Recap: 9/13

🎤PowerPoint Karaoke🎤

🚩BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front🚩

Few things can facilitate connection, shake up your day, and improve collaboration confidence like improv!

We tried out an activity used to develop teams and presentation skills called PowerPoint Karaoke.  This wasn’t meant to be serious - it was meant to get everyone playing around with words and storytelling.

*Chris Federer learned the activity from Rebecca Sutherns.

🚩Sessions🚩

Set The Stage

Today we’re jumping into a fun improv exercise to stimulate presentation and teambuilding skills called PowerPoint Karaoke.

Improv is a super important skill to develop in our professional lives.  It helps us get promotions, develop stronger teams, instigate change, and better serve our customers. 

But practicing improv can also be a vulnerable experience so we’ll also start with a warm-up activity to build some trust called “Rembember When…”

Warmup: “Remember When… ” (5 minutes)

Before jumping into PowerPoint Karaoke let’s warm up with a simple exercise called “Remember when…”.  The purpose of the exercise is to practice the “yes, and” mindset by creating an imaginary story together.  

Instructions:

• The facilitator starts a “remember when….” statement.  (ex: Remember when we went skiing in Japan?)

  • Also, clarify the group order of responses

• The next in order elaborates on the statement.  (ex: Yes, and we ate sushi pizza)

• Continue in order creating the story until the facilitator feels it’s time to stop.  

• Quick debrief

PowerPoint-Karaoke (10 minutes)

PowerPoint-Karaoke (also known as Battle Decks) is a game with very simple rules: The presenters get on stage and must convincingly present a deck of PowerPoint slides they’ve never seen before. The main purpose is to have as much fun as possible!

*Materials: Decks and a timer!

*There are different ways to structure PowerPoint-Karaoke. We created teams and each team shared presentation duties.

For each presentation:

• *If you create teams, send them to breakout rooms 1 minute for introductions.

• The presenters are not allowed to see the slides before presenting.

• The presenters must deliver each slide in succession without skipping any slides.

• The presentation ends when all slides have been presented or after 2 minutes (whichever comes first).

• When the presentation is over, the next team is invited to present a new, unseen, slide deck. Once all teams have presented, it’s time to judge the round.

• We based the winner on applause.  The name that garners the loudest applause is then proclaimed the winner.

*Tips for Presenters: Try to tie the slides together into a cohesive theme. Relax. Don’t take yourself too seriously. 🙃 Have fun!

Debrief the activity.

🚩 Takeaways🚩
In short, this activity was fun and led to new connections and smiles. It may join the “core Flash Fifteen activities” list. :)

This was very enjoyable it. It woke up my mind and areas that I haven't woken up in a while. So I enjoyed it.

I see my adrenaline is running more higher than I thought four cups of coffee. So it was a great way to start the day.

This does seem like the sort of exercise that would be enjoyable as a team building activity. Yeah, I would do this waiting room and this This was fun. Yeah.

Yeah, I thought it actually might be good for like I find myself sometimes trying to help employees or people that I work with, prepared to get on like a sales call where you're like, wanting to like tag team with somebody. And I actually think that this would be a really good tool to like do I might try to do it in one of my next meetings just to get people thinking abstractly. You know, because when given like a specific goal, sell this product, really it's this kind of like random back and forth that I think is most powerful to like the, you know, engage in sales conversation.

Here are a few one-word takeaways: Engagement thrives off random interactions, Energizing, Awakening