ted

How to Deal with the TED Effect

Peter Cripps presenting , , ,

Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design and author of the books Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences and slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations has written a great blog post about what she refers to as the TED effect. The TED effect refers to the impact that the TED conferences have had on all of us who need to present as part of our daily lives.

Nancy’s basic assertion is that “in public speaking it’s no longer okay to be boring”. In the years BT (before TED) it was okay to deliver boring presentations because actually no one knew if you were being boring or not because most people’s bar for what constituted a good presentation was pretty low anyway. In the dark years of BT we would all just sit stoically through those presentations that bored us to death and missed the point completely because bad presentations were just an occupational hazard we all had to learn to deal with. If nothing else it gave us time to catch up on our email or quietly chatter away to a colleague in the back row.

Now though everything has changed! For anyone that has seen more than half a dozen TED talks we know that if we are not engaged within the first 30 seconds we are ready to walk. Not only that if we felt you were wasting our time we go onto Twitter or Facebook and tell the rest of the world how boring you were. If however you did engage us and managed to get across your idea in 18 minutes or under (the maximum time of a TED talk) then we will reward you by spreading your ideas and help you get them adopted and funded.

As technical people software architects often struggle with presentations simply because they are communicating technology so, by definition, that must be complicated and take loads of time with lots of slides containing densely populated text or diagrams that cannot be read unless you are sitting less than a metre from the screen. But, as Nancy Duarte has explained countless times in her books and her blog, it needn’t be like that, even for a die-hard techno-geek.

Here’s my take on on how to deal with the TED effect:

  1. Just because you are given an hour to present, don’t think you have to actually spend that amount of time talking. Use the TED 18 minute rule and try and condense your key points into that time. Use the rest of the time for discussion and exchange of ideas.
  2. Use handouts for providing more detail. Handouts don’t just have to be documents given out during the presentation. Consider writing up the detail in a blog post or similar and provide a link to this at the end of your talk.
  3. Never, ever present slides someone else has created. If a presentation is worth doing then it’s worth investing the time to make it your presentation.
  4. Remember the audience is there to see you speak and hear your ideas. Slides are an aid to get those ideas across and are not an end in their own right. If you’re just reading what’s on the presentation then so can the audience so you may as well not be there.
  5. The best talks are laid out like a book or a movie. They have a beginning, a middle and an end. It often helps to think of the end first (what is the basic idea or point you want to get across) and work backwards from there. As Steven Pressfield says in the book Do the Work, “figure out where you want to go; then work backwards from there”.
  6. Finally, watch as many TED talks as you can to see to see how they engage with the audience and get their ideas across. One of the key attributes you will see all the great speakers have is they are passionate about their subject and this really shines through in their talk. Maybe, just maybe, if you are not really passionate about what your subject you should not be talking about it in the first place?

Discover Problems, Don’t Solve Them

Peter Cripps creativity , , , ,

A while ago I wrote a post called Bring me problems not solutions. An article by Don Peppers on Linkedin called ‘Class of 2013: You Can’t Make a Living Just by Solving Problems’ adds an interesting spin to this and piles even more pressure on those people entering the job market now, as well as those of us figuring out how to stay in it!As we all know, Moore’s Law says that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. As this power has increased the types of problems computers can solve has also increased exponentially. By the time today’s graduates reach retirement age, say in 50 years time (which itself might be getting further away thus compounding the problem) computers will be several million times more powerful than they are today.

As Peppers says:

If you can state something as a technical problem that has a solution – a task to be completed – then eventually this problem can and will be solved by computer.

This was always the case, it’s just that as computers are able to perform even more calculations per second the kinds of problems will become more and more complex that they can solve. Hence the white collar and skilled professional jobs will also become consumed by the ever increasing power of the computer. Teachers, lawyers, doctors, financial analysts, traders and even those modern day pariahs of our society journalists and politicians will continue to see their jobs become redundant.

So if the salaried jobs of even those of us who solve problems for a living continue to disappear what’s left? Peppers suggests there are two potential areas that computers will struggle with, one is to become very good at dealing with interpersonal issues – people skills (darn it, those pesky HR types are going to be in work for a while longer). The other way is not to focus on solving problems but on discovering them.

Discovering problems is something that computers find hard to do, and probably will continue to do so. It’s just too difficult to bound the requirements and define the tasks that are needed for creating a problem. Discovering new problems has another name, it’s also known as “creativity.” Creativity involves finding and solving a problem that wasn’t there before. How to be creative is a very profitable source of income for authors right now with more and more books appearing on this subject every month. However, here’s the irony, just as we are realising we need to be fostering creativity as a skill even more we are quite literally turning the clock back on our children’s innate abilities to be creative. As explained in this video (The Faustian Bargain) “the way we raise children these days is at odds with the way we’ve evolved to learn”.

Sadly our politicians don’t seem to get this. Here in the UK, the head of state for education, Michael Gove, doesn’t understand creativity and his proposed education reforms “fly in the face of all that we know about creativity and how best to nurture it”. It seems that the problem is not just confined to the UK (and probably other Northern Hemisphere countries). In India the blogger and photographer Sumeet Moghe is thinking that his daughter doesn’t deserve school. and is struggling with what alternatives a concerned parent might provide.

So, what to do? Luckily there are people that realise the importance of a creative education, fostering a love of learning and nurturing the concept of lifelong learning. Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk on how schools kill creativity is one of the most watched presentations of all time. So, what to do? Watch this and other talks by Ken Robinson as well as other talks on TED that deal in matters of creativity. Learn what you can and get involved in the “creative life” as much as possible. If you live in countries that don’t support creativity in education then write to your elected representative and ask her or him what they, and the government they are a part of, are doing about it. For the sake of all of us this is a problem that is too important to let our leaders get away with not fixing.