Friday, January 29, 2010
From the mouths of babes...
Last week was a crazy speaking week. Here's what it looked like:
Monday - Present an overview of planning in Calgary to the Architectural Technologies program at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology.
Wednesday morning - Three one-hour talks with grade 6 classes at Olympic Heights Elementary School about imagineCALGARY and sustainability.
Wednesday afternoon - Present on sustainability planning to a graduate seminar - "The Postmodern City" at the University of Calgary's Faculty of Environmental Design.
Thursday - Present planning history and sustainability to the undergraduate course I teach, "Planning the Canadian City" at the University of Calgary.
6 speaking engagements in 4 days. Needless to say, I didn't need to hear myself speak all weekend. A couple of thoughts on that diversity of audiences:
Don't underestimate the intelligence or insightfulness of kids. During my presentations at Olympic Heights Elementary, here are some questions I was asked:
"What is the single most important goal in the imagineCALGARY Plan?"
"How did you come up with the questions you used for your visioning?"
"Why did imagineCALGARY start in the first place?"
"We are concerned about the health of the forest next to our school. What ways can we get people to work on improving it?"
Not exactly out-of-left-field questions. It was fascinating to see how these kids - who are working on a multi-month project on the long term sustainability of Calgary - were able to cut to some core issues in a short time. Often times we get caught up in the minutia or stalled on semantics, rather than focusing on what is really important. I think the next time I catch myself in that mode, I'll call my niece or nephew for some advice.
Know your audience. A very basic premise, I know, but having such a crazy range of speaking engagements in such a short time, it only reinforced this idea. Yes, it takes more effort to consider what is relevant for your audience. Yes, it takes more time to prepare a new presentation. In the end, though, your audience will get much more out of it and you will benefit from an engaged group that you can learn from as well.
¶ 5:54 AM
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