The Calibration

The three skills good hosts master before any others.

It’s easy to spend a lot of time working on the wrong things to become a better host.

I’ve done it, you’ve done it, anyone who’s hosted anything has done it.

It when we get so focussed on improving our own skills and performance that we forget about the other important bits that will make the whole episode, event or meeting work. 

We end up with a calibration problem - the bits aren’t in sync and everything feels out of whack and clunky.

I first witnessed poor calibration during a game of Pictionary.

My Mum was a terrible Pictionary player. Rubbish. So bad that we would ‘bags not’ being her partner.

If you haven’t played, Pictionary is a board game where one person draws something, and their partner (or team) has to guess what they’ve drawn. For every correct answer, your team moves around the board, trying to beat the other teams to the end.

Our family would play Pictionary whenever we’d go and stay at the beach. I'll always remember one year my uncle came to stay - he’s an architect and a brilliant drawer - and Mum almost dived on him when he walked in the door to ‘bags him’ as her secret weapon Pictionary partner. She was so smug, thinking she’d finally sorted out exactly what she needed to win a game.

That night we sat down to play, and the first card that came out was an ‘AllPlay’. This means all drawers are drawing and all guessers are guessing. It gets frantic and noisy but also means you can listen in and hear what the other teams are guessing - it’s a somewhat frowned-on but legal technique. 

So off we go, and Mum starts yelling out things like ‘circle’, then ‘clock’. However, she could hear us yelling out almost the complete opposite - ‘square’, ‘cross’, ‘flag’, ‘Union Jack’ - and pretty soon the right answer, ‘London’!

Mum couldn’t believe it. 

I’ll never forget her looking at my uncle, then looking down at what he'd drawn and saying, “Well, what’s that?” And he said, “It’s Big Ben”!

And it was.

It was the most brilliant, detailed drawing of the clock tower Big Ben anyone had ever drawn in under a minute. But it wasn’t ever going to help Mum guess that the answer was London.

This, my friends, is a calibration problem. Mum and my uncle weren’t in sync.

To push the metaphor a bit further, it’s when we get so busy thinking about what we’re drawing and forget to think about why we’re drawing it, how we’re drawing it, and who we’re drawing it for.

I reckon this happens because of three reasons:

We’ve forgotten our purpose: Pictionary isn’t about drawing masterpieces. It’s about having fun and connecting. Similarly, being a good host isn’t about making sure we sound good, it’s about making sure the show sounds good and gives the audience what we promised them we would. 

We’ve forgotten our audience: We can't be in our own heads with everything we know and understand. We have to get into our audience’s heads with everything they know and understand, so we can draw them the Union Jack. Again, being a good host is about showing people what we know and care about, it’s about connecting in with what our audience knows and cares about so we can draw them what they need. 

We’ve picked the wrong partner: Just because someone is a good architect doesn’t mean they're a good Pictionary partner… (just sayin’, Mum). Being a good host is about looking beyond titles when we pick our talent. We need to pick people who are more than informed, but also in tune with our audience and can communicate in an interesting way. 

Knowing our purpose, our audience, and how to pick our talent is the essence of calibration - the skill good hosts master before any others.

Once we've got that down, we can move on to mastering the other key steps we need to focus on before the show, event, podcast (or even meeting) begins - navigation and preparation.

So, take some time to sort the calibration and we’ll move on to navigation next week.

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Did you know this is also a podcast?

It’s been a while since I banged on about the podcast version of The Penny Drop. These posts often start with me talking into a microphone - and you’ll soon learn that I do it from anywhere - from my studio, to the paddock, to a park, to walking up steep hills, or musing over a coffee. If you’d rather listen than read - or you’d like both - you’ll find The Penny Drop wherever you get your pods…. or here

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