Tag Archives: Hans Rosling

Hans and Ola Rosling: Wizz and Son.

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I am so pleased I spotted the title of a TED talk that had fairly recently been published. What caught my eye was the name, Hans Rosling. He has been featured in this blog before. In his previous outing I described him as ‘a wizz with visuals’. I still stand by that. On this occasion he is in double harness with his son, Ola. The talk is called How Not to be Ignorant of the World.

I said that they are in double harness, but actually it’s a relay.  Hans kicks the thing off, and Ola takes over at 8:30.

Hans is not just a wizz with visuals. He is brilliant at conveying statistics in a way that has impact and memorability, and most importantly is very funny. A big part of the secret is the huge amount of energy he pours into the process, but there’s a lot of science (I mean speaking science) there as well.

He piles straight in at the beginning, firing at the audience three multiple-choice questions which they must answer on electronic keypads. I shall not spoil your enjoyment by revealing here what the questions are, nor what the audience’s answers are, and least of all the blindingly hilarious tricks with which he spices up the analysis of the answers. Of these last, one in particular (involving primates) is brilliantly creative, and should inspire any speaker to seek out equivalent ideas. I am desperate not to say anything here to spoil your enjoyment; but in the interest of teaching I will point out that in a fraction of a second he takes the rather banal concept of randomness and transforms it in a way that has his audience in hysterics. This man is fantastic!

In my courses I strenuously advocate that if you use humour in your presentations, then throw-away humour is the best type, particularly if early in the talk. Also I made reference to it repeatedly in a recent article on a speech by Black Rod. At 6:03 Hans produces a prop which harvests an enormous laugh. He could have done all sorts of things to try to stoke up the joke, whereas he does nothing at all. He throws the joke away completely, and by doing so I contend that he maximizes the laugh.

He also at 8:30 throws away the introduction of Ola, his son, and thus makes the passing of the relay baton relatively seamless.

Suddenly the comedy warm-up is over, and Ola is delivering the serious academic explanation for what is under discussion – universal ignorance. We stop laughing, but the talk continues to be fascinating. I think Ola is rather too diplomatically charitable to the purveyors of skewed information, absolving them of any guilt, but perhaps that’s my bias.

There we have four paragraphs for Hans and only one for Ola (who speaks for slightly longer), and you might conclude that I am dismissing Ola as boring. Not so: he just isn’t yet as fabulously brilliant as his father; and anyway for the academic lesson to get across, the decorum needs to sober up a bit. Watch, listen and learn.

This TED talk has chalked up more than three million views since it was posted in mid-September, and I am not in the least surprised.

Hans Rosling: a wizz with visuals

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TED boasts 1500+ talks. That represents a serious amount of time that someone like me can spend, looking for examples that have particular interest for this blog. The trainee that suggested that I should look at Hans Rosling therefore did me an enormous favour. Merely for interest and entertainment the man is great value; but today I want to examine something that he does with particular skill. Rosling is a master at the development, use and application of visuals.

When I go through the routine of embedding a video here, I never know in advance what still picture will be used to illustrate it. You may think that the above picture was a happy chance, in view of what I said would be my theme for this posting, but you could pause this video almost anywhere and have a picture of Rosling in some galvanic pose with a visual.

His talk is on the impact of religion on birth rate, and he has some quite surprising revelations that I shall not spoil: this talk is worth watching for its own sake.

Before I home in on his use of visuals, I’d also like to draw your attention to his excellent use of a hanging thread at 2:04. In fact he begins spinning this thread at around 1:30. Hanging threads are very useful when you are torn between wanting to say something early in a speech, but don’t want to pre-empt a kindred point that you are planning to cover later. By telling the audience that you will return to this you not only solve the problem but you also hook them into paying more attention so as not to miss it. This latter quality is often covered in how-to books, with the regrettable result that too many speakers dangle too many arbitrary and meaningless threads. It’s a powerful device when used sparingly and judiciously, but badly used it can be tedious as hell. Rosling applies the principle beautifully.

The joy of Rosling’s visuals is in the synergy that he achieves between his voice and his pictures. They are never a distraction from what he is saying, nor does his voice prevent you from absorbing exactly what you need from the pictures.

At 2:40 he begins weaving a fascinating demonstration. At the beginning he is merely showing you a map of the world, indicating religious distribution, but this is in order that you might understand the iconography that will follow. A minute later there appears a graph, a chart. He spends yet another minute taking you through and explaining the chart, and we see how comprehensively he has made the chart interactive; but the real magic is yet to come. At 4:45 the chart starts moving to indicate the passage of time, and what it shows is extraordinary.

At 5:20 the audience breaks out in spontaneous applause. What are they clapping? What he has discovered? No, it is the way he has demonstrated it. The applause is well-deserved: that chart is a wizz! Together with his commentary it makes its point with complete clarity.

We are merely halfway through the talk and what is still to come is as fascinating as what has passed.  He plays more with the interactivity of his chart, and he plays with those boxes that you can see in the picture above. He also picks up the hanging thread.

And he plays with something else! He has a pointer. Not a laser pointer, but a great long pole with a bobble on the end. The juxtaposition of his high-tech graphics and this low-tech pointer makes for very appealing theatre. This is a clever guy who has thought everything through with considerable care. I can see myself wasting lots of time watching his talks.