I am back from Texel, where the 2009 SOL conference was held. That was fun!

I was honored to meet many of the people I frequently interact with online and with whom I have very stimulating conversations about coaching and solution-focus. I was also happy to make new connections and new friends!

Anyway, many workshops were going on simultaneously – I know I wanted to be in 7 different places at once, and I know other people felt the same way: having to choose one workshop out of seven, that means saying no to some very good presentations and activity, and that is hard!

Hoping to do something useful, both for the people who attended my workshop and for those who could not, I am posting here the slides of my presentation with a recording.

A few notes here:

- I discovered that the presence of an audience does make a difference. It is easy to come alive in front of other people, who can encourage you with their presence, their approval or simply by interacting with you, verbally or nonverbally. It is much harder to sound engaging when you are talking to a computer screen, with slides playing in front of you. What I am trying to say is: forgive my droning on, that is the price to pay to have not just the slides but the whole presentation.

- I had to break up the presentation in 5 parts, to make it more manageable for youtube. Be patient.

- During the actual workshop in Texel there were interactions with the participants, there were questions, there was some brainstorming, there was sharing of experiences and a live demo; that is what we cannot reproduce using this medium.

- The topic would require further elaboration, and a brief talk can only outline the basic idea. However, fear not! I wrote a paper to fully articulate this idea; I am now in the editing stage, and the paper will be hopefully published in November. I will keep you posted.

- Last but not least: credits! My live demo, kind of summarized in video number 3, originally comes from this great video about evolution. The flashing pictures in the last segment come from the Department of Psychology of the University of British Columbia, Canada. You can find them here. The quote of Darwin’s critic comes from this TED talk by Daniel Dennet.

And… what else… ah! enjoy!! :)
And fire off an email if you have any comments, suggestions or questions!

Update:

I wrote a paper based on this presentation, addressing the issue in more detail.
I submitted the paper to the InterAction Journal, hopefully it will be published in the November issue.

Tags: paper, presentation, SOL2009, Texel