know well and preserve your expert status. For podcasts, you should expect they will have a set list of questions and you should get those in advance. If the interviewer says something like “I let the muse guide me”, then I wouldn’t recommend joining that podcast, unless you are massively confident about the subject matter. Generally, there will be prior episodes, so you can get a sense of whether you are in the presence of real genius or a total nutter. Often there will be a pre-meeting, to go through the episode theme and for them to get a sense of what sort of a guest you will be. You can also get a sense of who they are too. Prepare for the questions, but understand you won’t be able to read from notes. The pace will move too fast for that. You can glance at your notes, so it is better to have them arranged for easy reference, if you indeed need to do that. Just having mentally calibrated the questions is usually enough. Remember you are there because you know about the subject, so it will be easy for you to speak about it. That is often the real problem. We do know a lot about the subject and we talk for too long and say too much. Media interviews are an area where the more concise you are the safer it is. Panel discussion hosts don’t like guests who want to hog the limelight, so they will unceremoniously cut you off, effectively signalling to the audience that you lack self-awareness. Podcast hosts may just edit the hell out of you. There is a balance, but being concise comes across a lot better than rambling. If what you say is a bit too circumspect, the interviewer will draw you out further. If you hear yourself talking too much, then you probably are, so you need to conclude your remarks on that point and stop. Rehearse your remarks based on the questions. Remember these are public occasions and just as you would rehearse for a public speech, you need ...
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    13 mins
  • How to Develop Persuasion Power

    How to Develop Persuasion Power
    Jul 21 2025

    One consistent issue which often pops up within companies requesting our training is achieving persuasion power with colleagues, bosses and subordinates. Being unable to convince others to follow your requests, ideas and suggestions is highly frustrating. Often the issue is how the topic is approached. In this “time is money”, no patience, miniscule concentration span, twenty four/seven scramble, people drive you to get to your point. If you are giving a presentation the big boss might bark out “Story, get to the point”. We are taught at business school to start with the punchline and get that into the Executive Summary, right at the front of the document. That is fine except it is ineffectual when presenting in person.

    The punchline may be an excellent idea – “let’s increase the marketing budget by $1 million to fund campaigns to coincide with the end of Covid”. The problem though is that the punchline is naked and has no protection attached. As soon as we offer a statement, we suddenly transform our neutral audience into a raving band of doubters, sceptics, naysayers and critics. Fair enough too, because we didn’t land the punchline properly. Comedians don’t start with the punchline. They set it up, they build the mental pictures for us so we can see the scene in our mind’s eye. They plug in plenty of context, add interesting characters, nominate a location and secure the build up in a temporal frame for us.

    When the punchline is unveiled it is congruent with the set up, makes a lot of sense and we laugh. Why on earth serious, well educated business people would imagine they can just throw the punchline out there, with no context, background, proof, evidence, data and statistics is a bit of a mystery. But they do just that and then get cut to ribbons by the baying crowd of non-believers.

    Our communication skills have to be good enough that briefly, we can build the basis for the punchline. If we do a good job, the members of the audience are all sitting there thinking “we should fund a campaign to coincide with the end of Covid”, before we say anything about it. The lead up has been so well constructed that given the background, the best way forward occurs to everyone as the most obvious thing needed.

    We have to keep it brief though. Storytelling is a big part of this, but these are “short stories”, not War and Peace tome like equivalents. If we labour the point or go too long with the background, some grumpy attendees are bound to tell us “get to the point”. So we need to have enough context, supported with tons of evidence, which draws out the needed next step. When we explain what comes next, everyone feels they already thought of that answer by themselves. This is guaranteed to get agreement to the proposal.

    The way we get to the structure of the talk is to start with the action we want everyone to agree to. Having isolated out the action we investigate why do we think this? What have we read, heard, seen, experienced something, which tells us this is the best solution. There must be a reason for what we are recommending. All we need to do is capture that information and add in the people they know, a place they can see in their mind, put it all in a time frame and definitely add in data, evidence and proof to back up what we are saying.

    We start with the background and then we reveal the punchline but we don’t stop there. Recency is powerful, so we want to control what is the last thing our audience hears. We top it all off with stating the benefit of the action. The action/ benefit component must be very short. There needs to be one clear action, so that everyone can understand what we need to do. Also, while there may be many benefits, we only want to mention the most powerful one. If we keep piling on the benefits we begin to dilute their power with too much detail. Clarity must be the driving ambition here. If we put it into mathematical terms then 90% of the time we speak should be devoted to providing the richest context possible and 5% each for the action and benefit.

    If we are doing a good job then by the time we blurt out the punchline the audience will be thinking “that is old hat, I knew that, that is obvious”. If we can engender that reaction then we have done our job well. Brief but powerful, clear and convincing - these should be our objectives.
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    11 mins
  • What Japanese Presenters Get Wrong

    What Japanese Presenters Get Wrong
    Jul 14 2025
    What Japanese Presenters Get Wrong Clients have some common problems with their Japanese leaders. I know this because the same requests keep coming up. This is across industries and companies and it is consistent. Usually Japanese presenters are excellent at assembling lots of data and information. They can really pack a lot into a few slides. When they present it is like a waterfall of wonderous content, just flowing forth, without much structure or clarity. Somehow the bosses have to work out the key points for themselves, because the staff’s job focuses on accumulating hoards of data and then putting it all up on screen. The presenter is almost invisible, has low energy, speaks in a quiet voice you can struggle to hear and blends well into the wall paper. This doesn’t work so well in international meetings and Japan looks weak and ineffectual to the rest of the far flung company world. We are battling two giants here. One is the educational system and the other is Japanese culture. I earned my Masters Degree here in Tokyo, so I have seen up close and personal what a high school education prepares you for and what universities do with that raw clay. An argument could have been made, prior to the advent of the internet, that the ability to memorise vast quantities of information and regurgitate it on command was a serious capability. We can find any thing very quickly today thanks to search engines, so having to memorise gobs of stuff isn’t as important as it once may have been. I see it in my son’s education when he was at international High School here. They were required to have laptops and everything was done online. His generations’ issue is there is too much information. How do you find the best and correct data, how do you sort the wheat from the chaff? Young people are digital natives, but they are all drinking from the firehose of all data every recorded, sitting just a few clicks away. We teach our students to start at the end. Define in as short a sentence as possible, the most important key message you want to impart. This is not as easy as it sounds. You have to be brutal with yourself. You have to eliminate all the nice to have, all the interesting to have and refine it down to the must have. Just throwing up a lot of data on screen doesn’t require as much thinking, as refining the data into the gold nuggets for the audience. Discerning the key message then allows us to build the structure for the argument and to align the necessary evidence in order to be convincing to our audience. The first words coming out of our mouth have a powerful role. Everyone seems easily distracted today, have miniscule concentration spans and are quickly bored. So we need to say something that really breaks through that wall of indifference and grab their attention. There is no point launching that blockbuster opening in a squeaky, unsure, timid little voice. People will be flying for their phones to escape you. No, we need a strong voice, standing or sitting tall if online, when we kick things off. We have to be oozing confidence. “But Story san, my English is so poor, I have no confidence”. This is another trope we often hear. Here we have Japanese perfectionism, no defect, no errors and no mistake culture colliding with the Education Department’s failed efforts to teach the population English. Don’t accept that excuse. No one cares about linguistic perfection in business meetings, except the Japanese staff when they have to speak in English. Give them the “no grammar needed” escape jail card for the meetings, to give them permission to speak without fear and let the rest of us work out what it is they want to say. We are used to this and are all pretty good at it. Just being able to isolate the key take away and deliver that in a confident manner will be a revolution to business meetings where Japanese have to present. Not having to wade through all the dross to understand the key point will be a relief. Having one idea per slide will be a life saver for everyone – make this the iron rule for Japanese presenters. This forces the selection of only the most important information to be shown. The result will be a much clearer messaging effort and greater clarity around what exactly is that message. Confidence sells the message, so the delivery has to be sold in that manner. Rehearsal is critical for Japanese speakers and so is coaching. This applies to whatever language they are presenting in, because you can guarantee the issues will be present in both languages to a great extent. When giving feedback to anyone, only look at two elements and tell them what they are doing well and then tell them how they can do it even better. This will build confidence and create a momentum that will maximise capability. What does all of this cost? Nothing, so let’s get to it.
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    12 mins
  • A Smile, Energy, Eyeline Make Such A Difference

    A Smile, Energy, Eyeline Make Such A Difference
    Jul 7 2025
    Once upon a time, we taught public speaking and presentation skills in a class room, with tons of people all seated together, right next to each other. We moved to teaching everything LIVE On Line since February 2020, so what has been the difference? Surprisingly, not as much as we expected. The one big difference is the lack of opportunity to employ full body emphasis when presenting, because everyone is mainly sitting in front of a screen. You can use a standing desk, but even so, the camera will cut you off at the thigh level, so we are not getting the full body power. There are a few tricky things about gestures when using fake backgrounds, which by the way seems to be standard now. What are the things that stand out most in the online presenting environment? Smiling is definitely one which has disappeared, when people are on screen. I don’t know why that is the case. Perhaps we are more self conscious in front of a camera? Or is this now such a serious business world that smiling is out of fashion? Think of any online meeting you have attended recently and ask yourself was anyone smiling when they made their comments or gave their reports? I was teaching a class on presenting skills online recently and what a difference it made when people would smile during their talks. Not every subject lends itself to smiling of course but there are bound to be good news in there somewhere and that is the time to trot out that big smile of yours. It is congruent with the content of the talk, so it works. It is also such a connector with the audience, it really drives up the engagement factor with an audience. We have all been doing these online meetings for 18 months now, yet most people still haven’t mastered the medium. I know it is difficult, because the camera lens is 10 centimetres above the faces on the screen. However, take a look at the eye line of the participants in the next meeting. How many are framed in the screen so that there is a half body showing and their head is at about two thirds height on camera? Many will still have their heads cut off and they are arranged at the very bottom of the screen, like they have been decapitated. Or they will have the camera lens angle shooting straight up their nostrils – not an attractive look that one. When we get the camera lens at eye line and we speak while looking at the camera, we are now using the medium as it was designed. The camera can bring us into the world of the viewer and we can be speaking directly to them through the lens. When we are looking down at the faces on screen we have broken off eye contact and we seem like we are looking down on everyone. It is the equivalent of giving a face to face speech without ever looking at your audience, in fact you are speaking to the floor, the whole time. Now I have seen speakers actually do that, but it is totally ineffective. The same with the online world – talk to the people through the lens and you will get your message across much more impressively. We mainly use our voices when presenting online. Yet what about gestures? Gestures can support what we are saying by bringing more physical energy to the point. If you have framed yourself properly then you can use your hands on screen. There are a few best practices though. Firstly, don’t wave your hands around, because the fake backgrounds will disappear them at certain points. So, hold your hands at between shoulder and head height, so that they can be easily seen and hold the gesture rather than trying to move it too much. Also, if you want to show some item on screen, use your own body as the shield and show it in front of you. The fake background won’t be able to disappear it on you when you do it this way. Most people I see online, are using the same speaking voice range they use all the time in the in-person world. When we are presenting we are no longer a part of the audience – we are on stage, be it in a venue or online. That means we need to bring a lot more energy to what we are saying, in order to attract the audience to our message. When we are online, we also need to compensate for the fact that the camera will sap 20% of our power and we will come across as having less energy that usual. You may have noticed that most people speaking online sound like they are on “downers”. We need to get that voice energy up and start directing at it a key words we want to emphasise in our sentences. Not every word in a sentence has the same value, so we need to pick out key words and phrases and make them hot, by hitting them harder. Most online presenters have a long way to go with this medium. The experience gained over the last year or so, hasn’t improved them, actually. They are still making fundamental mistakes. These can be easily corrected and it just takes greater awareness and some practice to get it right. So let’s think again about what we ...
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    13 mins
  • Presenting On Video

    Presenting On Video
    Jun 30 2025
    Video is tricky. However, it looks so simple. You just stand in front of the camera and give your talk. I don’t know why video saps twenty percent of our energy when it is actually broadcast, but that seems to be the accepted wisdom. That means that just speaking normally into camera will now look a lot less energetic. Getting the delivery to be fluent is also a challenge. Either we do it free style or we use a teleprompter. Both have their challenges. What do we do with our hands? This is an interesting one, because the camera lens seems to have some magic power to reduce our gesture self awareness to zero, until that is, when we see it played back in all its gory glory. I broadcast three TV shows on YouTube every week, so I am doing a lot of video work. My first weekly TV show was kicked off nearly four years, so I have gained a few insights over that time. I am not from the media world or have any background in television. I am a typical businessman who got into this by accident and so it is all pretty much self taught through exposure, practice and repetition. Yes, I have the advantage of being a High Impact Presentations instructor for Dale Carnegie, but presenting to a live audience and doing it on video is totally different. Everyone has discovered this fact since we all moved home, to spend a lot of our time in Zoom meetings or their equivalent. I also teach people how to present to the camera and I have noticed a few things. Invariably their energy is too low. They are transferring their usual speaking volume to this medium and it doesn’t work. They appear lifeless and boring. No problem, speak louder, right? That is what I thought too, but I noticed a lot of people find that daunting. For them speaking with 50% more energy feels like they are screaming. Remember we are subtracting 20% immediately to counter the camera lens energy deficit, but on top of that they need to bring even more energy to the talk. If I ask for 50% more energy, invariably I will get about a 10% increase. This is why having an instructor or coach is handy, because you can’t easily work this out by yourself. Gestures seem to be another area of mystery. What do I do with my hands? The most common choice is to do nothing with them. This is a big missed opportunity to bring physical power to support your verbal message. I have found there is a 15 second window to hold the same gesture. More than that and it become weaker and weaker and more and more annoying. The gestures need to be coordinated with what we are saying, so that they are congruent. If what we are saying and the way we are saying it don’t align properly, then our audience gets distracted. Once upon a time, the distracted audience would be by focusing on our voice or our apparel. Now it is on their phone. For half body video composition, we need the gestures to be held between rib height and the head height, so that they can be easily seen. For some curious reason, a lot of people hold their gestures at low waist level and apart from being difficult to see, this bit usually gets cut off in the editing process. What we are doing with our face also is important. Having one facial expression may be very energy efficient, but it looks wooden on video. Our face should be showing what we are talking about. If results are good, then look happy. If they are bad, then look concerned. If you ask a rhetorical question, then look puzzled. I think you get the idea. One thing the camera doesn't like is when we drop our chin down, while we are talking. It looks like we are talking down to our audience, we also look very constrained. So we need to keep that chin up the whole time. Try it for yourself and you will be amazed at the difference it makes, to how we come across to our audience. If we are just speaking off the top of our head, then we had better be pretty good or the video will be butchered in the editing process, as we have to stitch all those corrected mistakes together. It becomes very jerky in the final version, which is super distracting from our message. Zooming in and zooming out at these edits makes it appear less choppy, but you still don’t want too many of these to have to contend with. Teleprompters can fix this and a bit of adjusting for font size and speed is needed to find the right balance. The secret here is to only look at the left side of the screen as the words roll up. Otherwise, you will find yourself reading from left to right and on screen you will look like you are reading it. This rather defeats the purpose doesn’t it. Have a look at my shows on YouTube and see if you can tell I am reading it off a teleprompter? Remember, our peripheral eyesight is good enough to focus on the left side and still read the words which are on that same line off to the right. Video is a different game and we need to make this medium a winner for us....
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    13 mins
  • Is Appearing Too Slick A Negative When Presenting?

    Is Appearing Too Slick A Negative When Presenting?
    Jun 23 2025

    Too smooth politicians, silky salespeople, urbane company thrusters all set off alarm bells. We can meet impressive people and we can meet impressive looking people. Over time we have learnt how to plumb the difference. The world of presenting is made up of the top 1% who know what they are doing and the 99% who have no real clue. The 99% group are often card carrying sceptics, who have finely tuned radar for anything that looks different to what they know. Also, by definition this clueless 99% are our audience when we present. Are we in danger of turning them off if we come across as too professional?

    This is certainly the case in Japan. Standing out and being outstanding are not welcomed here. The most insightful cultural norm in Japan is captured in the traditional wisdom of “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down”. Owning the auditorium, dominating the podium, being a powerful stage presence are all “nail sticking out” issues. Looking supremely confident, being Mr. or Ms. Smooth, operating at a high level, are all viewed with suspicion. We have a similar idea in the West. When we meet a “smooth talking salesperson” we get worried about them taking our money.

    Japanese culture appreciates humility, harmony, group consensus, not putting yourself forward and modesty. Hello to all of our American fans out there. This Japanese viewpoint is absolutely the formula for not getting ahead in aggressive, competitive societies. Interestingly enough, as an Aussie, I think this Japanese approach is close to our cultural norms too. In Australian parlance, someone who “big notes” themselves is a self aggrandising, big talker and they won’t get very far Down Under. A Donald Trump telling everyone how rich he is, how smart he is, would be impossible for an Australian politician to replicate. As presenters, we operate within the bounds of our cultural rules and limits.

    So how do we do a professional job of presenting in Japan, when the whole ethos is against the display of high levels of professionalism? There is a difference between being very professionally prepared and being a boring oaf on stage. Talking about yourself, except in terms of self-degradation, is out. That means we frame what we say about ourselves from a more humble lens. We do design a blockbuster opening though, to capture audience attention. We do set up the flow of the talk, so that the navigation is simple and easy to follow. We do provide evidence to back up any assertions we make. We do prepare two closes, one for before and one for after Q&A. We do rehearse numerous times to perfect the content, polish the cadence and make sure we are on time. In other words, we are a total professional in the way we prepare the presentation.

    The friction points arise by the way we carry ourselves. I have lived here for 36 years and I have never seen a Japanese presenter stride confidently to the podium or the microphone. They walk slowly and hesitantly to the stage centre, stooping, wearing the greyest of the grey clothing, so they can be as boring as possible. They open up immediately with a series of apologies, to establish that they are not superior to anyone in the audience, even if they are.

    I can’t see me doing any of that when I am presenting. I will be a little more conservative in my dress, only because I don’t want a pocket chief or tie or shirt ,to compete with my message. I won’t be bounding up on to the stage like a panther ready to devour my audience. I will walk tall, with subdued confidence and go straight into my opening, without any time wasted on getting the tech right. There will be no microphone thumping because I will have tested it all before the event started. I won’t be fiddling around to get my slide deck up, because I will have someone else doing that for me, while I use those first few vital seconds to engage my audience.

    I won’t be making any faux apologies for my poor preparation or poor public speaking ability, because I will be moving straight into explaining the value the talk will bring to the listeners. I won’t be making flamboyant gestures or utilising any thespian artifices. I will be business like and focused on helping people through the messages I am delivering. The way I deliver the talk will be congruent with the content. It won’t feel slick, but it will feel competent and that is what I want, in order to have my messages accepted. I won’t attempt to be sardonic, cynical, use any idioms or try to be an amateur stand up comic. By Western standards, I will come across, as an understated expert in my topic. By Japanese standards, I will come across as a confident, but business like person, dedicated to their message for the audience. I will have threaded the needle between the two extremes and that will be a good result.
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    13 mins
  • Why Engineers Need Presentation Skills

    Why Engineers Need Presentation Skills
    Jun 16 2025

    English versus mathematics? Easy choice for budding engineers at High School and for when they get to University. Science is logical, knowable, understandable. Presenting seems to have little in the way of science and more art involved, so best avoided. Actually they do a pretty good job of avoiding it, until a certain stage in their careers. These days clients want to talk to the engineers, so they have to front up and visit the buyer with the salesperson. If the counterparty is another engineer, then the code is in place and everyone is fine. Line managers, decision makers, CFOs are different beasts and more difficult. Even more annoying is the client conducts beauty parades to decide which company’s engineers they are going to select.

    This is where the skilled engineer who can present in a skilled way eats everyone’s lunch. One engineer mumbles, rambles, doesn’t look confident and is struggling with basic coherence. The other is clear, concise, in command of the material and making the key points like a legend. Well, the choice for the buyer is made pretty easy.

    In other cases, the engineers get promoted and have to represent their section to the senior leaders in the company. This is often when we get a call. “Can you help us please. We have a great engineer leading the team but his communication skills and presentation skills are dismal and the senior leadership have tasked HR to fix the problem, by finding a training company who can help”.

    This sounds good but it is often a difficult task. The major issue tends to be a lack of awareness around the importance and value of presenting. These skills are soft skills rather than the hard skills, which their profession demands. They can see them as a bit “fluffy”. Presentation skills are very much in the eye of the beholder too, so opinions can vary regarding what is a good presentation. This lack of agreed, concrete measurable aspects can be an anathema to engineers.

    Fluffy or otherwise, persuasion power is a real thing. This requires good skills in the design of the talk, the gathering of evidence and in the delivery. Design here means does the talk flow logically resulting in a clear conclusion, that is credible, because of the evidence assembled to support the main argument.

    Ace engineer or not, if we start the presentation with a lot of fiddling around with the tech, there is a strong chance our audience is distracted and reaching for their phones to find something more interesting to do. We have to know that this is the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism and attention spans are functioning at microscopic levels. No matter how brilliant our evidence is, we will have lost many in our audience in those first few vital seconds, as we establish that first impression between speaker and listener. Online is even worse because now everyone is granted a free license to multi-task in the background and ignore the speaker.

    Our opening has to be a gripper, such that the audience want to hear more, they want to know where you are going with this presentation. We must speak clearly and confidently. Easier said than done for laconic engineers, who are not prone to speaking a lot. Also, not doing a lot of presentations or probably, avoiding to do presentations, has left a confidence vacuum that is filled with nervousness. Sounding confident to an audience when you are not requires a level of thespian ability, which is usually beyond the grasp of hard skill trained engineers.

    Rehearsal is the saviour here and lots of it is required. We don’t want to spend all of our time building the slide deck. The delivery is what sells the message and that relates straight back to the fact we have to buy what we are saying first and then communicate that belief to the audience. If we don’t understand the power of persuasion, we are likely to fluff off the rehearsal component of making the speech professional.

    I have never been able to trace this supposed Japanese saying but it does sound good, “more sweat in training, less blood in battle”. Let’s make our mistakes in practice, get the talk timing right, work on the cadence, the order and the delivery. If we have the right mindset, then good things will happen and all of these other pieces of the puzzle will fit into place nicely.
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    11 mins
  • How To Present In Breakout Groups

    How To Present In Breakout Groups
    Jun 9 2025
    Everyone is getting very swish with the tech these days, as we spend more and more hours in online meetings. Consequently, we are more and more likely to find ourselves in a breakout room to discuss a topic. When we first started doing this March 2020, as we ran our first LIVE On Line training, we discovered some disconcerting things about the medium. In many cases they were disparate individuals from different companies and also sometimes disparate individuals from different sections of the same firm. Initially, we found sending people who didn’t already know each other into breakout rooms perplexed them. For the breakout room captives, there was no hierarchy, no psychological safety and no trust. Many times, three people in a breakout room would just sit there for three minutes and say absolutely nothing to each other. We learnt we had to set up some social order and ground rules for them. We needed to tell them that a certain person will be in charge of the reporting for the group. That person will keep a record of the points raised and we also nominated another person to lead the discussion to create the points. This left everyone else to be a contributor, with the expectation they would do just that and respond to the leader’s request for their opinion. We also found that groups were unclear about the exact point they were discussing. We may have believed we explained it perfectly well, but often they were not sure what to talk about. Part of the reason was that when they heard they were going into a breakout room with strangers, their minds stopped listening to the instructions. Now they were focused on who would be in the group, how would they be perceived by strangers and how would they be judged for what they said in a public arena. With all of this front and centre in their minds, the details of the question had receded into the background. So we asked for a green check or a show of hands, around who understood what was happening. We would then call on some of those people to tell us the protocol for the breakout room and repeat back the question or issue they were going to discuss. The third thing we found was that we had to enter each room and just check that there were no questions. If there were none, then we would leave them to it and move to the next room to check. Surprisingly, even with all of this formatting going on, we would still enter a room to hear stone cold silence, with no one playing their designated leader role. If this was the case, we would become the leader and get the conversation going amongst the participants. I thought this was just Japan, but lately I have joined a study programme run by a global online education organisation. We were sent off to breakout rooms and it became obvious that most of the people participating from all around the world, really hadn’t a clue how to interact in that situation. Part of it is language, as English was not the mother tongue for some of the participants. However, many of the factors which applied in Japan were also in evidence around shyness, lack of hierarchy, being judged and trust. So, if you are sent off to virtual oblivion in a breakout room, here are some tips on how to get the most out of the situation. Seize that initial shy silence and be the one to introduce yourself and say where you are from. Next, talk about how much you are looking forward to learning from the other members of the group. “ I am not an expert in this area and so please give me feedback, if what I am saying makes no sense. Also, let’s all take full advantage of this chance to help each other grow. So, who would like to get us going and give a comment on the question?”. That takes about thirty seconds to explain. If nobody feels sufficiently comfortable yet to kick things off, then you lead with your prepared comment. I say “prepared comment”, because before this session you have gathered your ideas into a series of bullet points, which you can easily to talk to. You are not trying to wing it and make stuff up on the fly. Being prepared is much better than trying to be a spontaneous genius. And the rest of us can tell the difference. By being active and asking questions of others in the group, people start to feel more comfortable and free to express their ideas. It is a good idea to praise people’s contributions, by saying, “Great insight there, referring to XYZ. Could you go a bit deeper on that point please, I am keen to hear more”. When you speak, be concise, clear and please don’t try to hog the airwaves. Say your piece and then ask others for their ideas and comments. In this way, your reputation as a person of value goes up and your humility is noted and appreciated. No one enjoys the blowhard who wants to spend the majority of the time making sure everyone else has to listen to their voice.
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    12 mins