Past, Present, Future

Imagine the scene: We’re sitting in our office late on a Friday afternoon, thinking a little bit about the weekend ahead. The anticipation of upcoming events has us, well, a little distracted. Unexpectedly, our boss walks into our office and says, “I just heard that you pushed back your delivery of XYZ by 2 weeks. What’s going on?” Jolted back to work reality, the mind begins to race. The pressure is on. Since it’s true we’ve pushed back our delivery, nothing we say will be good news. With little or no preparation, we’ve got to deliver a compelling presentation that will accurately represent the circumstances and justify the decision we’ve made. It’s time to apply pattern  #3: Past, Present, Future (PPF).

We’re approaching the end of a series of posts aimed at helping us to be more effective in our day-to-day impromptu speaking opportunities. The premise is that when we are armed with a simple pattern to follow we will be more effective at delivering our messages with little or no advance preparation. By memorizing one or more of these patterns we can concentrate on the message rather than the mechanics.

In this post we’re bringing you Past, Present, Future (PPF). The dirty little secret is that this pattern is a simplification of the impromptu speaking strategy we discussed in a previous post, Tell a Story.

PPF almost needs no additional explanation:

Past = the way it was before

Present = the way it is now

Future = the way we plan for or predict it to be

This simple pattern is easy to remember and easy to apply. Let’s consider what we might say to our boss.

(Past) Our original schedule was developed with the information we had in hand at the time. The team has been working on the project for almost a month now. They have made significant progress. In the course of this work, however, we have learned quite a bit. (Present) For example, we now know that our original assumptions about the API were too simple. Also, the UI requirements have changed. The date changed to reflect the reality of this new work. (Future) Later this week I have a meeting with the QA team to talk about ways that we can increase the overlap between development and test, possibly to the extent of reducing the effect of this schedule slip on GA by as much as 50%.

The PPF pattern can be applied in many situations. It’s short, simple, and shares its name with some jewelry I bought for my wife a couple of Christmases ago.

Color Outside the Lines

It’s popular to speak boldly about “coloring outside the lines.” I think of it as a more hip version of the threadbare “think outside the box.”

The truth is, though, that when we first clutched those fat Crayons in our pudgy little hands the lines on the page provided guidance as we struggled for mastery.

I can remember being really tiny and looking with admiration at the coloring books of the older kids. Not so much as a smudge outside of the lines! Wow! They were, to me, masterpieces. I struggled mightily to build my skill to emulate their success. The lines on the pages of my coloring books gave me guidelines or patterns to follow. It was these patterns that eventually helped me to succeed.

When I watch the likes of EMC CEO Joe Tucci or President Barak Obama take questions from an audience, I feel like that little kid again. I watch as they produce a coloring book’s worth of impromptu speaking masterpieces that I wish to emulate. How do we build our skill to achieve a similar level of comfort and articulation? I believe that the answer, like when we first learned to color inside the lines, is to follow a pattern. Following a pattern will give us the guidelines we need to build expertise and eventually succeed.

Knowing and practicing a pattern to follow will also prepare us for the surprises that impromptu speaking opportunities bring. Consider the brilliant work of US Airways Captain Sullenberger in the recent crash landing in New York’s Hudson River. All passengers and crew aboard flight 1549 survived because in the 5 minutes between take off and splash down Sullenberger followed practiced guidelines and patterns. He had never lost two engines on takeoff before, but years of training and preparation equipped him with patterns he could follow automatically.

Knowing the patterns allowed him to focus on delivery–successfully delivering the passengers and crew alive!

Similarly, but with much less danger, our impromptu speaking opportunities present us with situations we’ve never been in before.

Like Captain Sullenberger we can handle these unexpected situations by automatically following patterns we’ve memorized and practiced. These patterns help us remain in control and focused even in the most challenging situations–successfully delivering the information our audience demands.

In a short series of upcoming posts to this blog we will discuss three patterns that we can follow to develop our impromptu speaking skills.

The patterns are:

*     Tell a story

*     Position, action, benefit (PAB)

*     Past, present, future

Stay tuned…