Speed

The main strength of Toastmasters is the opportunity for creativity where inside those safe closed walls of the Toastmasters’ comfort zone, you can do anything, be anything. You can push the boundaries of not just yourself but also of fellow toastmasters and I love this.

For me, one of the boundaries that I enjoy bending and reshaping is the format of our meetings. The basic toastmasters format is so flexible that the potential is amazing, as long as you keep the core focus on speaking and evaluating then you can do anything.

One idea that I’m aching to try out is the concept of SpeedGeeking.

Inspired by speed-dating, SpeedGeeking was designed as a short, simple and interactive way of passing new information about new projects, software tools and future technical trends.

It works by setting up presenters around a room. Each presenter will give 5 minute presentations to small groups, usually 3 or 4 minutes of presentation with 1 or 2 minutes answering questions. When the 5 minutes are up, a whistle is blown and like speed-dating, each group gets up and moves on to the next presentation. This gives the groups the chance to hear multiple new ideas and presentations in a short space of time and the presenters many opportunities to show off their abilities and presentation skills.

We can take this concept and adapt it to a toastmasters meeting because what is happening here is that presenters have the chance to speak multiple times to different audiences.

What if each time they spoke the presentation was that little bit better?

What if by the end of the session their final presentation was dramatically improved?

This is the potential of speed-toasting.

Instead of having the usual serial presentations, change the format to parallel presentations with a presentation zone in each corner or the room. Split the audience between the four zones. In this version, the audiences will stay in place and the speakers will move, this will also allow for more than 4 speakers to present in one session.

This being Toastmasters, we can’t have the speakers speak without an evaluation, now can we?

My proposal is that instead of having 5 minute presentations, create sessions of 10 minute blocks.

Each block will consist of a 5-7 minute speech followed by 3-4 minutes of either a single evaluation or a group evaluation.

Each speaker will be evaluated four times, once by each audience group. The idea is that they can use what they learnt from each evaluation in the next presentation of the speech thus by the end of the 4th presentation, the speech has gotten stronger, more cohesive and more effective.

In one evening a speaker can make more progress than they would in 3 or 4 meetings….

Tempting isn’t it?

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For more information on SpeedGeeking: http://facilitation.aspirationtech.org/index.php/Facilitation:SpeedGeeking

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