Not that there'd be anything wrong with that...

My talk at the upcoming Applied Brilliance Conference will be nothing like this:

Some good advice from Karen Amstrong.

"There are times when you have to speak out against injustice or cruelty. But if you speak — and this is what Gandhi said — in order to punish or wound, you will do more harm than good. The Dalai Lama said that to condemn injustice with hatred in your voice will make the injustice worse. ... So it does no good to attack viciously. The thing to do is not to rise to the bait."

-from an interview with Karen Armstrong in the June issue of the Believer magazine.

Ms. LaVette in NYC!

NeuroCooking friends in the New York City area have just three more nights to see Ms. Bettye LaVette at the Café Carlyle.

A Racy Taint.

Just the final sentence of the article "Off-Color Communiques Taint FBI Sting in Court: Racy text messages between informant and agents turn off jurors" by Del Quentin Wilber, which appears on the front page of today's Washington Post:

“U [expletive] [expletive],” the agent texted back.

Forget Expertise; Go for Immediate Engagement

This morning, I had the pleasure of coaching a brilliant law professor on an upcoming presentation. We've been working together for two and a half years, and I am continually impressed with her passion for the law, and her sense of it as a creative and forward-thinking field. And I continually struck by how the tenets of being a good lawyer contrast with the skill set of a good presenter.

Most notably. when presenting a case to judge, or teaching to a classroom of law students, a lawyer must defend his or her position by thoroughly establishing context and background, and providing all relevant data. Expertise - and thus the right to win, pontificate, or hold forth - must be established.

When one is asked to be on a panel, present a speech, or deliver a keynote, however, expertise is already established. You are there precisely because of your expertise and the audience is anticipating - and deserves - engagement. As a speaker, you must immediately engage with your audience, and give them reason to trust you. And then, especially in the limited time allotted to a presentation, you must continue to engage them in a compelling discovery of information.

Establishing trust with an audience is different than proving expertise to a judge or oppositional lawyer. If you know your stuff, it will be communicated whether or not you say it in the bulk of your limited remarks. (You can always share it, if necessary, during Q&A.)

You don't have to prove yourself; you have to offer an invitation to conversation.

How Twitter Makes You a Better Presenter

For a nifty exercise on how to hone the message you deliver when you present, see my new blog post for The Communications Network, How Twitter Helps Hone Communication.

Confidence in efficient communication is power.

I don't know how long it took them in the studio to make, but Jerry Lee Lewis's great 1958 Sun Records recording of "Wild One (Real Wild Child)" is just one minute and fifty-three seconds long.

GREAT Question!

Every public speaking coach I've known advises presenters not to respond to a question from the audience with "That's a good question." The fear is that as inquiries progress, when you do not respond affirmatively, the questioner will feel badly, as if he or she asked a less-than-stellar question.

Well, maybe they did. Maybe the question is irrelevant, or less-than-focused. Maybe it completely distracts from your main point.

A good presentation invites good questions; as a speaker, you are taking time to highlight your main points. Why not also highlight the questions that frame your important responses?

Also, a good presentation is a shared and equitable experience between the presenter and the audience. You are inviting conversation. As a partner in the conversation, you have the right to respond honestly, and to passionately build the discussion.

Responding, "Great question!" is not about passing judgment on your audience; it's about you and your interests, and the information you are excitedly sharing. Don't tamp down your enthusiasm. Great questions service the delivery of great content.

Reading, Writing & Speaking

Being an authentic written communicator may be very different than being an authentic spoken communicator.

By authenticity, I mean being honest and generous with one’s knowledge and passion, and compassionately striving to fully and empathetically engage one’s reader or listener.

I may write a compelling and well-structured essay, with a clear point of view and takeaway, and woven together with pithy sentences. If I were to read it verbatim, however, it would sound horrific. If I were to get hung up on delivering each of those sentences, word for word, I would surely trip myself up; my attempt at delivering perfect paragraphs would result in my being frustrated, and then apologetic, and surely alienate my listeners.

I do have one client who writes each of his speeches out and is capable of reading and delivering them with gusto. He is an exception to most leaders.

Instead, when I deliver a keynote speech or facilitate a large program, I write my presentation out, allowing me to experiment with structure and vocabulary. Then, I read it aloud, several times, allowing me to recognize jarring transitions, play with rhythm, and toy with segue ways.

And when it comes time to present, I no longer distract myself with the fully developed expository speech. Instead, I glance at an outline. I have realized that I must compensate while presenting, with passion and engagement.

I do bring the fully developed composition with me, and reference it during program breaks. In this way, I get to bring up points I may have skipped while speaking. For me, the combination of outline plus composition provides the right measure of authentic engagement along with intellectual security and generosity.

Like Speaking Another Language

I greatly enjoyed working with my Chilean client, and recently delivering two programs in Chile. One of the great pleasures was the difference in language: rather than "persuasion", my client referred to "seduction". Instead of talking about the "framework" of the program, we discussed the "journey" of the day.

Although there were interpreters at each of the two programs, I was careful not to fall back on American English idioms. I avoided saying things like "fall back" and instead choose "revert". Instead of "come back", I would say "return". Instead of "want", I speak to "desire" and "intent". I looked to the Latin rhetorical roots so as to be better understood and to present information more efficiently and respectfully. Conversing became both more intentional and more surprising, and I cherished in the poetry of our interactions.

A colleague's son was recently studying vocabulary, in preparation for his middle school entrance exam. He remarked that it was "like speaking another language". Indeed!

Human word, syllable, combination
of spread light and the find art of the silversmith,
hereditary goblet which gathers
the communications of the blood --
here is where silence came together with
the wholeness of the human word,
and, for human beings, not to speak is to die --
language extends even to the hair,
the mouth speaks without the lips moving --
all of a sudden the eyes are words.

I take the word and go over it
as though it were nothing more than a human shape,
its arrangements awe me and I find my way
through each variation in the spoken word --
I utter and I am and without speaking I approach
the limit of words and the silence.

I drink to the word, raising
a word or a shining cup,
in it I drink
the pure wine of language
or inexhaustible water,
maternal source of words,
and cup and water and wine
give rise to my song
because the verb is the source
and vivid life -- it is blood,
blood which expresses its substance
and so implies its own unwinding --
words give glass-quality to glass, blood to blood,
and life to life itself.

Excerpt from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's "The Word"

A speech of exemplary clarity, with lots of passion – and data.

"My feeling about you is just the opposite."

In 1926, Wolfgang Pauli attended a lecture by Paul Ehrenfest. Afterwards, Pauli made many criticisms, and an exasperated Ehrenfest said:

"I like your publications better than I like you."

Pauli responded:

"Strange. My feeling about you is just the opposite."

____

Source: "137: Jung, Pauli, and the pursuit of a scientific obsession" by Arthur I. Miller.

"... I walk out to make a point."

December 7, 2008:

"I didn't come there to try anything," she said. "I just thought, Whoever else is on that show, they have to die tonight. I haven't had the opportunity to be adored already when I walk out onstage. Still, when I walk out, I walk out to make a point. If I have to rise to the occasion of killing you, I will."

-from "Long Time Coming: Bettye La Vette gets her due" by Alec Wilkinson, in the November 15, 2010 issue of the New Yorker.

On reductionism.

A Day with Edward Tufte

I had the delight of spending today with Edward Tufte, preeminent author on information design, professor of computer science, Presidential Appointee, and sculptor, at his gallery in Chelsea. Okay, I paid to spend the day at his course, Presenting Data and Information, and was prompted because it was uniquely being held in his gallery, ET Modern. It was a day of inspiration, epiphany, and art appreciation. What follows are quotes from Professor Tufte, in the order in which they were delivered:

Making a presentation is a moral act as well as an ethical and intellectual act.
Your spirit of inquiry should be: Whatever it takes to explain something.
Show causality. Linking lines in a chart equal verbs.

We never need boxes. The 2-dimension of the noun is shown by the 2 dimension of the font. Boxes reflect insecurity in design. You should be suspicious when you see boxes and bold face - maybe there could be content there.

There are 2 things you are doing in every presentation you give:
1. Explaining the story
2. Explaining why you believe the story
Everything is about credibility. Everything we do when presenting should encourage belief.

I happen to think that public health organizations are inherently noble.

You want an open mind, but not an empty head. Balance skepticism and knowledge. That's called judgment.

In evaluating presenters, incompetence is greatly under-estimated! And conspiracy and malice is greatly over-estimated.

The people in your audience are probably more like you than any other group in the world (next to your family). Start out with great respect for them.

No wonder they are called Power Points - they are intensely controlling! Let people pull their own relevant information from your presentation, using their own cognitive style.

The only thing worse than a presenter reading a PowerPoint is the dreaded Slow Reveal. In that case, audience members should rise up and declare, "The knowledge presentation at this meeting is quickly approaching zero!"

Much of today's design is narcissistic and shows us a poverty of information.

The human eye/brain link is processing information at 20 megabits a second, in 16 colors, and is a sophisticated editor that can remember, forget, and cluster.

Here we are with this ability. So why are we sitting in meetings looking at a large screen with 4 numbers? Have we suddenly gotten stupider because we came to work? [This was a recurring lament.]
Clutter is an attribute of bad design. If the audience is confused, fix your design.

We will do whatever it takes to reason by causality.

For all you Neurocooking narrative fans, Tufte shared the following quote from Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories (discussed and graphed in Tufte's book, Visual Explanations)

…the Water Genie told Haroun about the Ocean of the Streams of Story, and even though he was full of a sense of hopelessness and failure the magic of the Ocean began to have an effect on Haroun. He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and [the Water Genie] explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each colored strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories…

1 +1 = 3. The first mark, the second mark and the space relationship between the two. Sculpture is the relationship of the object to its surroundings.

There are only two industries that describe their clients as "users": illegal drugs - and computers.

Any chance you have to get something real into the room, do so. Most of us spend most of our time staring at one dimensional representations of things.

You want to annotate everything. Have sentences pointing to items of substance. Show people how to read the architecture of information.

All tables should be thought of as performance tables. Order the data by performance. When you put things in order by measure of performance, your audience may learn something new.

Never, ever do Lowest Common Denominator Design. You're trying to get everyone in the audience into the elite, to make them smarter. They can't get smarter unless you give them knowledge.

Gain credibility by showing Mastery of Detail - of one small part of the presentation. Be authentic. Don't be generic. Don't pretend to be something you are not. Talk about what you are good at.

92% of every web page should be content, and navigation does not count as content.

Agencies, departments, and organizations don't do things - people do things. People's names should be on things to foster both accountability and pride.

Most design today is based on fashion and style, and what technology throws up. Analytical design must be based on analytical thinking.

Tufte's Fourth Grand Principal of Analytical Design is Integration of Evidence

Completely integrate words, numbers, images and diagrams. [On the fallacy of left/right brain thinking]: Thinking tasks don't care about mode of display. Why should we let the plumbing of the brain decide the cognitive tasks we are doing? This is like letting your gastroenterologist be your chef.

The reason you are giving a presentation is content. And design can't salvage failed content. The finest typography won't turn lies into truth. Relevance is a content property. The best way to make improvements in your presentations is to get better content.

Woodcuts look like woodcuts. A lot of PowerPoint presentations look like PowerPoint itself. They don't look like content.

No matter how beautiful your interface is, it should be less ugly. The idea is to zero out the interface altogether and be left with nothing but content.

To clarify, add information. If information is in chaos, fix the design.

The best visualizations in the world are those published in the journal Nature.

How to Make a Presentation

Use PowerPoint solely for full screen images. (Stay away from cognitive stuff.)

Until we all have iPads, use an 11 x 17" paper, folded, as a handout. This holds the equivalent of 200-250 PowerPoint slides. Put a Super Graphic [Tufte's term for the one graphic that perfectly encapsulates your information] on the inside. Deliver a high resolution data dump.

Sentences are smarter than bullets. They have agency in them; a subject and a predicate. Use sentences to describe the problem, its relevance, and the solution you are presenting. If the roof falls in, you'll have it all out there.

People can read 3 times faster than you can talk.

1. Have your audience read.
2. Then, you point out a few things.
3. Finally, you take questions.

This will result in 30% shorter meetings!

If presentations where you work are about positioning, then maybe you want to work somewhere else. The willingness of an organization to sacrifice spirit for length of meeting is indicative of a serious problem.

The best advice I ever got about giving a presentation is to show up early.

Tufte was asked about the best presenters out there:

Steve Jobs. He's got a mix of enthusiasm and content. He's got some nice signature moves.
The worst presentation: I've had my heart broken once every 5 years at Bob Dylan concerts.

On consulting:

I wasn't very good at it. I always learned more from my clients than they learned from me. It's hard to be on the outside.

I asked him, If resources were unlimited, what would be your dream project?

I thought the government work would be, but I haven't put the necessary time and energy into it. I'd rather be in Chelsea 3 days a week than in DC, which is what it would take to do right, at a minimum.

I don't do anything for the people. Everything for the people is in my books. I like to make sculptures.

...About 10% of my books is about the war against stupidity. And that is a war that will never be won. My sculpture is about joy and lightness and happiness.


Stop staring at the glass. Get off the sofa, and fly into 3-dimensional space and time.

"To move forward..."

Last night we braved the downpour (sans umbrellas, per Secret Service) to attend a very special evening event at Constitution Hall. The featured musical guest was B.o.B:

And the featured speaker was President Obama:

The President's speech is available on C-SPAN.

"To move forward, you put the car in D – To move backwards, you put the car in R."

[Photos are our own (more here), taken with a Ricoh GX100. Because the invitation said "small cameras okay", we did not want to risk bringing a camera that might not be considered "small".]

Presenting via Conference Call

Some initial thoughts on how to be an effective and engaging presenter via teleconference:

• Announce yourself each time you speak. Not all listeners will remember the association between your voice and your name. People may have joined the call since you last spoke. And this simple, gracious act draws attention to what you are about to say.

• Summarize your points after you make them. Most likely, listeners will be multitasking, and offering a summary focuses their attention. It also provides a strong conclusion to your communication.

• Summarize the information to which you are connecting your point. For example, "Earlier, Jane said x. I am going to build on the idea of x by adding..."

• If you are facilitating, take the time to summarize the ensuing conversation throughout the call.

• Provide examples. Say, "Let me give you an example..." Research shows that listener attention is sparked by the announcement of a forthcoming example.

• Share stories. Short and simple stories with a clear beginning, middle, and end.

• Think radio. Good radio broadcasters paint a picture with words. Provide sensory details so that your listeners can picture what you are talking about.

• Stand up! Again, think radio: you need to convey energy through the phone lines, and the best way to do this is to bring energy into your voice through your body. Stand up, move around. Invest in a good headset.

• Smile! A smile conveys energy and passion. Try it: say "Hello" while smiling, and then without smiling.

• Look at yourself. Catch your reflection on your computer screen, or in your window. Are you relaxed? Do you look like someone with whom you would like to speak? Provide your listeners with the same level of bodily engagement that you would if you were meeting with them in person.