Speak Easy

A lot of our working life is spent explaining things. Talking a client through a tricky decision, making a case in a meeting, standing up at a conference and holding a room. We are only as good as our ability to do that clearly, and it is a skill people are rarely given time to build. So we built some.

Speak Easy is a small group that meets for an hour a week to practise speaking. That is the whole idea. Not a course, and nobody at the front who has it all figured out, just a group of people getting the reps in together.

How it works

Each week we run one or two short speaking games in small groups. A lot of them come from Ultraspeaking, which is built around thinking on your feet rather than reading a script. Now and then someone brings a technique to try, and afterwards we talk, informally, about what came up.

It is deliberately low-commitment. Drop in when you can, no sign-up, nothing compulsory. The moment you make a thing like this mandatory you kill the part that makes it work, so we don’t. People come because they want to get better, and they keep coming because it does.

Why we bother

For the people who work here. Speaking on your feet, saying what you mean under a bit of pressure, managing the nerves, being genuinely present in a room rather than waiting for your turn: these are skills you build by doing, and most people never get paid, judgement-free time to do it. This is that time.

For the people who hire us. When you bring us a problem, a good part of what you are buying is the ability to think it through out loud with you, and to explain the hard parts clearly rather than hiding them behind jargon. A team that practises communicating is a team you can actually follow, all the way from the first workshop to the awkward decision three months in.

The bigger idea

This is the same bet we make everywhere: that a team which keeps deliberately getting better is worth more than one that stands still, and that the good stuff comes from making room for people to practise and then keeping out of their way. Speak Easy is Making time to get better pointed at a different kind of craft. One is about sharpening how we build; this one is about sharpening how we explain it.