The envelope was from Fines Victoria.

Fifty in a forty.

A fine and demerit points to go with it.

I'd been running late to pick up the kids from school. Somewhere along the way the limit had dropped, and I hadn't seen the sign. It wasn't hidden behind a bush. I just wasn't looking.

My teenager was there when I opened it.

"That's a skill issue."

The annoying thing was, they had a point.

I've been driving for thirty years. That was the problem.

💡 ONE IDEA WELL

I give a talk on neonatal resuscitation. Partway through, I play a video of ABBA singing SOS.

​

(Click for sound. I checked.)

It's there to teach the tempo of CPR. A number on a slide is easy to forget. A song gets stuck in your head, like an earworm.

In a room, it works. Every time I'd shown it, it had worked.

The first time I gave the talk on Zoom, I didn't check. Why would I?

I advanced the slide. The video started on its own, the way it always did. On my laptop, ABBA played.

Then someone came off mute.

"There isn't any sound. But I'm guessing it's SOS by ABBA."

All that time, Agnetha and Frida, in thick blue eyeshadow, had been singing to a grid of black squares. Behind one of them, I like to imagine, someone was trying to lip-read a distress call.

They'd guessed right. I apologised, said a few words about musical mnemonics,* and fast-forwarded.

They got the song.

They never got the beat.

*ABBA isn't the only option. Nellie the Elephant was a CPR favourite for years, until a 2009 BMJ trial found it got people's rate right and their depth wrong. Another One Bites the Dust keeps the tempo too. Best kept to yourself.

🧰 LESS MESS, MORE MESSAGE

Experience isn't the villain here. It's what got the ABBA clip into the talk in the first place.

But experience has a side effect. It turns checks into assumptions.

A junior doctor giving their first talk on Zoom would test the sound. Probably twice. I'd have told them to.

I didn't, because it had always worked.

That's the skill issue experienced people have. We haven't lost the skill. We've forgotten that things go wrong.

Most of the time, that's fine. Same room, same projector, same kind of audience. Autopilot works on a road you know.

The trouble starts when the zone changes. A new venue. A different crowd. A talk that moves from a room to a screen. The signs are all there. We're doing fifty anyway.

Online, the signs get harder to see. In a room, I'd have known in seconds: puzzled faces, someone leaning over to whisper to a neighbour. On Zoom, there were only black squares, and nothing told me anything until someone was brave enough to unmute.

⌨️ TRY THIS

When something changes about a talk you know well, treat it as a new talk.

A new format, a new venue, a new kind of audience. That's the sign the limit has dropped.

Then do what you'd tell a junior colleague to do. For Zoom, I now run the talk past a friend first. Not on the day. Earlier, so there's time to fix whatever breaks. (It's usually the sound. When you share your screen in Zoom, there's a "Share sound" tickbox in the bottom-left corner. You're welcome.)

Rooms can catch you out too. Before I worked out the sound settings, I carried a small Bluetooth speaker in my bag and paired it with my laptop. One less thing to assume.

You don't need to slow down for every talk. Just the ones where the limit has changed.

🧭 ASK YOURSELF THIS

Forward this to the colleague who's given the same talk for ten years and has just been asked to do it on Zoom.

Speak soon,
Andy

PS. My teenager turns sixteen next year and gets their learner's permit. I've already started practising "That's a skill issue" from the passenger seat.