Your speech has more reach than you might think

 

At his Manner of Speaking blog on May 24, 2021 John Zimmer has an excellent post titled Do this calculation every time you speak in public. (He talked about this topic previously on February 26, 2016 in another post titled Every time you have to give a speech or make a presentation, do this calculation). John says to multiply your speaking time by the number of people who will be in the audience. He calls this the true amount of your speaking time. Doing the calculation will make you focus on your audience, each of whom are giving you their valuable time. For example, as he discussed in the earlier post, at work you might speak for 30 minutes to an audience of 20 people in your department for a total time of 600 minutes or 10 hours.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I instead call it the reach of your speech, in units of person-minutes - a product illustrated above in a graphic via the area of a purple rectangle. As a retired engineer, I think it’s important to carry along the units. That process is known as Dimensional Analysis. I blogged about it on November 25, 2020 in a post titled A million times too large.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How about a 60 minute speech to an audience of 120 people? Now the reach is 7200 person-minutes, or 120 person-hours, or 5 person-days. That’s huge! (Industrial engineers used to talk about man-hours, which are a sexist form of person-hours). Back on June 22, 2015 I blogged about Visualizing emotional equations with PowerPoint or flipcharts and also showed multiplication as an area to illustrate how Authenticity = Self-Awareness x Courage.