Wes Kao: recommendation

Transcript context

…Okay. So when I was building my PM course with you, you blew my mind a number of times on how to actually teach effectively. And one of the lessons you taught me was around the importance of creating state change in the talk, how to create state change. And so without giving it away, I'd love to just hear your thoughts on what is state change, why is it important, and just, how does it help you, not only give better talks, but also even better Zoom meetings? If you think about most Zoom meetings or presentations, it's one person talking at you the entire time and everyone else has to listen silently. It's pretty hard to do that on Zoom where your camera's on, you're sitting, you have to sit still, look straight ahead at the camera, control your face and make sure you look focused. And so it's really not surprising that most people find that very draining. They want to turn off their cameras, they get distracted. So the idea behind what I call the state change method is that you should punctuate your monologues with state changes. So state changes are anything that shakes your audience awake and adds some variety. So it might be asking people to put something in the chat box. It might be switching from gallery view where you see everyone in that Brady Bunch grid and switch over to screen share, to share something and then switch back. It might be having someone else speak. It might be asking people to unmute themselves and go ahead and chime in. It might be putting people into breakout rooms, so they can discuss amongst themselves and then come back and then do a popcorn where someone shares out and they popcorn to the next person to the next person. So all these are examples of state changes that help your audience stay engaged with the material that you are presenting. And it's really in reaction to monologues. I'm kind of imagining Salesforce with their no software sticker. If you think about no monologues, try to avoid monologues as much as possible because that puts your audience to sleep. What are examples of different states? You mentioned breakouts, chat. What other sorts of things can you do, especially on a Zoom let's say for running a meeting?…

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