• You make it clear that you’re there to inform, rather than entertain. Those seeking entertainment will stay away, instead of falling asleep or walking out.
• You inform your audience brilliantly.
• You do some little things that are unambitiously entertaining — include a relevant cartoon or video or a funny story (and rehearse it so it is funny).

1. Do your homework. Know your subject extremely well. Rehearse with people who are hard to dazzle with new information, until they’re impressed. 
2. Pick your venues, know your audience. If the conference is full of bored people who are only there because it’s a company-paid jaunt, pass. No point being knowledgeable if the audience isn’t interested in learning. Talk to them before your presentation to find out what they know and what they care about.
3. Give ‘em lots of new stuff. I always have twice as much new, interesting material as I expect to be able to present. I don’t let on that I have a lot of slides that I can show (I rarely get to all of them). I put most of the best stuff at the beginning, and save the very best to last, skipping stuff in the middle that won’t fit. I move at a fairly fast clip, but if people have questions, I let them come. 
4. Make sure your information is practical and useful. Some abstract new concept may be interesting to you, and a few in the audience, but most of us are looking for something we can apply in our jobs or our lives. If it’s not obvious, it’s even OK to suggest to people how the information you’re conveying can be used. If there are free downloads or other ‘takeaway’ tools you can point them to that can help them use the information, that’s even better.
5. No bullet point slides. Interesting, relevant pictures, graphics, screen-shots. Give the audience something to look at, but force them to listen to you at the same time.
6. Give ‘em lots of handouts. Not the entire text of your presentation — other stuff that adds to it. Reading lists. Related articles. Copies of especially good graphics. Hotlinks to sites with further information and tools and demos they can try out on their own time.
7. Go with the flow. In a small group, if they’re really engaged, my objective is to turn the presentation into a group conversation. After giving them some new/interesting information at the start of the presentation (and handing out a bunch more) I’ll toss out a question and, if there’s a lot of discussion, I’ll just moderate and facilitate, keeping it going as long as there’s energy around it. Sometimes the audience has more to teach each other than I have to offer them. Those who don’t want to participate can read the stuff I’ve handed out. In a larger group, I leave time and room for a couple of interesting diversions (which, if I’ve done my homework, I can usually anticipate and plan for). I ask the audience if they’re interested in the tangents I’ve planned for, and if I get a lot of nods, I’ll go there — it’s a way of making a large audience feel involved in the flow. If I get no response, I’ll stay with the original agenda.
8. Use multimedia. Relevant visualizations and short video clips that make your point make a nice break from the static. Dave Snowden showed the famous Daniel Simons “basketball” observation skills video last week, and people were talking about it for the rest of the conference. I showed the India traffic video to demonstrate complex adaptive systems.
9. Speak enthusiastically and passionately. This can be hard if, like me, you don’t sleep well in hotels and on planes and you’re a bit weary when you step up to the podium. Or if you’re not used to speaking and are nervous. But it’s important. If you don’t sound interested or intrigued by your subject, you can’t expect your audience to be.
10. Tell stories — about how the information you’re giving has been practically applied, or (if you prefer war stories to success stories) how it should have been applied. Stories from your own experience are best, but second-hand stories are OK too.

Dave Snowden’s famous comment about knowledge is that “we know more than we can say, and we can say more than we can write down”. In his case it has taken him four years to write the book on complex adaptive systems that he teaches in a three day course, and in neither the book nor the course could he hope to explain more than a fraction of all that he has learned on the subject.

Those of us who manage written information therefore have a great challenge. How can we make what is written down more meaningful, more valuable? How can we make it “make more sense”? Here are ten principal ways to do so (the links in this chart are to illustrations or further discussions of each tool or skill):

Here’s an example of how these ten ways can be applied to some excellent, but unrefined and under-appreciated information: George Monbiot’s new book on global warming, Heat:

1. Paying attention: Most of us only absorb a small proportion of what we read or see. Perhaps because we now deal with so much information, of which little is really important, our attention is so divided that we skim, and browse, everything, and therefore run the risk of missing what’s critical. Unless you’re a more skillful reader than I am, you need to read Monbiot’s book twice, carefully, to really appreciate his arguments, and also to appreciate their Achilles’ heel. While the book Presence is a bit new-agey for most businesspeople’s taste, it’s one approach to achieving a deeper understanding of information than most of us are capable of today. 
2. Interpreting: It was when I started thinking about the leaks in my own house, relating Monbiot’s arguments to my personal situation, that they began to make more sense and take on a greater urgency. In addition, combining the information in Monbiot’s book (with the solutions to global warming) with that in Flannery’s The Weather Makers (about the causes of global warming) made both books more sensible.
3. Synthesizing: A lot of people learn by distilling information down to its essence. That’s one of the reasons that a site like the hugely popular Peak Oil primer Energy Bulletin picked up my review of Monbiot’s book. Corporate think-tanks are beginning to use cartoonists to capture the key learnings of brainstorming sessions. And blogs are increasingly being used by three corporate constituencies (subject matter experts, newsletter editors and community of practice coordinators), even while most of the business world lags behind in adopting blogs as excellent means of synthesizing and adding context to corporate information.
4. Imagining: As I read Monbiot’s book, I was constantly imagining (a) what the world would look like if his proposals were implemented, (b) what would need to happen here in Canada for his proposals to be implemented, and (c) what role I could play in getting them implemented. This imagining added greatly to my understanding of the book’s arguments, and the possibilities they present.
5. Modeling: This visualization from a 1996 paper by Dennis Hartmann captures in one diagram a lot of information about the causes of global warming. Monbiot’s and Flannery’s books would both have been better if such visualizations had been included. While I was reading Heat I made systems thinking diagrams in the inside cover to increase my understanding of the book’s critical arguments. As another example, my appreciation of how societies develop self-managed rule-sets to cope with complex adaptive systems was greatly augmented by watching this video of traffic in uncontrolled intersections in India’s cities, and then reading the rules that make this apparent chaos work so well.
6. Stories: Monbiot’s book includes many anecdotes, mostly about his own situation, that help add context and immediacy to his arguments, and make them more memorable. Dave Snowden and Steve Denning both have websites with excellent information on how to tell, and appreciate the meaning of, anecdotes and stories.
7. Analyzing: As I read Heat, I used the Pyramid Principle structured thinking methodology to annotate the key points of the book. My synopsis and review of the book is the result, largely a transcription of my annotations. It’s how I recognize the implications of what I read — in effect, what it means.
8. Analogizing: Monbiot doesn’t use analogies often, and hs work suffers for it. As I read the book, I was constantly restating what he was saying “in other words”. But I too have a lot to learn about developing and using effective metaphors. Unfortunately, the people I have known who use them the most, use them badly. They need to be developed carefully and thoughtfully, and used sparingly. The world needs more Lakoff, since good analogies start with being able to see things from different perspectives.
9. Recording: If you’ve ever listened to, or watched, the tape of an event you attended live, you probably realize how much you miss, or get wrong, the first time around. I’ve started using mindmaps to document all my meetings, displaying them on screen at the front of the room so that errors and omissions can be picked up in real time. It’s an amazing, and humbling, experience. Thanks to training from Steelcase, I’ve also learned the valuable skill of cultural anthropology. Not only does this training hone your observation skills — it teaches you what to look for.
10. Conversing: Since we first appeared on this planet, conversation has been the principal means by which we exchange context-rich information. And because it’s so effective (if time-consuming) it still is. I had a conversation with someone who had borrowed my copy of Heat shortly after I read it, and I think I learned more from that conversation than I did from reading the book. No wonder book circles are so popular.
11. Canvassing: Prediction markets, which draw on the enlightened self-interest of the many, can glean collective intelligence that cannot be captured any other way. These are now a major focus of the Knowledge Management community, which sees them as one way to tap ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’. The key to getting value from this wisdom is asking the right questions (appropriately ‘qualified’ crowds are best at answering closed-ended questions that ask for predictions, factual information, decisions, or root causes) of the right crowd (the largest possible number of objective, independent, basically-informed people, who are motivated to provide the best answer — often because, as employees or customers, they have a stake in the result).
12. Collaborating: Of all the tools and techniques that can add meaning to information, this is the category that has the most promise and has been the most disappointing. Too many collaboration and ‘virtual presence’ tools are over-engineered, unintuitive, and too complicated to learn, and are therefore under-utilized. Even tools that offer the best features of wikis and other ‘groupware’  (like Jotspot — recently acquired by Google) are cumbersome and intimidating to the majority on the other side of the digital divide. But as they are made simpler and their more sophisticated features are shoved ‘under the hood’ their time will come. In the meantime, as soon as we develop greater skills in inviting and facilitating Open Space events, this methodology promises to help us understand and address complex problems far more effectively than any of the tools in our current toolkit.

Before these tools and techniques can begin to augment and partially supplant face-to-face conversations as a means of adding meaning and value to information, many more people need to become much more adept at using them. In my opinion, the best way organizations can do this is by reintermediating the role of the Information Professional:

• Getting our librarians, front-line IT people, trainers and other back-office information professionals away from their desks and content management jobs and out in the field learning how front-line people in the organization use information and technology, helping them use it more effectively, and determining what information, in what formats, they find most valuable;
• Training these IPs to use the tools and techniques listed above, getting them to apply this learning to the information that passes through their hands so that, in the hands of its requesters and ultimate recipients, it becomes much more intelligible, useful and valuable;
• Enabling the IPs to teach these newly-acquired skills to the people on the front lines, so they too can get more meaning from information and add more value to it as they pass it on in turn; and
• Involving the IPs in the design and development of new tools and techniques that add meaning and value to information — no one knows more than they do what is most needed.

The great challenge in this task is enlightening management — the majority of executives still seem to see IT as a means to disintermediate information and get rid of the IP role entirely. It has been my experience that no one in the modern organization is as under-utilized and under-appreciated as the information professional. To demonstrate this to senior management, IPs themselves will have to take the initiative, championing small-scale experiments that use some of the above-mentioned tools and techniques, and demonstrating how much value they can add. The peer-to-peer networks of IPs are very strong (perhaps due to the fact that no one else in most organizations knows or cares much about what IPs do), so I’m optimistic that, by working collaboratively, IPs will be very successful introducing such initiatives and experiments, and will ultimately take their rightful place as the highly-valued stewards of the modern organization’s most important and strategic resource — what it knows.

Boy, writing an article like this really makes me appreciate the truth of the statement in its second paragraph above — it takes a lot longer than actually delivering the presentation!

I concluded that that story was too ‘old’ for them, and instead transitioned from the dragon story to its predecessor, the ancient HC Andersen story of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Once again, I was amazed at their attentiveness, as this time I drew out the story a bit. When I finished, they expressed no interest in the common tie-in or moral of the two stories but instead said to me:

I was dumbfounded. I didn’t know any more stories. I didn’t know how to tell stories (despite having taken a course in it by Dave Snowden and having read Steve Denning’s book on the subject The Springboard).

I had been told, and thought, that the power of stories lay in the personal joy of discovering and learning their meaning. In fact, I had just delivered a presentation at KMWorld that argued that stories add meaning and value to information by adding context and allowing people to become engaged by filling in the details from their own experience and ‘making the story their own’. Yet here the pleasure of listening to stories seemed to lay in just listening and imagining and visualizing the events and details of the stories themselves, and their lessons and moral were unimportant. Was this unique to children, or did adults also not care about what stories meant, as long as they found them entertaining?

I thought back to a memorable story Dave Snowden had recounted at KMWorld, about his experience walking unawares at night through an extremely dangerous part of New York City after attending the opera in a tuxedo, having been informed by Google Maps that this was the fastest route to make his connection to his next scheduled appointment. The message, which Dave stated explicitly near the end of the story, was that Google Maps software was unable to manage the complex arc of information that would have allowed it to suggest a better (safer but slower) route. But what delighted the audience (me included) was the image of Dave being stopped, scolded and escorted to safety by the police. I could even imagine listeners retelling the story, perhaps with embellishments or even in the first person, appropriating the story as their own, and omitting the message or even the reference to Google Maps. Would the omission of the lesson about complexity diminish the story’s power and value? Would this omission actually enrich the story, by making it accessible to people who didn’t care about complexity or know what Google Maps was? Is the truth, including essential information and learnings, often and easily sacrificed in the interest of making a story more entertaining?

When we tell stories, are we in fact giving them away? Can we presume to trust that what we consider their essential details and veracity will be retained in their retelling, or do we immediately give up all rights to such presumption, much as we do when we gift anything else, like a piece of jewelry or a book? Even if we authored that book?

The truth about stories is that that’s all we are. If that’s the case, when we ‘give away’ stories, are we giving away a part of ourselves? Do we dare, then, get attached to our stories? Do we owe it, to the truth, to learn to tell true stories carefully, memorably, completely, so that those who ‘take them’ from us will be more inclined to recall and retell the truth when they pass them on?

Conversation has two purposes — to inform or to entertain. There are ways to inform without entertaining (I’m reasonably good at this — in presentations and dialogues I give people a lot of ideas, links, reading suggestions and other ‘useful’ stuff). There are ways to entertain without informing (ask a stand-up comedian how — I’m terrible at this). Stories allow you to do both, separately or at the same time. But they run the risk that the information will be lost in the entertainment.

I’ve resolved, once again, more than ever, to learn to be a better story-teller, mostly by practicing.

But I’m asking myself why. Do I want to tell better stories to convey information better, with more context, more memorably? Or do I want to tell better stories to be more entertaining, more popular, even if it may mean being less informative?

* In the business world, the metaphor substitutes an elephant (‘in the room’) for the dragon.