On Jan. 12, 2019, I delivered a one hour training on the Toastmasters' Moments of Truth (MOT) in the Club Officer Training (COT) of Division R, District 85.
Design the Workshop
It is clear that the purpose of this training is to inspire and encourage the club officers to apply MOT in their clubs, so that they can provide better club experience for both the members and guests. And for the structure, normally I prefer to develop a training with three parts: Why, What and How, which applies for this training too.
Moments of Truth is actually one of the projects in the Toastmasters' Successful Club Series, but the whole recommended time is 10-15 mins instead of one hour. There's already a formal and standard introduction of "What" is Toastmasters' Moments of Truth (even with ready slides), so I don't need to bother too much about the content.
As for the "How" part, there's a Check and Rate session as recommended by the manual with ready handouts, and it was clear that there will also be a roundtable session as suggested by the COT organizer, with a roundtable master for each table, discussing how to improve each Moment of Truth in the clubs, followed by a group presentation. It seems that the task is quite easy for me-- I don't neither need to talk too much to fill all the 60 mins, nor need to prepare too much for the What or How part.
However, as I can imagine, the concept of Moments of Truth is totally new to most of the toastmasters members and officers (perhaps to most of the Chiness). Take myself as an example, though I am a Toastmaster member for over two years and attended COT or ADT for several times, I haven't had any clear idea or impression of what MOT is and more importantly, why we should apply MOT in Toastmasters untill very recently. To find out and demonstrate the logic behind it to my audience, that should be the upmost priority task of my training.
And indeed, that's where all my efforts and difficulties were--Why MOT?
Very luckily that not long ago I read the Chinese version of MOT and learned the origin and meaning of it. The idea of Moments of Truth had firstly become known in the book of Jan Carlzon, the former CEO of SRS who had brought the airline company from crisis to a new and profitable competetiveness within one year.
According to Jan, "anytime when a customer comes into contact with any aspect of a business, however remote, is an opportunity to form an impression… that time is a Moment of Truth", and how to create a positive impression at each moment of truth for the customer is the secret of success.
Later many Top 500 companies had appled Moments of Truth, and the idea was proved success and became popular not only in the business world, but in some non-profit institutes or organizations, among which is Toastmasters International.
Toastmasters International defined its Moments of Truth as below:
When anyone comes in contact with any aspect of Toastmasters, the person forms an impression based on her experience at that particular time. These decisive times when initial impressions are formed are known as moments of truth.
However, why Toastmasters International, a non-profit organization should also apply the idea of Moments of Truth, or why Moments of Truth should be of such a great importance as to be part of the training for the Toastmasters clubs' officers, that is what to be made crystal clear and convincing to the audience in the training.
As far as I am concerned, the logic can go as below:
a. Though Toastmasters International is non-profit, a useful guide is needed for a sucess and sustainable development so as to fulfil its mission--to empower the individuals to become more effective communicators and leaders.
b. For each toastmasters club, there's a specific target group of customers---the guests and members, which we need to try the best to satisfy
c. Each toastmasters club is expected to be run independently as a business, with the officer team ((the audience) as its management team, and to learn to apply MOT in a toastmasters club can prepare the officers with a better sense of service for their future career or business.
And the essential task of my training is to guide the audience to find out and agree on this logic.
Create Presention Materials
1. Cover page
I was thinking of choosing a fancy picture for the cover page, but later I decided to keep it simple and left only the title "Moments of Truth". But to help to audience understand this topic better, I added the Chinese title "关键时刻", for to those who are new to the concept, the English title barely convey nothing.
Later, for fear that this cover page would be too plain, I added some phrases of "Moments of Truth" as background, in a very light color--an inspiration I got from the cover of the Chinese version. Looks not bad.
2. Beginning story: Wowfactor initiative
To engage the audience and test the technique of storytelling, I designed the beginning of the training with the recent Wowfactor project initiated by the Headquator. To my surprise and, disappointment, however, it's so interesting to the audience that a girl even asked for more info about this project...instead of MOT...
Actually, beginining the training directly with Jan Carlzon's success story would be much better.
3. club logos
To help the audience to realize that each club is just like an independent business, I put the logos and names of all the 15 clubs of Division R, hoping that it helps to bring a kind of formality as well as a sense of pride and engagement from the audience. Seems it worked well.
4. Numbers and pictures
As said before, there are detailed introduction to the Toastmasters' six Moments of Truth and the six standards of each Moment of Truth, but all in words. Another problem was, my audience would have been sitting for about 3 hours before my session, if I show them nothing but words and words, I am afraid they would be bored to death and remember nothing. To avoid such a disaster and reduce their burden of memorizing, I made a slide with only the numbers "6*6", to help them to gain the main structure of the content.
Pictures are more visual and can impress the audience more effecively than words. To explain the Moments, I put some photos at the begining, e.g. the photos of their joint meetings when talking of the Moment of "Fellowship, Variety and Communication", a photo of a formal new member induction ceremony for the Moment of "Membership Orientation". And the photos of their clubs can make the audience feel familar and happy.
But a pity that the laptop was changed before my session and a wrong version of PPT was displayed....I had to ask for help to find my final version in the middle of my training.
5. Handouts
Actually there're two copies of handouts in the manual and I printed them out and handed out to each club beforehand, which was quite helpful to engage the audience.
Deliver the Workshop
1. Dresscode
As usual, for such an occasion, I prefer professional or business casual, and suits, shirts or cardigans are all good choice.
2. To group and regroup
As planned, there would be two group discussions during my session, the first one by club and the second one by Moment, so the audience needs to be regrouped in the middle. But before my session, I noticed that some of the officers were not sitting with their club mates. To avoid two frequent regrouping in the middle, I had to, at the very begining of my session, leave some time and ask the audience to move back to their clubs, which wasted some time and caused confusion...
Actually I should have asked the MC to guide the audience to be seated with their club mates after the break, so that more time can be saved.
3. To engage the audience with rhetorical questions, questions, true stories, group discussions and group presentations.
Asking questions is really a very good way to engage the audience. During the whole training, from the first question"What is MOT?', I kept asking the audience questions, and then paused, waiting for their answers, esp. during the "Why" part, I had almost forced the audience (with pauses and terrible silence) to think hard and find out the logic by themselves. Often there was silence, dead silence, and sometimes hesitant murmurs. I tried to keep my smile and waited for more responses, for I could feel in the air the nervousness and excitement of struggling for an answer. They were engeged.
But the problem of aksing question is that, it takes up quite a lot of time, esp. if more responses are expected from the audience.
Besides, due to the relative long time for this MOT session, different types of activities were applied to engage the audience as much as possible, which demonstrated people like to be heard by others, and that the more engaged the audience is, the better the training would be.
4. Accident, wrong computer and wrong ppt.
I had never expected that a different laptop would be used and a wrong old version of my PPT was displayed. Again, a thorough doublecheck of every detail beforehand is vital.
P.S.
Despite of the changes and accidents, the whole training was delivered just as planned (except that it run overtime..) But how effective was this training? Well, though we didn't have a detailed survey or follow-up, when I saw after the training people talking about MOT and setting their goals to increase the variety of their club meetings, I knew that MOT is no longer a totally new and strange idea to the club officers. That's enough!
The things that I would like to change if I deliver the training for a second time:
1. Begin the training directly with "What is MOT?" instead of "Wowfactor Project", to make it more relevent to the topic and, save time for more survey among the audience.
2. Group the audience by club first during the break instead of at the beginning of my session, to save time.
3. Double check and make sure the right version of PPT is used.
4. Time control.
5. Practise, practise, practise.
