 Later
this week, I'll be posting my first podcast, an interview with Chris
Corrigan, Open Space guru and author of the Parking Lot blog. Chris is
a conversationalist extraordinaire, so interviewing him was a piece of
cake -- future interviews will be tougher and need more research and
planning.
Nevertheless, the brief time I spent in this first
interview produced some learning and insights I had not expected. For a
start, I learned that you have to know the objective of your
podcast/interview before you begin. My podcasts have the same ultimate
objective as my blog posts: to help readers better understand how the
world really works, and to provide ideas on better ways to live and
make a living.
To achieve this in my podcasts, I will basically
have to throw away my interview 'script' and instead research my
interviewees sufficiently to know what learning and ideas I want the interview to bring out.
This is a lot more than just throwing out open questions -- it means you have to know the interviewee's answers before you ask the questions.
The interview just facilitates the emergence and articulation of ideas
to the point that, as I've written before, the interviewer's questions
and voice can be omitted from the podcast without any loss of cohesion
or clarity -- you just listen to one person, the interviewee, conveying
unhesitatingly the ideas and information. A form of conversational
minimalism, if you will.
I could have done this with Chris'
interview. Because he's so skilled, I didn't need or want to say much
beyond getting him started with one broad question.
I've
tentatively decided, however, to take another approach, at least for
this first podcast. What I'm going to do is essentially write, and then
read, a blog post about my
interview with Chris, with Chris' voice and comments, edited down,
interspersed. This will allow me to add my own, measured, thoughts to
Chris', and to elaborate a bit on what I think he's getting at, in my
own words.
The result, I suppose, will be, as Chris put it, a bit like a CBC Ideas program -- a narrated interview.
I
don't know that I'll be able to sustain this -- it may be more work
than I have time to invest once a week. But it will be fun to 'produce'
a two-person exposition, crafted one person at a time and then 'mixed'.
Three other things I learned from this first podcast production experience:
- Test
the technology first. For some reason Pamela (the recording software)
stopped recording every 60 seconds, so Chris was interrupted once a
minute with another "this call is being recorded" message. Man is he patient!
- When
you're recording a call, you listen completely differently (and more
intently). Suddenly, the conversation's for your audience, not for you.
Great exercise for interrupters and thinkers-ahead like me. When you
start letting people finish talking, you learn more, and you let the
conversation go in directions that open your thinking up. It's
astonishing, and humbling.
- Conversation is, at its best,
collaboration. When I tore up the script and started following Chris'
comments with "Yes, and..." sentences, we went suddenly from exposition
to revelation. Breakthrough ideas (you'll have to wait for the podcast
to hear what they were).
Podcast and transcript will be posted in a few days, once the editing and narration are done. Thanks Chris!
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