10 Things To Check Before Every Presentation

There's a lot to remember when giving multimedia presentations. PowerPoint or KeyNote presentations involve the complex interaction of your computer, your software, the presentation file, a display screen or projector, your remote, and the audio system. And increasingly, presentations are given as webinars, where the presenter (i.e. you) may be in charge of an even greater scope of technical requirements, including gadgets in your office that can interfere with your presentation. Not to mention that co-worker who barges into your office without knocking. A lot can go wrong. So how can you minimize the risk of technical problems? Don't spend valuable mental RAM thinking about the little but important things you might forget. Here's a simple checklist:

1. Screen saver....................................Disabled

2. Power settings.................................Never turn off (all modes)

3. Multiple displays (for webinars)........Disconnected

4. Email notifications...........................Turned off

5. Other popups and notifications..........Disabled

6. Ringers (cell phone, office phone)......Turned off/DND

7. Sign on door (for webinars)...............Displayed

8. Glass of water...................................Filled

9. Outline............................................On podium/desk

10. Presentation.....................................Open/slides loaded

This is a work in progress and I welcome your comments. And for any particular presentation, there may be more to add to your list. Also consider having multiple backups of your presentation ready to go, as detailed in this excellent post.

Now go knock 'em dead.

Does Technology Make You Complacent?

Is autopilot dangerous? The National Transportation Safety Board is holding a three-day conference in Washington, D.C. to discuss pilot and air traffic controller professionalism, including whether automation makes pilots complacent.  The New York Times reports:

Automation is generally considered a positive development in aviation safety because it reduces pilot workload and eliminates errors in calculation and navigation. “The introduction of automation did good things,” said Key Dismukes, chief scientist for aerospace human factors at NASA. But it changed the essential nature of the pilot’s role in the cockpit. “Now the pilot is a manager, which is good, and a monitor, which is not so good.”

...

Finding the balance between too much technology and too little is crucial, according to William B. Rouse, an engineering and computing professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Complacency is an issue, but designing the interaction between human and technical so the human has the right level of judgment when you need them is a design task in itself,” Mr. Rouse said. “When the person has no role in the task, there’s a much greater risk of complacency.”

Law offices certainly don't run themselves. But some functions are now automated, like document assembly, which utilizes software, templates, and the organization's knowledge base. There's no dispute this is a good development, reducing the time and expense of legal work and producing higher quality and more consistent work product.

Yet the danger of complacency exists. The technology makes it easy to produce good looking work product without dwelling on the details of the process. Professionals can be lulled into clicking buttons rather than thinking carefully.  They can overlook special circumstances or reasons for deviating from standard work.

Good countermeasures might include checklists to ensure people think through the issues. There should be a good review process to ensure final quality. And most importantly, as mentioned in the article, humans must maintain a role in the task -- important work shouldn't be completely automated.

Lean bonus: Discussing the Northwest Airlines flight that overshot its destination, the article quotes Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the captain who famously landed the US Airways plane in the Hudson last summer, reminding us to look for root causes of problems rather than reflexively blaming technology:

“Something in the system allowed these well-trained, experienced, well-meaning, well-intentioned pilots not to notice where they were, and we need to find out what the root causes are,” he said. “Simply to blame individual practitioners is wrong and it doesn’t solve the underlying issues or prevent it from happening.”

Also see this post by Mark Graban on aviation, standardized work, and automation.

Using Aviation Checklists To Improve Your Work

(updated below)

I've nearly finished reading The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. In developing his surgical checklist, Dr. Gawande looked at examples from aviation, which has a long and successful history of using checklists to improve safety. Below are checklists for the Boeing 747-400 and 737-600 (click on images for entire lists)(PDFs).

737-600 Normal Checklist

Boeing 747-400 Normal Checklist

Similarly inspired, I radically re-worked my GTD Weekly Review checklist. One of the major ideas I borrowed from aviation was to replace the checkbox with an abbreviated description of what "complete" means. For instance, an aviation checklist won't just list the landing gear next to a checkbox. Rather, the landing gear should be "down" on final approach, and that's how it's set out in the checklist.

Adapting this idea, my checklist omits the checkbox and instead describes what complete means. For example, my voicemail boxes should be "empty," my briefcase should have "no paper/items," and the prior week of my calendar should be "reviewed/updated." Here's a copy of my new checklist (click to enlarge).

Weekly Review

Hope this inspires you to create or improve your own checklists.

Update: Pilot and commentator Patrick Smith makes an important point:

My feeling is that boredom and automation have relatively little to do with one another. Or, better to the point, they haven't any more to do with one another than they've had in the past. Pilots are at times extremely busy; at other times there are long periods of quiet. Duties come and go, ebb and flow. It has always been that way. Boredom was a factor 60 years ago when planes had rudimentary autopilots and propellers spun by pistons. It's going to be a factor in any profession where there are long stretches of reduced workload -- such as when flying across oceans -- and when a large percentage of tasks becomes repetitive and routine.

Reducing Stress With Checklists and GTD

In the ABA Journal, Martha Neil writes:

A sense of impending doom is a common feeling for many attorneys in practice: From the mistake made when drafting a document or taking a deposition to a transgression that you may not even be aware of yet, there's always something lurking in your consciousness to produce a feeling of being "in trouble."

She goes on to quote a psychotherapist and former lawyer who believes on-the-job stress can cause diagnosable disorders. I'll leave that question to the mental health professionals. But this will certainly sound familiar to any litigator.

While it's probably impossible to avoid stress in law practice entirely, checklists make a huge difference in addressing anxiety levels. If you've done a good job developing your checklist, you're much less likely to feel like you're forgetting something critical. And getting "In to zero" with GTD eliminates that feeling that something bad out there is waiting to bite you.

4 Reasons To Use A Checklist

Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto has arrived, and sits in my kitchen until I get my first free moment to enjoy it. I hope to read it, fittingly, on my upcoming cross-country flight. I meant to post about this earlier, but Dr. Gawande was on the The Daily Show back in February. From the interview, here's four reasons to use a checklist:

1. Complexity. The complexity of our work has skyrocketed.  Aviators implemented checklists because airplanes became too complicated to fly safely otherwise. One of the best test pilots in the world crashed the B-52 on its inaugural flight because he forgot a simple yet critical detail in the pre-flight procedure. For many of us, we've reached a B-52 level of complexity with our work.
2. Forget your pride. Pilots embrace them, despite thousands of hours of training and having rehearsed routine procedures many times. Increasingly, surgical teams use them. So should you in your work.
3. People like them.  Most people actually enjoy using checklists. It eliminates that nagging feeling you're forgetting something and lets you concentrate on doing the work well.
4. They're useful. Almost all medical providers who have tried using checklists say they would want their doctor to use one, were they the patient.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Atul Gawande
www.thedailyshow.com
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Checklists: Get Consensus and Follow Up

Matthew May just finished Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, a book high up on my own reading list. Matt discusses two criteria for checklists:

• Clarity. Assume an untrained eye will read it. Make it bullet-proof, specific, and complete, to capture the knowledge. Make it concrete and representative of the real world. Describe with precision the what, where, and how. That way, there’s no question of what constitutes a deviation or problem.
• Consensus. Everyone who will employ the standard must agree on it. That forces a shared investigation to ensure that the standard represents the best known method or practice at that specific point in time. The activity in turn facilitates understanding.

The consensus part is where most organizations fall short. This is resource intensive. But to get it right, managers must practice genchi genbutsu -- that is, they need to go see for themselves how the work is being done. This takes time and may be perceived as a distraction from "real" work (like putting out fires started because of the lack of good standard processes!).

May suggests three basic steps for deploying a checklist:

1. Establish a Best Practice. Make sure it’s the best-known method. Get input and feedback from those doing the work. Get agreement on it.
2. Make it Visible. Accessibility is key. Hiding it in a drawer won’t work. Post it or publish it so everyone will constantly be aware of it.
3. Communicate. Inform everyone. Prepare and train people. Test it out. Monitor effectiveness and usage.

Step three also takes more time than some managers wish to invest. Training is expensive. It's also difficult to summon the energy after training for follow up. Folks are happy just to be done.

But I'm a huge believer in the power of checklists for lawyers. My experience is that a good checklist pays for itself almost immediately in saved time and reduced errors, sometimes recouping its production costs the first time it is deployed.

D. Mark Jackson

Free Your Mind (and the rest will follow)

David Allen recently wrote (no link available):

I'm lazy and I don't want to think about anything more than it deserves. So my quest became to find the best and most efficient ways to think about things as little as possible. What I found was that by asking a few clarifying questions, and putting the answers in a trusted system, I was able to use my mind more creatively and more strategically for the kind of stuff that really did deserve my mental horsepower.

Using a good system for capturing standard processes allows you to delegate routine thinking to your system, thus freeing up your mind for hard thinking. Contrary to popular belief, a good organizational system enhances creativity.

Most people use a calendar this way. They put appointments and deadlines on their schedule, rather than trying to keep it all in their head. Instead of thinking about when a meeting is scheduled, for example, they focus on preparing for the meeting, or doing something else entirely. By getting the basic information about their schedule on the calendar, it frees them up to think about more important things.

But most people don't appreciate that this method works just as well with tasks. By taking the list of next actions out of your head -- which is usually an impossible thing to keep in your head anyway -- you free up mental RAM for something else. This is particularly true with routine and standardized tasks, which may require little mental energy to do, but tremendous mental energy to keep straight in your head.

And getting tasks into your system minimizes waste. Managing tasks mentally adds little value, and does so at the expense of higher value thinking.  It's like searching for a tool versus using the tool to make something.

D. Mark Jackson