We recently looked at a participant’s slide before and after learning our data storytelling approach. The first version was not exactly wrong. The numbers were there. The breakdown was there. The content was there. But as a slide, it still asked too much from the audience. They had to read through the table, compare the...
What happens when a class isn’t just listening – but absorbing, trying, and responding? That’s what we saw in this session of Presentations Alive!™, our flagship programme on presentation skills – designed to build structure, clarity, confidence, and presence. The learners came from one of the world’s top audit and advisory firms. From the moment the...
They were laughing. They were learning. And somehow, they were doing both without losing focus. Across industries and seniority levels, one message keeps surfacing in participant feedback: “It was fun, but also serious and effective.” That balance is not accidental. It is designed. Programmes such as The Case Maker™ Advanced and Presentations Alive!™ are built on a dual engine:...
On the morning of Day 2 in the two-day Presentations Alive!™ training, Anna, one among the cohort of management trainees, said something simple, funny, and deeply revealing: “I have a brain.” It was not a throwaway comment. It was Anna’s way of describing a shift that had happened overnight. “Before this training,” she confessed “I struggled to...
To understand why critical thinking matters so much today, it helps to begin with two modes of thought. System 1 is fast, automatic, and intuitive. It helps us respond quickly, make snap judgments, and move efficiently through daily decisions. System 2 is slower, more deliberate, and more effortful. It helps us pause, examine assumptions, weigh...
Since we are in the Raya month as I write this, I am reminded of a story from a two-day training of The Business Storyteller™. Everyone was tasked to find stories in their days, weeks, months, years. And this group, a fund investment company, just could not find stories. They declared everything was BAU – Business...
In a lighter moment during a discussion, the team reflected on an observation from the field: pricing is not always driven by underlying cost, but by perception and positioning. Whether it was food pricing or programme benchmarking, the same principle applied – labels, context, and framing influence what clients perceive as “reasonable”. It is a...
My first week of training this year was almost entirely filled with sessions on Compact Slides and One-Pagers™. That surprised me. With AI tools now able to generate slides in seconds, you might expect demand for slide visualisation training to slow down. If anything, the opposite happened. In class, we still see the same challenge: extremely...
It was our fifth run of the Persuasion & Presence programme with a major telco undergoing a cultural transformation. The goal was crystal clear: help team members look, sound, and feel like they belonged in the room with senior consultants. They weren’t there just to learn to present; they were there to learn how to sound like...
At the start of the two-day Presentations Alive! training, she introduced herself almost apologetically: “I’m from Finance. I don’t usually make presentations.” What followed wasn’t a lack of ability – it was fear. She wasn’t comfortable expressing herself because it wasn’t routine. She was afraid of making mistakes, afraid of other people’s opinions, and afraid of being...