In all honesty, I was nervous about taking part, and the event itself for me was a big step in my personal development, having not done a lot of public speaking before. I experienced nightmares leading up to the big day, which I’m about 98% sure was down to nerves, and maybe 2% down to the latest Stephen King novel I’m reading! Having attended numerous conferences and meetups over the years, I have always admired the way a speaker can influence and inspire you. Now, attempting to masquerade as one of those speakers myself, I had to achieve the same effect on my audience.

Sitting in the audience (as a speaker myself) made me realise that even the experienced public speakers, that I greatly admired, admitted to being just as nervous as I felt too.

The more I listened to the other speakers before me, the more I realised that the audience isn’t thinking about how nervous they are or willing the speakers to do badly; they’re encouraging them and hoping that they can take something away from what they’re saying. Ultimately, the audience is thinking about themselves; what can I learn from the speaker? What content can I use in the future? And how is this inspiring me?

This made me feel at ease.

I was speaking to people who were on a journey at this event, and the ideas that I was exploring in my talk were there to team up and cement with everything else they had been listening to all day. I was there to inspire the audience, to help them return to their organisations and teams and use my ideas to develop their own strategy. That made me feel more at ease; I was part of a line-up, a team of people, that were there to inspire everyone. We were in it together.

One of the recurring themes of the day was that it’s ok for your work not to be perfect! The amount of time you spend trying to tweak your output from good to excellent before you’ve even received feedback on it could be time wasted.

In my workshop ‘Prototyping to communicate ideas’, I also explored this theme. My workshop detailed how creating prototypes had helped break things down for me across disciplines at Wood Mackenzie, as they were a tool I used to elicit feedback. The prototypes that I create, are often of low fidelity, and I share them with my team to validate that I’ve understood the customer problem I’m trying to solve and that I’m headed in the right direction with my ideas. In the workshop, the group created their own simple prototype and used it as a storytelling aid to communicate their idea to their partner. Then asked to give feedback on the prototype, to show how even something created in a short space of time, sharing a version of the solution, could only improve it.

‘Imposter Syndrome’ is something I’ve heard a great deal about recently, and something I’ve experienced personally in my career. Sharing my ideas early and opening myself up for feedback can often lead to me thinking that I should already know the answer and what if my colleagues tell me I’m wrong? Being a designer, I spend a lot of time iterating my ideas and getting stuck in my own head about what the best solution should be. It’s not often that the first ideas I have are the right way to solve the problem, but being in an Agile team, we have to move fast to continuously deliver, so I have to share those early ideas with my team for feedback. Now at times like these, I could let the feedback get to me, and think next time, I should wait until I’m more confident in my approach in case I’m wrong — or I could praise my colleague for giving me good advice, and also acknowledge myself, for if I hadn’t shared that idea in the first place, then we’d be no further forward in solving it.

If anyone would like more information on how they can use prototypes in their work to help solve problems, please get in touch on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Quote of the day:

Today’s shiny is tomorrows legacy

Key takeaway Instead of spending time thinking about how to make your work perfect, share it for feedback, it’s the best way to improve something quickly.

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