There’s nothing quite like presenting on a subject of which you know very little.
It was the end of a long week with extra long hours. One of the departments at work was holding a brainstorming session at the end of the day, and they invited all departments to join. I joined because I knew there would be food.
While we enjoyed some complimentary snacks, we were tasked with writing down questions we had about five specific projects. Each project had it’s own poster, and we wrote our questions down on sticky notes. After that, the facilitator of the session called us all together and began to explaining our main activity:
PechaKucha (chit-chat in Japanese), is a method of presenting ideas in which the speaker must present 20 slides at no more than 20 seconds per slide. The event usually involves multiple speakers, each of whom must give their own “20×20” presentation immediately following the previous one. The point of the exercise is to pack as much information about multiple topics into a very small amount of time. Therefore, as an example, a 20×20 PechaKucha with 6 consecutive presenters would take a total of 40 minutes.
We did a modified version of PechaKucha: a 4-minute by 4-minute (4×4) model in which we had 4 minutes to prepare one slide and 4 minutes to present it. So we split into five teams and started preparing a slide for our chosen project. Unfortunately, when it came time to present, the only person in our team who wasn’t a recent hire had to leave – thus, it was up to me and a girl who had just been hired the week prior to do a four-minute presentation on a project about which we knew next to nothing.
When it came our turn to present, we made light of the fact that we knew nothing about what we were going to share. Everyone had a good laugh, and it turned out fine. I guess that’s the best way to handle any situation when you don’t know what to do. Just be honest about your ignorance, and add a dash of humor.
That should do it for tonight’s post. No closing quote today, but I’ve been using my highlighter quite a bit as I continue to go through Mere Christianity. There’s one excerpt in particular that I may write about in detail for tomorrow’s post.
Stay tuned.
-Daniel
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