Some days ago, after a conference, one of my friends posted that he wasn’t satisfied with his session.

I didn’t know what went wrong, because I had to left the conference just after my session (yes, I know that it’s not a good thing to do, but sometimes you travel too much, and you want to come back to your family earlier). But, I knew that probably he missed something, and so I asked him if he did the dry run before doing the session.

Dry run, that means a rehearsal, can be used to test the session, to test the timing, to test the flow, to test the degree of sarcasm in the presentation, to test the expectations of the audience, or to test the compliance to the Code of Conduct. As you probably already know, I’m a big fan of dry runs.

Coming back to my friend, he told me that he did the dry run to test the timings, and in fact, they were perfect. BUT, he did the dry run all by himself, and so nobody tested the flow of the presentation, and that part wasn’t working as he expected.

Always remember why you’re doing a dry run. In doubt, it’s still better to do the dry run with somebody else and ask them to interrupt you if something is going bad if something breaks the flow. When the flow is working, test the times. Not the opposite.