This is the Business English Podcast, Episode 315, how SWAT makes business meetings more effective.
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Hello, Lindsay. How are you?
Hi Aubrey, I'm doing great today.
How are you? Excellent.
I have a question. What has been a highlight of your week so far?
Wow, do you mean of my life week or work week?
Oh, good question. Life week?
Probably run club last night.
I joined the run club, which I'm starting to join more often on Tuesdays and so we go.
We run twice around the park and then we go have a beer together all of us.
Is it pretty big? How many people show up for that run club?
It's become a really huge group, so it's 40 maybe?
40 people. Oh, wow.
Yeah, that's a big group.
It's like a full marathon.
Yeah, it's connected to a brewery.
So all the breweries, many of them and coffee shops in Denver have run clubs and so you start there and you finish there can hang out and socialize.
So yeah, getting outside, breathing in the air.
Probably the highlight.
I love that idea. You guys check out the run club if there's one near where you live.
I think that sounds like a really fun thing to do.
It's really cool. You get in your workout.
You're socializing everything.
It's good stuff. Yeah.
Awesome. Well, you'll notice I asked Lindsay about a highlight.
We got a really good question about highlights and lowlights.
Do we use that word?
So let's read this question and then we're going to dive.
We're going to answer this question and share some vocab and strategies for business meetings today.
All right. Should I go ahead and read it for us, Aubrey?
Yeah, let's do it. All right.
This is from D .D. D .D.
says I've been listening to Oliver's English for years.
That is amazing. It helps me quite a lot in using and learning English.
I'm working in an international IC design house in Taiwan now.
English is the official and daily language we use.
There are lots of meetings we have to do in English.
Most of the time we have to do the presentation in highlight and lowlight topics, but I'm a little confused on the definition of highlight and lowlight.
Is that a good thing to be spoken as highlight and a bad thing to be lowlight?
Please help. Thanks, D .D.
Yeah. This is such a great question.
I had to do a little googling because I wasn't sure at first.
I realize now what D .D.
meant and I'm excited to dive into this because we have answers for you and for anyone else, if you're using highlight lowlight in PowerPoint, you might think, okay, I can call things in daily life.
A lowlight, you can't.
We don't use it that way.
I'm excited to shed some light on this vocabulary.
Shed some light. Get it?
Nice pun there. Oh, I like it.
Is that a pun on purpose?
Unintentional pun. Impressive.
Impressive. All right.
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Awesome. Okay. So let's dive in.
First, when she's talking about, or she or he, I'm not sure, the presentations, having highlights and lowlights, I saw that in PowerPoint.
This is a term that's used.
So I saw a lot of PowerPoint presentations where you have highlights and lowlights, and this is like the good and the bad.
But that's the only place that I saw lowlights really.
Other than that, we don't use it in business English or in regular conversation.
So that's interesting to know.
But we did some crowdsourcing because I hadn't used this in PowerPoint and I talked to a few people and found out some alternatives that are actually used more in the business world that we want to share with you guys.
Okay. So the one time that I have heard it used is often people that maybe were camp counselors or something or went to camp, they might ask the campers to go through the highlights and the lowlights of their day, kind of a self -reflective activity.
But it's real. And it's almost a play on words, right?
We know highlight is like, what was the best thing?
What would you focus on?
And then just giving an opposite low light.
Yeah, exactly. So not super common, only in certain niche areas where you would even hear that.
So let's move on to some better things, some better options.
This is actually going to be a two -part series because I wanted to share what would be the opposite of highlighting and we're going to share vocab for that.
But then a lot of the words you would think maybe mean the opposite of highlighting actually have more of a connotation of de -emphasizing.
So part two, we're going to go into that vocab.
All right. I am excited to get through both parts of this concept.
So let's start with what we're learning today then, alternatives.
Yes, alternatives to highlights and lowlights.
Often SWOT is used, which is an acronym that stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
So this is when we talk about the way we could structure a meeting.
Is that right, Aubrey?
Yeah, instead of just highlights and lowlights, you may want to get a little deeper.
This is used very commonly to like, okay, we've got these buckets now.
We're going to share something to break it down.
Yeah, it's so much easier if you're planning a meeting to have some kind of structure predetermined.
And it could be something different, a different structure every time, by the way, the way you do it could be different, which really is good to mix it up.
But if it's just starting with a blank canvas, it's quite hard.
Right. Whereas you can see how having the structure would also help move things along.
If, OK, we've shared a couple strengths, now we know we move on to weaknesses, it's easier to keep the meeting going.
Yes, 100 percent. OK, so SWAT, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
And this is a very old, old, old acronym.
It's been around forever.
This is also an acronym you may see in a business plan.
I know when I started my first business back in 2010, I worked with a score counselor, which is the free business mentors, the government service.
And he had me going through this whole formal old school business plan.
And then I had to write out my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats.
It's really ingrained, especially in the older kind of frameworks of business, but it's still used today for sure.
Yeah, absolutely. So a newer one is there's a second option here is Rosebud Thorne, which is kind of fun to imagine this rose.
You have the bud. So the rose is kind of where we're at right now.
OK. Bud would be like, what is coming, what's being developed?
And then Thorne would be those threats or the negatives.
What are the struggles we're having?
It's always good to anticipate what's working now.
Is it going to be working in a year?
Right. Or what are you what are you planting the seeds for?
What's being developed that's going to thrive in a year from now?
I like that. Interesting.
And I love that that gives everyone the big picture.
Right. There may be things that are not ready to implement.
But if everyone on your team knows what's in the pipeline, what's coming, then we all kind of have the same we're on the same page with the big picture.
Maybe we'll use this framework for our next Team Sync.
We'll see. It'll be fun.
It'll be fun. So what's interesting, highlight.
This word has multiple meanings in English.
One is, as was mentioned in the email, right?
Something that's being emphasized, drawing attention to something.
But when we're usually talking about highlighting, we don't usually use low light, like Lindsay said.
There every now and then you'll hear this almost like a play in words.
If you're going to share the highlights.
Oh, share the lowlights.
Yeah. But this specific question in this email was, you know, I'm confused about the definitions, is it good to be spoken of as a highlight?
Like, is there a positive connotation here?
And when you're talking about the highlights of your day, definitely a positive connotation.
This is the good things that happened.
Highlights at work, highlights in a meeting.
This is the best part of it, or what we're focusing on.
And then what they asked, is it a bad thing to be the low light?
So in business, right?
If you're going to use this, highlights and low lights, that would be like these are the negatives, these are the threats with SWAT.
These are the things that are difficult, the struggles.
Yeah. We don't use that in daily conversation, low light that way.
No, look for these other opportunities, other ways to structure a meeting, to talk about a business opportunity.
Not so much highlights, low lights.
Yes. OK. OK. So there's always an opposite side to things, Aubrey, which is when we don't want to emphasize things.
Right. Yeah. And this is what's interesting.
We have highlight, which is just sort of like this is what we're focusing on.
This is what we're going to highlight.
So when I'm thinking about the negative, you know, how do you say that?
If you don't say low light, what do you say?
Right. Yeah. First, you would just use the negative.
We would just say we're going to not highlight these other things.
Right. We're going to highlight this and this and this.
We're not highlighting that today during this meeting.
OK. So that's one thing we could do, just to not highlight it.
Or we could skip something.
Right. So the word skip.
We like that one. Let's highlight growth and skip the summary of how we got there.
Right. Right. So it's like if you're looking at what you're going to focus on, it's not these other things.
It's not that you're de -emphasizing them.
You're just not focusing on them.
You're not highlighting them.
So this is we would just maybe say skip it.
Yeah. Or maybe you prepared a lot of slides and you realize that you're running out of time and you might just use, let's skip this section.
Let's move on from this section and jump to the next section of the presentation.
Exactly. And our third option, I love this a lot.
I use it a lot, is the the verb cover to say you're not covering something.
So if you're not highlighting it, you're skipping it, you know, you might say we probably won't cover upcoming events today.
Yeah. And I think this term probably comes from journalism.
Right. When I think about journalists, what did you know, what's what?
What do you cover in your column or your investigative journalism?
What's your area of expertise?
So to cover. Yeah. That's an interesting sort of a more specific phrase.
Right. If we're not highlighting it, we're not focusing on it.
We might say, like, let's just not cover that at all.
And it means we're not going to address it or skipping it.
For sure. Let's do a role play.
And of course, we are in a business meeting.
So here we go. All right.
Let's go over the SWAT from the sales meeting.
Aubrey, can you share the strengths?
Yeah, we did a good job highlighting the new product features.
The presentation on that was really clear and concise.
Nice. And what about weaknesses?
I think we're still lacking a few things the client is looking for.
That could be an issue in the future.
That brings us to opportunities.
I think we got some good ideas for growth.
Absolutely. Excited to see where our dev team will take it.
I don't see any imminent threats as long as they can figure out the development timing.
Anyone else see something that I'm missing?
I agree. I think we're looking good.
OK. Wow. That was a very quick SWOT analysis.
Right. It's clearly like something very specific.
Maybe there was a presentation.
We had a short meeting and then we're like, OK, let's do a quick SWOT about how that went.
Wow. If only business were this simple, right?
No. Right. When it's a role play, it can't be an hour meeting, right?
Yeah. It's like, OK, let's take an early weekend.
Now we're all set. We've done our SWOT.
Oh, that's funny. So I said let's go over the SWOT, the S -W -O -T, that acronym from the sales meeting.
Aubrey, can you share the strengths, right?
Share the strengths.
First thing, that S would be the strengths.
And I used highlighting here.
We did a good job highlighting the new product features.
So this is where I wouldn't say, you know, we highlighted new product features and we low lighted sales figure or something, right?
We wouldn't use it that way.
No, you're right. That's a good point.
Yeah, for sure not.
All right. So next we're on to opportunities, right?
That brings us to opportunities.
And then I said, I think we got some good ideas for growth.
Right. Yes. And I said, excited to see where our dev team will take it, our development team often will shorten that and just say dev team.
Yeah. And then we talked about threats.
You said, I don't see any imminent threats.
I like this adjective, imminent means like anything that is for sure going to happen in the future would be imminent.
Yeah, for sure. And so I've seen SWOT used in the context of certainly a meeting or an event, even like a conference.
I've also seen it used in envisioning a company that you're going to launch.
Right. As I said, in a business plan.
To talk about, OK, do you have a place in the market to launch this company?
Or maybe your company is launching a startup that's spinning off of it.
Right. Or a new department.
Do we have what are our opportunities in this market?
Other things people use might be like the lean canvas if you're working more in a Silicon Valley technology type place, you might be using the lean method methodology or there's lots of methodology.
So I think our listeners can look for this and know that it is very much ingrained in business English for sure.
Absolutely. Right. I think it's helpful to know you're not, you know, stuck with highlights and lowlights.
You see that in PowerPoint.
There are so many options.
Interesting ways to switch up how you're structuring a meeting.
I love like you said, Lindsay, doesn't have to be the same every time.
You could be creative about this.
Yes, exactly. How you structure a meeting, how you structure a business proposal to your investors.
Right. Maybe you're going in front of venture capitalists.
We're going to give you seed money for your idea.
You just do need some framework of how you're presenting your idea and how it's going to go over in the market.
They're going to expect that obviously.
Yes. All right. I want to share a related episode 10 88.
Right. On on the All Year's English podcast was one key phrase to emphasize and intensify in English.
And there was some great vocab.
And that one like let alone not to mention where you're wanting to emphasize.
So definitely make sure you're following All Year's English and don't miss that episode.
Yes. Scroll back down a little bit and find that episode.
Really good, really good gems there in our back catalog.
Aubrey, where should we leave our listeners today?
Yeah, it's a great takeaway is it's always good to have structure in a meeting.
And there are so many options.
Right. Switch it up.
Highlights, lowlights might be used.
Don't let it confuse you.
We don't use lowlights that way in conversation.
Yes. Thank you for the question.
And we'll see you in the next episode.
Aubrey, have a good one.
Awesome. See you next time.
Bye. Thank you for listening to Business English, a podcast just for you.
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