Here’s the scenario. A bio-tech company will fly to Paris to convince influential French physicians to use their compound-in-development in clinical trials. The company has invited the French doctors to a nice meeting room in a nice hotel and plans to tell the doctors all about the compound.

When asked, “What is the purpose of the presentation?” they say, “To tell them about the drug.” I say I see it differently. I say it’s to help the French doctors come to the conclusion that the bio-tech company would be a great company to partner with, and that the drug is a versatile powerhouse that will almost certainly make it to market and get their names in the best peer-reviewed journals in the world.

When I lay out this plan, they say it is not scientific enough. I am sensitive to that. I like and respect the traditions of science. But I say, “This is not a scientific presentation. This is a business presentation. Science plays a part, but the goal is a business goal. You need these people to believe in your company and your compound. Our job is to induce belief in them, and raise that belief to the level of action.”

We take the scientific and corporate information they already have and restructure it to make a strong argument for partnership. There is some resistance holding out in the recesses of their scientific hearts.

I persist. This is a “decisional” presentation, I say. The French doctors will say, “Yes, No or Maybe.” There are risks for them. They could miss out on a good thing if they say no. They could miss out on better opportunities if they say yes. There are rational calculations to make, including the fact that they have practices to run, assistants to pay, and time to manage.

There are also non-rational issues. They would love to get their names on an important study. They would hate to work for years on a trial of a compound that never gets to market. Should they say no? Should they say yes?

In reality, I would guess their decision will hinge on what the most influential physician in the group decides.

This was a lesson in knowing the audience–in targeting their rational and non-rational needs. The bio-tech firm was relying on the science to do the job. It seemed to me the calculation was broader than that. For the doctors, the decision would be psychological as well as scientific.

Stay tuned.

I just finished working with a client who had to prepare and deliver an after dinner talk to clients in a museum. Her firm planned to take the clients on a private tour of the museum, feed them dinner, and then she was to stand up and offer them a short talk on investment opportunities in the current turbulent markets.

We spent a few hours crafting the talk, and another couple of hours getting her to verbalize it. At the end of the rehearsal, it was still not right, but she had to go. It was Friday afternoon–the weekend called.

As we parted, I made a few suggestions.

1. Cut it. Your audience is primarily in their 60s and beyond. They will have been on their feet, drunk a few glasses of wine, and will be looking at their watches thinking of bed.
2. Say it aloud at least five times over the weekend (she was to speak on Monday night).
3. Don’t drink any wine until you’ve spoken.
4. Go to the museum tonight, or over the weekend, to see the room where the dinner will take place. Find out where you will stand, what the acoustics are like, and whether you need a microphone or a lectern.
5. Wear something red.
6. Keep it simple, upbeat, and story-like. Don’t drill down into an analysis of the investments.

A few days after the event, I called her. “How did you do?” I asked.

“I give myself a 7 out of 10,” she said.

“How come?” I asked.

“Well, it was too long, they couldn’t hear me, the room was horrible, I didn’t go to see the room over the weekend, I had to cut it on the fly, which made me nervous and look discombobulated.”

“Great!” I said. “Now you know. After dinner speaking is intense. It is intimate. Your audience is on top of you. The rooms are often not good for speakers. There’s noise in the room. The audience is tired and drunk. They want to be entertained–period. They want funny stories and they want them short.”

“It was intense,” she said.

“You’ve had an experience,” I said. And I quoted Mark Twain: “Good judgment comes from experience. And where does experience come from? Bad judgment!”

I told her not to be discouraged. Most people fail their way to success.

She said she was not discouraged, and looked forward to trying again.

She’s a trooper.

Effective speaking has many enemies. A partial list would include a speaker’s lack of experience, stage fright, lack of training, no clear point, too much information, and finally, no clear flow, or structure.

We could go on. But the items on the list are only those enemies that hide within the speaker himself. What about the external enemies–the environmental obstacles, including those that hide within the audience?

Certainly one of the most stubborn opponents you can face as a speaker is an audience that has endured a morning’s worth of presentations, escaped into a lunch of heavy food and sweet desserts, only to be herded back into their seats to listen to you!

This is a test that separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls. Such an audience can be somnolent, indifferent, and murderously hard on your ego.

What should you do?

1. Throw a match on them. Light them on fire. Henry Ward Beecher, one of the greatest preachers in American history, once found himself on a hot day in a town in West Virginia known to be Death Valley for speakers. Sure enough, that afternoon, as he was being introduced, he saw that half the town was already dozing. He rose from his chair and, wiping his brow with a large handkerchief, strode to the front of the platform.

“It’s a God-damned hot day,” the clergyman began.

A thousand pairs of eyes opened wide. An electrical shock straightened the crowd erect. Beecher paused and then, raising a finger of solemn reproof, went on, “That’s what I heard a man say here this afternoon.”

He proceeded into a stirring condemnation of blasphemy–and took his audience with him.

2. Keep it interactive. Ask the audience questions. Ask them to discuss something in small groups for a few minutes. I’ve seen speakers ask the audience to shout in unison a product name whenever he mentioned the name in his speech. They got into it and listened carefully in order to be part of the chorus.

3. Keep it short and sweet. This is true always, but especially true after lunch. Don’t try to take the audience on a death march through your comprehensive analysis of photosynthesis in the genus papaver somniferum.

4. Speak and move with energy and verve. You are the leader, and your followers need to be inspired. Breathe some life into them.

5. Tell stories. The Golden Rule of after-dinner speaking is to make a simple point by telling a whimsical but relevant story. The same rule should apply to after-lunch speaking, even though your audience is not seated at their lunch table but back in the conference hall.

6. Know your enemy. Your enemy is the food in their stomachs that demands their attention, even as you demand their attention from the lectern. You must be more compelling than the food that drags them into the arms of Morpheus. Your talk must be flavorful, adequately salted and spicy with a variety of fascinating facts, insights, and bold opinions that are sprinkled with a dash of style, passion and humor.

In other words, you’ve got to be well-prepared, well-rehearsed, and well-seasoned to capture and keep their attention.

For other highly challenging speaking environments, go to How to Give Good Webinar

What should you do when the lights are so bright that you can’t see your audience?

1. Make sure you know where the audience is and look in that general direction with focus and confidence. The audience won’t know that you can’t see them. In other words, press on. (This seems obvious but see story below for details.)

2. Find something to focus on. Windows or EXIT signs have worked for me. Talk to the EXIT sign on the left, on the right, and then in the middle. The audience will think you’re looking at them.

3. Leave the lectern, if possible, and step to the front of the stage, where you will most likely be able to see those in the front row. Talk to them.

4. Look for another spot on the stage where the light will not be so bothersome and you can connect with your listeners.

5. Ask to have the lights lowered, especially if you have slides on display and the bright lights are washing out the images.

6. If none of the above works, follow the advice in recommendation #1. Focus your eyes for at least three-to-five seconds on the darkness in different quadrants of the hall–left, right, forward and back. You will feel like a deer in headlights, but you look more confident and persuasive when your eyes are focused. So, despite seeing nothing, you will be seen as authoritative. (This reminds me of Machiavelli saying, “All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.”)

To elaborate on the first point–”look in the general direction of the audience,” I include an embarrassing story.

I once arrived late to speak at a large event. The host rushed me out onto a thrust stage, where I was immediately blinded by the light. I assumed the stage was surrounded by seating on three sides, as all thrust stages are. Bravely I positioned myself in the middle, then moved to my extreme right to address those who might have been seeing my profile, and then to the left edge to do the same for those seeing my left side. I continued to move in this way throughout my talk.

When it was over, polite applause came from the middle of the theater. The house lights came up, and I saw, to my chagrin, that the small audience was clustered in the middle section of the hall. Not a soul sat to the left or right of the stage. I had been talking to the vacant, interstellar spaces, and not one member of the small audience had spoken up.

I was blinded by the light, and they were silenced.

Derrick called and spoke a mile a minute. His boss, the founder of a new hedge fund and the primary money runner had to speak at a capital intro in a week. Could I come and help?

I asked if the boss knew what he wanted to say, and Derrick said yes, but the talk was not developed yet and he (the boss) wouldn’t have time to devote to it until the weekend.

I asked about the boss. Derrick said he was really smart but not all that experienced speaking to large groups and hard to pin down because he was so busy keeping his eye on the markets.

We set up two meetings. The first to hammer out what the message would be; the second to practice saying it. I asked for a general summary of what would be said. Derrick replied, “He’s going to talk about distressed securities.”

“Is he going to say something unusual about them, or is he going to say something predictable but try to say it well?” I asked.

“By that question, I can tell that you are going to be helpful,” said Derrick, assuring me that I would not see any drafts until I arrived.

When I walked in the door, the receptionist seemed to be expecting me. She jumped up and escorted me into a meeting room off the lobby.

Derrick arrived like clock-work. He handed me his business card, made from the thickest card stock I’ve ever felt. I enthused over the feel of his card. He seemed to enjoy that. It broke the ice.

He briefed me on the status of the script and slides (a work in progress) and then in came his boss, backing into the room as he spoke to an assistant down the hall.

Peter was small and intense, with long hair and granny glasses. If Derrick was natty and professional, Peter was rumpled and professorial. Derrick excused himself immediately and closed the door as he left.

Peter had a handful of wrinkled papers in his hand. They were his notes. He did not know how to connect his computer to the projector, or how to use PowerPoint well enough to re-sequence the slides.

However, his knowledge of distressed securities was encyclopedic and his speech was supersonic. He had so many thoughts stampeding from his mind to his mouth that they got stuck on his tongue and toppled over each other.

Hummingbirds beat their wings 15 to 80 times per second, depending on the species. If a hummingbird could speak, that’s how fast Peter talked.

When I asked questions about his meaning to help him clarify what he wanted to say and in what order, he was wonderfully patient with my modest understanding of his discipline, and used analogies and metaphors to explain his point—a sign, I think, of a good communicator.

In addition to speaking like a hummingbird, he did not look me in the eye, and did not relate what he said to the bar charts on the screen. But he spoke with visceral passion and emphatic verve about the coming crisis in corporate debt—and that made up for his other sins as a speaker. He could lift up his whole body and jump into a key word with both feet–giving it real meaning and significance.

When our rehearsal led him to a new thought, he leaned over the conference table, pawing through his wrinkled pages, and jotted  words on a spare corner of the paper.

He was trying to say that the imminent credit crunch would not be like past credit crunches, due to recent care-free lending practices. In fact, due to covenant-light loans, and CCC loans, he argued, we would not get early warning signs of trouble: we would be in the middle of the crisis all at once.

The challenge was to build the story so that the audience would think they were hearing a standard pitch about the potential attractive opportunities in distressed debt, and then yank the tablecloth out from under the meal spread before them to reveal something entirely new and terrifying.

After two meetings, we had cut the slides down to six and the timing down to less than ten minutes. He had no time to rehearse. He promised he would work on it in his hotel room when he arrived at the capital intro. I continued to e-mail suggestions to his Blackberry over the weekend.

I learned from Peter that he did not rehearse until he was on the plane, and then he stayed up most of the night in a panic working on it.

Two days after the event, he called to say it went well, and that my messages had helped. I called Derrick to get his assessment, who said it was a little short—much shorter than the presentations made by other speakers. I pointed out that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

As Mrs. Hubert Humphrey said to her husband after a particularly long stem-winder, “Hubert, for a speech to be immortal, it need not be interminable.”

The question will be whether Peter can:
1. Get attention at capital intros.
2. Keep attention
3. Make a clear point in a memorable way
4. Stand out in a crowded field
5. Move people to come talk with him.

That’s it. He doesn’t have to sell the fund, or close the deal. His job is to generate trust and curiosity.

During the Clinton/Obama debate from California, Barack Obama seemed to get off to a good start, making his point (”I am the future, she is the past.”) at the end of his opening remarks. As I listened, I was made aware of the power of going first. I thought that Hillary Clinton would be at a disadvantage because she had to go second.

But then she began to speak, and I found myself even more deeply engaged than I had been listening to Senator Obama. She was confident, assertive, and crisp. But even more important, she was concrete. She used images that we could see in our mind’s eye. She made her point (”I have more experience”) better than Obama made his.

Let me illustrate this with passages from the transcript.

Senator Obama

After acknowledging the contributions of John Edwards to the political conversation in this election season, and announcing that he (Obama) has been and will be a friend to Senator Clinton, Senator Obama got down to his message:

“I believe we’re at a defining moment in our history. Our nation is at war; our planet is in peril. Families all across the country are struggling with everything from back-breaking health care costs to trying to stay in their homes. And at this moment, the question is: How do we take the country in a new direction? How do we get past the divisions that have prevented us from solving these problems year after year after year? I don’t think the choice is between black and white or it’s about gender or religion. I don’t think it’s about young or old. I think what is at stake right now is whether we are looking backwards or we are looking forwards. I think it is the past versus the future.”

In a nutshell, he’s saying this is an important election, we’ve got a host of problems to deal with, and I am the new guy with the new ideas, while Hillary is part of an old administration that caused deep divisions in the country and has already had her chance.

Senator Clinton

Hillary Clinton didn’t waste her opening moments when viewers would be most engaged: she got right into a story to illustrate her point, a story that enabled us to visualize the future. Here’s what she said.

“On January 20, 2009, the next president of the United States will be sworn in on the steps of the Capitol. I, as a Democrat, fervently hope you are looking at that next president. Either Barack or I will raise our hand and swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

And then, when the celebrations are over, the next president will walk into the Oval Office, and waiting there will be a stack of problems, problems inherited from a failed administration: a war to end in Iraq and a war to resolve in Afghanistan; an economy that is not working for the vast majority of Americans, but well for the wealthy and the well-connected; tens of millions of people either without health insurance at all or with insurance that doesn’t amount to much, because it won’t pay what your doctor or your hospital need…

… an energy crisis that we fail to act on at our peril; global warming, which the United States must lead in trying to contend with and reverse; and then all of the problems that we know about and the ones we can’t yet predict.

It is imperative that we have a president, starting on day one, who can begin to solve our problems, tackle these challenges, and seize the opportunities that I think await.

… there are still 37 million Americans who are living below the poverty line and many others barely hanging on above. So what we have to do tonight is to have a discussion about what each of us believes are the priorities and the goals for America. I think it’s imperative we have a problem-solver, that we roll up our sleeves.
I’m offering that kind of approach, because I think that Americans are ready once again to know that there isn’t anything we can’t do if we put our minds to it. So let’s have that conversation.”

In essence, she said “You want me walking into that room on January 9th, sitting down at that desk, rolling up my sleeves, and digging into that stack of problems. I am the practical, problem solving candidate, not the dreamer, the poet, or the guy whose never really run anything other than a social services agency.”

Much stronger than Obama, at least at that moment. Concrete, specific, story-like in structure.

I was impressed.

Let’s call her Sheila.  Like many in the financial services industry, she sells with the aid of a pitch book, printed in landscape format and containing information about the history of her firm, her team of colleagues, their range of services, the historical performance of their funds, and their fees. It’s a handsome piece, with beautiful thick card stock for covers, and full color graphs and pictures throughout. It took her firm a year and a half of internal wrangling to produce it.

When we sat down to role play, she directed me to the first page, which was covered with bullet points enumerating the key features and benefits of her firm. I was soon lost in a jungle of terms, ideas, and services with which I was not familiar.

When she paused, I jumped in and asked her if I could tell her about my situation and what I thought I needed. She apologized for plowing through the boilerplate and allowed me to describe the situation I faced.

As I was speaking about the need to get my finances in order and to help my aging parents with theirs, she stopped me and referred me to page 18 in tab 3 to show me her firm’s trust and estate capabilities.

I listened to what she said about their long history helping people preserve assets across generations, but still I felt as though I wasn’t being heard, or I wasn’t hearing what I needed.

I stopped the role play and said that I felt that I was being drowned in information, and that I wanted her to show some bedside manner. I instinctively trusted that she knew about investing–after all, I was referred to her by a friend who used her services–but I did not feel that she had learned enough about me.

As I was saying this, Sheila interrupted me to say that this was just a role play and that of course she would do that in real life. I asked if she was aware that I found it difficult to get a word in. She said no. I began to explain my experience and she interrupted me to tell me that others had told her the same thing.

“What have they told you?” I asked.

“They’ve told me that I interrupt people,” she said.

“Did they tell you how they felt about being interrupted?”

“I assume they don’t like it,” she said. “But some people are just slow. They need to be straightened out.”

“What about your prospects? What happens when you straighten them out?”

“I suppose they think that I know more than they do. That’s what they’re paying me for.”

“To interrupt them? To correct them?”

“Well, I don’t have all day. People shouldn’t be so sensitive.”

I began to ask her again how people might feel about being interrupted when she cut me off to say that she thought I wanted her to use the pitch book–and that was why she hadn’t asked me questions.

I said, “You interrupted me again.”

She acknowledged that she had, but said she had to say what came into her mind before she forgot it.

“But if you do that, you cut the other person off,” I said, “And they feel that you’re dictating the flow and direction of the exchange.”

Our session continued in this manner, and every time Sheila interrupted me, I pointed it out and asked her what she should say.

“I’m sorry?” she asked.

“Yes. What else?”

“I’m sorry? I interrupted you? Please continue?”

“That’s a good start,” I said. “If you can’t change your habit of interrupting right away, at least become mindful of it, and apologize.”

According to a poll conducted by the Gallup Organization, the number one most disliked habit in conversation is “people who interrupt.” The second is “people who use profanity.” The third is “people who mumble.”

And along the same lines, the four biggest mistakes that sales people make?

1. They talk too much
2. They don’t ask enough questions
3. They don’t listen well
4. They are too quick to offer solutions

Let’s call her Sheila, but let’s understand she’s like most of us. We all have our pitch books and boilerplate. We think selling is about talking. We think listening is easy. It’s not, because to listen well requires that we drop our self interest momentarily and help the other person articulate clearly what they have not been able to say so clearly before.

Believe it or not, that’s a great service.

As PowerPoint reaches its 20th birthday, Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal reflects on our love/hate relationship with “one of the most elegant, most influential and most groaned-about pieces of software in the history of computers”:

While PowerPoint has served as the metronome for countless crisp presentations, it has also allowed an endless expanse of dimwit ideas to be dressed up with graphical respectability. And not just in conference rooms, but also in the likes of sixth-grade book reports and at PowerPointSermons.com.

He also interviews PowerPoint’s creators, Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin, to learn their perspective on how their well-intentioned brainchild has changed the world of communication. Surprisingly, he writes, “they aren’t the least bit defensive about the criticisms routinely heard of PowerPoint.” Gaskins, in fact, agrees with the harsh appraisals of infographics expert Edward Tufte, who basically fingers PowerPoint as a key culprit in the dumbing down of our civilization.

Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.

Since then, he complains, “a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don’t like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.”

One of the problems, the men say, is that with PowerPoint now bundled with Office, vastly more people have access to the program than the relatively small group of salespeople for which it was intended. When video projectors became small and cheap, just about every room on earth became PowerPoint-ready.

Many of us use PowerPoint as both written and spoken communication. We expect our decks to serve two purposes. First, to be a compelling display of visual evidence, and second to be a complete record of our research, analysis and thinking.

Often because of this dual purpose, the visual evidence is actually not visual at all, but rather written in the form of bullet points, which demand that we read and listen at the same time, causing us to lose concentration.

Further, because we expect the document to be clear and useful to someone unable to attend our talk, the data, analysis, and recommendations are often obscured because we write complete sentences on the slides, distracting from the more relevant graphical evidence.

Even more fundamental, the experience of witnessing a PowerPoint presentation can feel like a disconnected jumble of thoughts. The slides are rarely arranged in a way that feels logical to the listener, even though we’re given an agenda. They seem to be separate from each other–they don’t often flow like a story–and so they are hard to remember.

Tufte suggests that PowerPoint decks tend to be NOT rigorous enough for scientific and engineering presentations, while being too busy and congested for some other purposes.

For instance, there is no reason why the CEO has to use PowerPoint when speaking about the values and attitudes he hopes to instill in the people who work for the company.

And scientists, engineers, and researchers ought to prepare a thorough and formal report on their work, and then use PowerPoint simpy to summarize their findings and recommndations.

We continue to use PowerPoint in the way that everyone uses it, except we don’t know if the way everyone uses it is optimal for creating clarity and understanding.

Something needs to be done. Huge amounts of time and money go into the creation of PowerPoint decks, and as far as I know, none of us know whether our approach is effective and efficient.

I suspect we can do better.

I occasionally hear from clients that they don’t want to change their style as presenters.  The implication is that any behaviors I recommend that are outside their range of normal will be artificial and ineffective.  They just want to be themselves.

I know how they feel, and focus them on the flow and logic of their content: they don’t want to be actors.  But eventually their success could come down to being a little more interesting.

So I may ask, in response to their desire to “be themselves,”–”What if “yourself” is distracting, or having difficulty keeping people focused?  Do you still want to stick with it?”

If they let me, I will tell them about Brian Little, a psychologist and Professor at Harvard who does research into human personality.  He says that we have fixed traits–those habits of being we are comfortable living in every day, and free traits, which are those modes of being we are willing to stretch into for life projects that are important to our deepest values.

For instance, Little cites himself–a highly introverted person–who, in order to do his job as a professor, acts like an extrovert in order to deliver his lectures.  He does this because he knows his teaching career depends on his ability to hold the attention of the students in the lecture hall.

He also says that after his lectures, in order to recover from the stress of operating in the zone of his free traits, he retires to his office and lies down on his couch for a few minutes.

He calls this his free trait agreement with himself.

Presenting is the number one tool of leadership, influence, and persuasion.  We will all use the tool in our own unique way, and when we work on our presentation skills, we work on ourselves.

With the average sales call in the pharmaceutical industry now shrunk to less than 30 seconds, medical liaisons have an important opportunity to engage the interest of key physicians at advisory board meetings.

However, there are several common problems.

First, facilitating ad boards is not presenting. In fact, it’s almost the opposite of presenting. Presenters give information, while facilitators pull information out of the audience.

That said, facilitating borrows from the skills of presenting and public speaking because it requires the leader to project confidence and authority, focus the meeting, energize the participants, and connect with the people in the seats.

Here are some tips for facilitating ad boards gathered from some of the most successful liaisons in the industry.

1. Have a battle plan. Most battles are won and lost before the fighting starts. Same with ad boards.
2. Plan the room, the sound system, the air-conditioning, the lighting, the seating, the food, the A/V equipment, etc.
3. Plan your goals, your questions, your wingman (in case you get into trouble), your scribe, your parking lot, your opening, your ground rules, and just who will be the final decision maker in the room should things get hairy. In other words, “Who is the quarterback?”
4. Plan to rehearse the night before with your colleagues.
5. Tell your colleagues to stay engaged. When physicians see industry professionals BlackBerrying, or doing other tasks in the back of the room, it sets a very bad example. Don’t let them do it, and don’t you do it when your colleague is in front of the room.
6. Choose your questions wisely and put each on its own PowerPoint slide. They should flow in a logical order.
7. Have enough energy and assertiveness to be the locomotive that pulls the train of thought in the room.
8. Enjoy yourself. You are much more engaging when you are having fun.
9. Listen to what people say. Repeat it back to them to make sure you’ve understood. Ask follow-up questions.
10. Listen to what people say. Don’t pretend to listen while you’re thinking about what you’re going to say next (this is a big one!)
11. Follow your battle plan and be prepared to switch on the fly. No battle plan survives the first encounter with the enemy.
12. Be a lion-tamer. Don’t let big cheeses stink up the place by holding forth (I’m mixing metaphors.) Say, “Doctor Lyons, thanks for your input. I want to hear from some of the others.” And then call on a mouse.
13. A mouse is a participant who doesn’t feel comfortable speaking up in a large group. Mice have good things to say. Call on them by name and encourage them to give their opinion.
14. Stifle the snakes. A snake is a doctor who is negative, who poisons the room. You should not engage in argument with such a person. Call on another doctor who has another point of view to neutralize him. Perhaps your wing man will step in and move the conversation in a different direction. Or you can simply bring up a question about other information that contradicts the negative perspective. E.g, “What does the group think of the new xyz study as it pertains to Dr. Rattler’s remarks?”
15. Demand respectful and attentive behavior. Blackberrying, newspaper reading, side conversations, and other forms of rudeness should not be tolerated.
16. It’s best to get everyone’s agreement at the beginning. Lay down the ground rules and get them to say, “Okay!”
17. Call them on it. First, ask a Blackberrying snake a question. Say, “Dr. Copperhead, what’s your response to Dr. Python’s approach?” That might do the trick.
18. If it doesn’t, try the direct approach. “Dr. Copperhead, may I please have your full attention? We need your input.”
19. It that fails, call a break and speak to Dr. Copperhead privately. Ask him if there’s some other topic that would engage him more fully. If it suits your larger purpose, then weave it in later, but still insist that he give his attention to the meeting.

The list could go on. The real trick is getting comfortable using these techniques when you’re under pressure. A good way to develop your skill is by watching others, borrowing what you like, and adding the borrowed techniques to your own style.

And of course, a good experiential training program will help you up the learning curve as well.

A good facilitator is a gift to the universe–a rare blend of expertise, assertiveness, and genuine interest in others. We are all on that journey, and I urge you to fare forward through all obstacles within you and without you.