Case Study 1 | Talent Academy

Mastering Q&A: How we helped a team of engineers pitch to the Board

We ran a 12 month communication course for a team of engineers to help them deliver Q&A effortlessly and pitch innovative proposals to the Board. Improving their communication skills under pressure ensured their innovative ideas withstood scrutiny from multiple executives inclined to cut costs.

There are many key differences between Q&A and delivering a rehearsed scripted presentation:

Q&A relies heavily on ingrained skills - this requires time & human adaptation to acquire.
Rehearsed scripted presentations rely more on memory & familiarity.

About the client

We surveyed the team of 12 engineers and got them to self-assess their confidence and likelihood of success performing Q&A under pressure to the Board.

The Problem

Although the participants were extremely knowledgeable about their respective subject matter (safety, IT systems, machine learning, sustainability, recruitment, etc) - each speaker returned self-assessment survey results of “1 out 5” or “2 out of 5” for confidence or likelihood of outcome 4 weeks prior to pitching to the Board for the first time as per below table.

If the Board did not accept the proposals put forward by the engineers, then the alternative would be to proceed with the existing systems but find ways to cut costs. This would put the engineers’ roles at the company at risk.

Question: How could we significantly increase Q&A skillsets in 12 engineers in a 4 week period, while not interfering with their day to day roles?

Our Strategy

Our Solution

Learning long term skills requires human adaptation. In short:

An intense effort triggers a need for adaptation
Rest and sleep consolidates skills into long-term memory
Reattempting the intense effort in a short period before too much reversibility occurs

When ingraining Q&A skills in our clients, we subscribe to the Fitts & Postner stages of skill acquisition:

Cognitive phase = client acquires knowledge about how to do the skill and how not to do the skill - what is good or bad to do, what is optional, relevant or irrelevant.
Associative phase = client performs the skill to the best of their ability and tries to improve their performance by taking on feedback (from themself, their coach, recordings, data, etc).
Autonomous phase = the client can perform correctly and effortlessly. The skill is so ingrained it might actually feel uncomfortable for the client to do it the wrong way.

Here is a graph of how our clients typically progress along these 3x phases.

In the Cognitive phase, we provided our clients with:

A 20-page workbook on Talent Academy’s approach to Q&A;
Demonstrations done by our coaches from our AI Roleplay software;
A 1 hour coaching session to explain & demonstrate the subject matter and undertake an initial assessment of each participant’s Q&A skills, gaps & goals

In the Associative phase:

We met with each participant for a session once or twice a week at free times in their work schedule;
Each session was an intense 1x hour coaching session putting the workbook concepts and trying increasingly difficult AI Roleplay scenarios
We regularly provided the client an opportunity to re-attempt the skill after receiving personal feedback, professional feedback and data / recording feedback.
A summary email was sent after each session to help the client track their progress and consider optional “homework” to accelerate their development in their own time.

In the Autonomous phase:

We set aside the AI Roleplay and had other participants act as realistic Board Members (or more difficult versions of Board members)
We tested and measured each participant's Q&A skills in realistic scenarios under pressure.
Lastly, we re-surveyed the participants to self-assess their Q&A confidence and likelihood of success.

The Results

The program was a success and more than $10 Billion dollars worth of innovative projects were green-lit by the Board.

Here are the tracked improvement and survey results: