G'day - I'm Oscar Trimboli, and this is the Apple award-winning podcast, Deep Listening: Impact Beyond Words. Good listeners focus on what's said and deep listeners notice what's not said. Each episode is designed to help you learn from hundreds of the world's most diverse workplace listening professionals, including anthropologists, air traffic controllers, acoustic engineers and actors, behavioral scientists and business executives, community organizers, conductors, deaf and blind leaders, foreign language interpreters and body language experts, judges, journalists, market researchers, medical professionals, memory champions, military leaders, movie makers and musicians. You'll learn from neurotypical and neurodiverse listeners, as well as neuroscientists and negotiators, palliative care nurses and suicide counsellors. Whether you're in pairs, teams, groups or listening across systems, whether you're face to face, on the phone or via video conference, you'll learn the art and science of listening and understand the importance of the neuroscience and these three critical numbers: 125, 400 and 900. You'll also learn three is half of eight, zero is half of eight, and four is half of eight when you listen across the five levels of listening, conscious of the four most common barriers that get in your way. Each episode will provide you with practical, pragmatic and actionable techniques to reduce the number of meetings you attend and shorten the meetings you participate in. The Deep Listening Podcast is the most comprehensive resource for workplace listeners. Along with the deep listening ambassadors, we're on a quest to create a hundred million deep listeners in the workplace one conversation at a time. The Ultimate Guide for Listening on a Video Conference, Host Edition This episode is the last of three in a series about how to listen as host during a video conference. If you haven't had a chance to listen to the overview, Episode 101, it outlines three things: 1. sequence before, during and after the meeting. 2. the role. Are you the host or the participant? And 3. the meeting size, intimate, interactive or broadcast. In episode 101, we dived deeply into sequence, how to think about before, during and after the video conference. In part two, episode 102, we explore your role as the host as well as a participant. Like all the episodes, you can revisit them based on their episode number. This one would be www.oscartrimboli.com/podcast/103 And the first episode in this series would be 101, and the second, 102. If you haven't done so already, I strongly recommend you listen to these episodes in sequence starting at 101, 102 and then this one, 103. You can listen to 101 at www.oscartrimboli.com/podcast/101 In this episode, the final in the series, we explore listening and hosting tips based on meeting size. There are three meeting sizes. 1. The first one, the intimate meeting, you, maybe one or two others. It might be a catch up meeting with a peer. It might be a meeting with your manager. It might even be a job interview. A quick reminder, intimate meetings refer to the number of participants in the meeting, not the content being discussed. 2. Meeting size number two, interactive. You as the host are part of the Zoom meeting, which has between three and 15 people. Typically, it's a regular meeting. It's a team meeting. It's a work in progress meeting. It could be a group meeting. It could be an executive or an ex-co meeting. It could be a board meeting. It could be a kickoff meeting. These meetings have a deliberate purpose, agenda and one or many hosts and one or many agenda items. 3. Meeting three, this is the broadcast meeting. These meetings typically involve over 20 people, and some people say the opportunity for engagement is limited. In the 105 pages of The Ultimate Guide to Listening in a Video Conference, www.oscartrimboli.com/videoconference the primary navigational orientation is by meeting size. The first question you need to ask yourself is what type of meeting, and then you can use the navigation inside the document to move you around really quickly. If you visit oscartrimboli.com/videoconference, there's a 17-page preview guide. In the preview guide, this outlines the welcome, the introduction, who is this guide for and who is it not for? There's an explanation about how to use the guide, including the three key pages of navigational guidance. These are organized by the meeting size. Each meeting, intimate, interactive or broadcast, is organized into a three by three grid. Across the top from left to right, the context of the meeting, these three boxes, independent of the meeting, represent the host perspective, the participants' perspective and the meeting's outcome. From left to right, it goes host, participant, outcome. From top to bottom, it represents before, during and after the meeting. In each of these nine boxes, there's a hyperlink which will take you directly to the explanation of each term with actions, questions, techniques and tips to make you a great listening host. For the broadcast meeting, these boxes focus the host as follows: Before, ask three questions of the group to understand their current mindset. During, acknowledge the themes in response to your initial three questions. After, announce what was heard during the broadcast and when you communicate the actions accordingly. Before we jump into the guide, let's listen to Hugh Forrest, who serves as the chief programming officer for South by Southwest, held annually in Austin, Texas. This event brings together more than 70,000 industry creatives from across the United States and around the world. And I have to say I'm very excited that in 2023, South by Southwest comes to my hometown of Sydney and looking forward to catching up with Hugh. Next, Hugh will explain how South by Southwest prepare for thousands of broadcast presentations. Hugh Forrest: We spend what I'd like to say is an inordinate amount of time reading through user feedback from the previous year. There are many good reasons for doing that. You learn about the event from a completely different perspective than you had as an organizer. There are often things that you learned that were great that you had no knowledge of. There are often things that you learned that didn't go so well that you had no knowledge of, and that just reading this feedback gives you a much better perspective and much fuller perspective and much more nuanced perspective of what was good and what needs improvement. That process of reading feedback, of digesting feedback, of trying to understand feedback, of listening to what your users and what your community is saying can be mentally, emotionally, spiritually exhausting. It's often not easy reading sharp criticisms of what you've done, particularly if you think you've done something incredibly great, but I think you try to have a generally positive attitude here and understand it's all part of the learning process and helps you get better and throughout the most harsh criticisms and throughout the highest praise and the whatever objective truth is somewhere in the middle, but again, helps you do that by reading this feedback. So we'll spend six weeks reading feedback, trying to analyze that feedback, try to put that into some general themes and even more specific themes. And then by about late May, early June, we're beginning to plan for the next year. And one of the big pieces in terms of planning for the next year is this South by Southwest Panel Picker interface that we've been using for approximately a decade. This is an interface where anyone in the community, which basically means that anyone with a web connection can enter a speaking proposal. It allows us to listen to what the community wants to get new ideas and new speakers into the event. We'll get somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 total ideas, speaking proposals for South by Southwest, of which hopefully about a thousand of those will be accepted to the event. The other 4,000 are also, again, very, very useful in terms of trying to discern what our community wants to hear, what our community wants to learn about that our community is much more focused on learning the latest technologies. This Panel Picker system is ultimately a way for us to communicate with our audience, for us to learn from our audience, for us to listen to our audience, and I think it's one of the many things that has helped us continue to improve present event. Oscar Trimboli: Whether you're preparing for 70, 700, 7,000 or 70,000 as Hugh has just explained, when it comes to the broadcast format, the majority of effort is actually in the preparation. Let's jump to the guide now and understand how to prepare to listen before you commence the process of putting the content together for the broadcast meeting. If you were to click on the link for the host in the guide right now before the broadcast meeting, this is what you'd read. Before the meeting, many techniques available during intimate and interactive meetings are available in the broadcast meeting as well in the broadcast meeting. Especially the ability to ask participants questions before the broadcast, during the registration process. These questions signal that you want to listen. You want to make the session interactive. You want to signal to the audience that you want them to be part of the presentation. Whatever you collect before the meeting, please make sure you summarize and integrate the themes from registration into the content of your broadcast. This is where your effort will be. It will be in collection, categorization, summarization and ultimately, presentation back to the group. Be conscious that your questions in advance will influence and impact you, the participants, the group and the outcome. For the broadcast meeting, balance your questions and responses between open questions and questions that force the participants to rate or rank a value that you can deconstruct later on for the audience. In the guide, we provide a link on how to customize your meeting or webinar registration. If you are doing this via a Zoom meeting, the setting can be found via meeti
