Tag Archives: TED (conference)

Hans Rosling: a wizz with visuals

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Alain de Botton lacking structure

Posted on by
Reply

A past trainee of mine co-sponsors periodic business lectures in Cambridge, and I have attended some excellent ones. I wallow in the luxury of being able to listen without needing to criticise. One such that I remember enjoying (though I don’t remember what it was about) was by Alain de Botton; so when I came across a TED talk by him I was eager to go and sample it. It was this lecture, entitled A kinder, gentler philosophy of success.

We don’t see the very beginning, unless he is accustomed to starting halfway through a sentence, but when we join him he is travelling like an express train. He talks of his misery on occasions when he judges the degree to which his achievements are dwarfed by his ambitions; and he therefore seems to be castigating our culture for belittling those it perceives to be losers. I decide first, before donning my rhetor hat, to listen to the talk.

  • He confuses career with life – a common but critical error.
  • He bases his arguments on a shallow and narrow definition of success – even when he says he doesn’t.
  • He mixes with the wrong people.
  • He goes to the wrong parties
  • He seems almost to conclude that something should be done about this perceived problem. Legislation? What a hideous prospect!

Regardless of the above (and with this talk so far scoring 1.8 million views, he should worry what I think!) let’s look at how well he put it across, and how it could be improved…

He can speak: he is very articulate. He can shoot from the hip: so can anyone (I’ve proved it countless times) but he knows he can so he does. He speaks very quickly and nervously; but in his case it represents an outpouring of nervous energy as distinct from fear, so to the audience it’s appealing. He is intelligent, well-read and bursting with ideas, even if to my mind some of them might be a little half-baked. The only thing he really lacks is structure.

The talk, though reasonably absorbing, has no real after-taste. Five minutes later you are likely to have forgotten it, or at any rate what he said. What did he say? In my mini-summary, above, my last comment begins, “He seems almost to conclude…” because I was not quite sure what his conclusion was. He flits from idea to example to argument like a manic butterfly.

His lack of structure is also evinced by his needing to hold (and regularly refer to) a palm-top as a prompting device. For a lousy seventeen minutes, that’s really pathetic. I could show him a range of ways he could give this thing structure and shape and narrative and an overall coherence that would make it memorable both to the audience and to him.

As I often say to trainees, if you can’t remember what you are planning to say to them, how can you expect them to remember what you said?

Michael Sandel owns his audience.

Posted on by
Reply

My godson, a psychologist and himself a university lecturer, posted on Facebook a link to this TED talk by Michael Sandel; so I had to go and look.  A Harvard professor should be comfortable on the speaking platform; and a political philosopher should fulfil Cardinal 1 – have something to say.

Though we don’t see his introduction, so cannot guarantee to catch the very beginning of his talk, we do see someone (presumably his introducer) exiting downstage right. My eagerness to see the very beginning of any talk is because of my keenness on what I call the bald opening – going straight in without lame preambles.  I think he has a bald opening. He also has adopted one of my favoured default hand-strategies – one hand in pocket, the other gesturing.   He is comfortable with it: I know because the pocket hand, of its own subconscious volition, emerges in seconds .This is promising well.

As a university professor he should be comfortable on his feet in front of an audience, but still there are tiny symptoms of hump if you look for them.  So let’s not.  His hump-busting tactic is to have this opening well-prepared. He gives us a Contents Page by setting his agenda. At 0.25 he says, “We need to rediscover the lost art of democratic debate”. There’s the Face!  Has he read my book?  This is straight down the middle of the fairway of my orthodoxy.  There’s a pleasing anaphora sequence at 0.50, using the word ‘over’ as the repetition key. To round off his agenda-setting he announces a discussion on the validity of applying Aristotelian principles to the issues at stake. At precisely the 2-minute point he seems to have shrugged off the hump, has set the scene and is well set.

Lovely clear structure – I’m enjoying myself! So will you. It’s excellent.

Having announced a discussion, he is as good as his word. Almost immediately he is working his audience. He calls for opinions, discusses opinions, stages differences of opinions between members of the audience, generates laughter, gets people thinking. He owns that audience right up to his closing; and the reasons are simple.

I’d like to refer you to two things. In my book I discuss the importance of using a judicious mixture of Need-to-Know and Nice-to-Know; and I give various reasons that I will spare you here. In my critique a few days ago of Matt Ridley’s TED talk, I discussed the value of causing the audience to apply their own critical faculties to issues being covered. The way Sandel structures this discussion fulfils all of that. While audience members are throwing up opinions in a relatively light-hearted fashion the diet cannot get too rich. Therefore they are very receptive when Sandel then piles in with something quite meaty. Furthermore, while he is inviting their opinions they get drawn deeper into the issues at hand; and that means their increased attention.

Suppose you are addressing department heads in your company on the importance of their getting their new fiscal year’s budgetary requirements submitted on time (I have deliberately recalled a scenario with which a Finance Director once challenged me on the basis that it was impossible to make such a talk interesting). I suggest you could use Sandel’s template quite effectively in that situation.

By the way, did you spot asyndeton three paragraphs ago?  Check the glossary if you don’t know what the hell I’m on about.  The third sentence in that paragraph is a list of items with never a conjunction. It makes the list cleaner somehow.