"Idea Building" and "Talk Renaissance" Chapters 2 and 19 of TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson (2016)

Author: Chris Anderson

Anderson, C. (2016). "Idea Building" and "Talk Renaissance" Chapters 2 and 19 of TED talks: The official TED guide to public speaking. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Foundation 2 IDEA BUILDING

The Gift in Every Great Talk

In March 2015, a scientist named Sophie Scott stepped onto the TED stage, and within 2 minutes the entire audience was howling with uncontrollable laughter. Sophie is one of the world’s leading researchers on laughter, and she was playing an audio clip of humans laughing and showing just how weird a phenomenon it is —”more like an animal call than speech,” as she put it.

Her talk was 17 minutes of pure delight. By the end of it, everyone was basking in the warm glow of a deeply pleasurable experience. But there was something else. None of us would ever think of laughter in quite the same way again. Sophies core idea about laughter — that its evolutionary purpose is to convert social stress into pleasurable alignment —had somehow entered our heads. And now, whenever I see a group of people laughing, I see the phenomenon through new eyes. Yes, I feel the joy, I feel the urge to join in. But I also see social bonding, and a strange and ancient biological phenomenon at work that makes the whole thing seem even more wondrous.

Sophie gave me a gift. Not just the pleasure of listening to her. She gave me an idea that can forever be part of me.*

* Of course, Sophie Scott’s idea may get refined or contradicted by future research. In that sense, ideas are always provisional. But once an idea is formed in our minds, no one can take it from us without our consent.

I’d like to suggest that Sophie’s gift is a beautiful metaphor that can apply to any talk. Your number-one mission as a speaker is to take something that matters deeply to you and to rebuild it inside the minds of your listeners. We’ll call that something an idea, A mental construct that they can hold on to, walk away with, value, and in some sense be changed by.

That is the core reason that the scariest talk I ever had to give turned out to be effective. As I explained earlier, I had 15 minutes to try to convince the TED audience to support its new chapter under my leadership. There were many things wrong with that talk, but it succeeded in one key aspect: It planted an idea inside the minds of those listening. It was the idea that what was truly special about TED was not just the founder I was taking over from. TED’s uniqueness lay in being a place where people from every discipline could come together and understand each other. This cross-fertilization really mattered for the world, and therefore the conference would be given nonprofit status and held in trust for the public good. Its future was for all of us.

This idea changed the way the audience thought about the TED transition. It no longer mattered so much that the founder was leaving. What mattered now was that a special way of sharing knowledge should be preserved.

START WITH THE IDEA

The central thesis of this book is that anyone who has an idea worth sharing is capable of giving a powerful talk. The only thing that truly matters in public speaking is not confidence, stage presence, or smooth talking. It’s having something worth saying /I am using the word idea quite broadly here. It doesn’t have to be a scientific breakthrough, a genius invention, or a complex legal theory. It can be a simple how-to. Or a human insight illusstrated with the power of a story. Or a beautiful image that has meaning. Or an event you wish might happen in the future. Or perhaps just a reminder of what matters most in life.

An idea is anything that can change how people see the world. If you can conjure up a compelling idea in peoples minds, you have done something wondrous. You have given them a gift of incalculable value. In a very real sense, a little piece of you has become part of them.

Do you have ideas that deserve a wider audience? It’s amazing how bad we are at judging an answer to that question. A lot of speakers (often male) appear to love the sound of their own voice and are happy to talk for hours without sharing anything much of value. But there are also many people (often female) who massively underestimate the value of their work, and their learning, and their insights.

If you’ve picked up this book just because you love the idea of strutting the stage and being a TED Talk star, inspiring audiences with your charisma, please, put it down right now. Instead, go and work on something that is worth sharing. Style without substance is awful.

But, more likely, you have far more in you worth sharing than you’re even aware of. You don’t have to have invented lion lights. You’ve led a life that is yours and yours only. There are experiences you’ve had that are unique to you. There are insights to be drawn from some of those experiences that are absolutely worth sharing. You just have to figure out which ones.

Are you stressed about this? Maybe you have a class assignment; or you need to present the results of your research at a small meeting; or you have a chance to speak to a local Rotary about your organization and try to gain their support. You may feel that you’ve done nothing that would be worth giving a talk about. You’ve invented nothing. You’re not particularly creative. You don’t see yourself as super-intelligent. You don’t have any

particularly brilliant ideas about the future. You’re not even sure there’s anything you’re super-passionate about.

Well, I grant you, that’s a tough starting point. To be worth an audiences time, most talks require grounding in something that has some depth. It’s theoretically possible that the best thing you can do for now is to continue your journey, search for something that really does grab you and make you want to go deep, and pick up this book again in a few years’ time.

But before you come to that conclusion, it’s worth doublechecking that your self-assessment is accurate. Maybe you’re just lacking self-confidence. There’s a paradox here. You have always been you, and you only see yourself from the inside. The bits that others find remarkable in you may be completely invisible to you. To find those bits you may need to have honest conversations with those who know you best. They will know some parts of you better than you know them yourself.

In any case, there’s one thing you have that no one else in the world has: Your own first-person experience of life. Yesterday you saw a sequence of things and experienced a sequence of emotions that is, quite literally, unique. You are the only human among 7 billion who had that exact experience. So… can you make anything of that? Many of the best talks are simply based on a personal story and a simple lesson to be drawn from it. Did you observe anything that surprised you? Maybe you watched a couple of children playing in the park, or had a conversation with a homeless person. Is there something in what you saw that might be interesting to other people? If not, could you imagine spending the next few weeks walking around with your eyes open, being aware of the possibility that some part of your unique journey could be of interest and benefit to others?

People love stories, and everyone can learn to tell a good story. Even if the lesson you might draw from the story is familiar, that’s OK—we’re humans! We need reminding! There’s a reason religions have weekly sermons that tell us the same things over and over, packaged different ways. An important idea, wrapped up in a fresh story, can make a great talk if it’s told the right way.

Think back over your work of the last three or four years; what really stands out? What was the last thing you were really excited by? Or angered by? What are the two or three things you’ve done that you’re most proud of? When was the last time you were in conversation with someone who said, “That’s really interesting”? If you could wave a magic wand, what is the one idea you’d most love to spread to other people’s minds?

PROCRASTINATE NO MORE

You can use the opportunity of public speaking as motivation to dive more deeply into some topic. We all suffer, to a greater or lesser degree, from some form of procrastination or laziness. There’s a lot we’d like to get into in principle, but, you know, that Internet thing just has so many damn distractions. The chance to speak in public may be just the kick you need to commit to a serious research project. Anyone with a computer or a smartphone has access to pretty much all the world’s information. It’s just a matter of digging in and seeing what you can uncover.

In fact, the same questions you ask as you do your research can help provide the blueprint for your talk. What are the issues that matter most? How are they related? How can they be easily explained? What are the riddles that people don’t yet have good answers for? What are the key controversies? You can use your own journey of discovery to suggest your talk’s key moments of revelation.

So, if you think you might have something but aren’t sure you really know enough yet, why not use your public-speaking opportunity as an incentive to truly find out? Every time you feel your attention flagging, just remember the prospect of standing on stage with hundreds of eyes peering at you. That will get you through the next hour of effort!

In 2015, we tried an experiment at TED headquarters. We granted everyone on the team an extra day off every second week to devote to studying something. We called it Learning Wednesdays. The idea was that, because the organization is committed to lifelong learning, we should practice what we preach and encourage everyone on the team to spend time learning about something they’re passionate about. But how did we prevent that just becoming a lazy day of sitting in front of the TV? There was a sting in the tail: Everyone had to commit, at some point during the year, to giving a TED Talk to the rest of the organization about what they’ve learned. That meant we all got to benefit from one another’s knowledge but, crucially, it also provided the key incentive for people to get on with it and actually learn.

You don’t need Learning Wednesdays to have this motivation. Any chance at speaking to a group you respect can provide the incentive you need to get off your butt and work on something unique to you! In other words, you don’t need to have the pertect knowledge in your head today. Use this opportunity as the reason to discover it.

And if, after all that, you’re still floundering, maybe you’re right. Maybe you should turn down the offer to speak. You might be doing yourself—and them —a favor. More likely, though, you’ll land on something that you, and only you, can share. Something you’d actually be excited to see out there in the world a little more visibly.

For most of the rest of this book, I’m going to assume that you have something you want to talk about, whether it’s a lifelong passion, a topic you’re eager to dive into more deeply, or a project for work that you have to present. In the chapters to come I’ll be focusing on the how, not the what. But in the final chapter we’ll return to the what, because I’m pretty sure that everyone has something important they could and should share with the rest of us.

THE ASTONISHING EFFICACY OF LANGUAGE

OK. You have something meaningful to say, and your goal is to re-create your core idea inside your audiences minds. How do you do that?

We shouldn’t underestimate how challenging that is. If we could somehow map what that idea about laughter looked like in Sophie Scot’s brain, it would probably involve millions of neurons interconnected in an incredibly rich and complex pattern. The pattern would have to include, somehow, images of people guffawing, the sounds that they make, the concepts of evolutionary purpose and of what it means to ease stress, and much more. How on earth is it possible to re-create that whole structure in a group of strangers’ minds in just a few minutes?

Humans have developed a technology that makes this possible. It’s called language. It makes your brain do incredible things.

I want you to imagine an elephant, with its trunk painted bright red, waving it to and fro in sync with the shuffling steps of a giant orange parrot dancing on the elephant’s head and shrieking over and over again, “Let’s do the fandango!”

Wow! You have just formed in your mind an image of something that has never existed in history, except in my mind and in the minds of others who read that last sentence. A single sentence can do that. But it depends on you, the listener, having a set of preexisting concepts. You must already know what an elephant and a parrot are, what the color concepts of red and orange are, and what painted, dancing, and in sync mean. That sentence has prompted you to link those concepts into a brand-new pattern.

If I had instead started out by saying “I want you to imagine a member of the species Loxodonta cyclotis, with proboscis pigmented Pantone 032U, conducting oscillatory motions…” you probably would not have formed that image, even though this is the same request in more precise language.

So, language works its magic only to the extent that it is shared by speaker and listener. And there’s the key clue to how to achieve the miracle of re-creating your idea in someone else’s brain. You can only use the tools that your audience has access to. If you start only with your language, your concepts, your assumptions, your values, you will fail. So instead, start with theirs. It’s only from that common ground that they can begin to build your idea inside their minds.

At Princeton University, Dr. Uri Hasson has been doing groundbreaking research to try to discover how this process works. It’s possible to capture in real time the complex brain activity associated with building a concept or remembering a story. It requires a technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

In one experiment in 2015, Dr. Hasson put a group of volunteers into fMRI machines and played them a 50-minute film that told a story. As they experienced the story, their brains’ response patterns were recorded. Some of those patterns could be matched across almost every volunteer, giving concrete physical evidence of the shared experience they were having. Then he asked the volunteers to record their own recollections of the film. Many of these recordings were quite detailed and lasted as long as 20 minutes. Now — and this is the astounding part — he played those recordings to another set of volunteers who had never seen the film, and recorded their fMRI data. The patterns shown in the brains of the second set of volunteers, those who listened to the audio recollections only, matched those patterns shown in the minds of the first set of volunteers as they watched the movie! In other words, the power of language alone conjured up the same mental experiences that others had while watching a movie.

This is amazing evidence of languages efficacy. It is a power that every public speaker can tap into.

YES, WORDS MATTER

Some public-speaking coaches seek to downplay the importance of language. They may cite research published in 1967 by Professor Albert Mehrabian and claim that only 7 percent of the effectiveness of communication is down to language, while 38 percent depends on tone of voice and 55 percent comes from body language. This has led coaches to focus excessively on developing a speaking style of confidence, charisma, etc., and not worry so much about the words.

Unfortunately, this is a complete misinterpretation of what Mehrabian found. His experiments were devoted primarily to discovering how emotion was communicated. So for example, he would test what would happen if someone said “That’s nice,” but said so in an angry tone of voice, or with threatening body language. Sure enough, in those circumstances, the words don’t count for much. But it is absurd to apply this to speaking overall (and Mehrabian is so sick of being misapplied that his website contains a bolded paragraph begging people not to do this).

Yes, communicating emotion is important, and for that aspect of a talk, ones tone of voice and body language do indeed matter a great deal. We discuss this in detail in later chapters. But the whole substance of a talk depends crucially on words. It’s the words that tell a story, build an idea, explain the complex, make a reasoned case, or provide a compelling call to action. So, if you hear someone tell you that body language matters more than verbal language in public speaking, please know that they are misinterpreting the science. (Or for fun, you could just ask them to repeat their point purely with gestures!)

We’ll spend much of the first half of this book digging into ways in which language can achieve its magic. The fact that we can transfer ideas in this way is why human-to-human speaking matters. It is how our worldviews are built and shaped. Our ideas make us who we are. And speakers who have figured out how to spread their ideas into others’ minds are able to create ripple effects of untold consequence.

THE JOURNEY

There’s one other beautiful metaphor for a great talk. It is a journey that speaker and audience take together. Speaker Tierney Thys puts it this way:

Like all good movies or books, a great talk is transporting. We love to go on adventures, travel someplace new with an informed, if not quirky, guide who can introduce us to things we never knew existed, incite us to crawl out windows into strange worlds, outfit us with new lenses to see the ordinary in an extraordinary way … enrapture us and engage multiple parts of our brains simultaneously. So I often try to fashion my talks around embarking on a journey.

What’s powerful about this metaphor is that it makes clear why the speaker, like any tour guide, must begin where the audience is. And why they must ensure no impossible leaps or inexplicable shifts in direction.

Whether the journey is one of exploration, explanation, or persuasion, the net result is to have brought the audience to a beautiful new place. And that too is a gift.

Whichever metaphor you use, focusing on what you will give to your audience is the perfect foundation for preparing your talk.

Reflection 19 TALK RENAISSANCE

The Interconnectedness of Knowledge

I wish to persuade you of something: That however much public speaking skills matter today, they’re going to matter even more in the future.

Driven by our growing connectedness, one of humankinds most ancient abilities is being reinvented for the modern era. I’ve become convinced that tomorrow, even more than today, learning to present your ideas live to other humans will prove to be an absolutely essential skill for:

• Any child who wants to build confidence.
• Anyone leaving school and looking to start a meaningful career.
• Anyone who wants to progress at work.
• Anyone who cares about an issue.
• Anyone who wants to build a reputation.
• Anyone who wants to connect with others around the world who share a passion.
• Anyone who wants to catalyze action to make an impact.
• Anyone who wants to leave a legacy.
• Anyone, period.

The best way I can make this argument is to share with you my own learning journey of the past couple of decades, a period that completely changed my understanding of why great public speaking matters, and what it might become. So let me take you back to Wednesday, February 18, 1998, Monterey, California, which is when and where I first set foot inside a TED conference.

Back then, I thought of conferences as necessary evils. You put up with hours of tedious panels and presentations in order to meet the people from your industry that you need to meet. However, my good friend Sunny Bates, one of the world’s great connectors, persuaded me that TED was different and I should check it out.

I ended the first day a little bemused. I had heard a series of short talks from a software programmer, a marine biologist, an architect, a tech entrepreneur, and a graphic designer. They were nicely done. But I was struggling to find their relevance to me. I was a media guy. I published magazines. How was this going to help me to do my work better?

When TED was founded back in 1984, Richard “Ricky” Wurman and his cofounder, Harry Marks, had a theory that there was growing convergence between the technology, entertainment, and design industries (the T, E, and D of TED). It made sense. That was the year the first Apple Macintosh computer was launched, the year that Sony unveiled the first compact discs. Both products had deep roots in all three industries. It was exciting to imagine what other possibilities would emerge if you connected the three fields together. Maybe technologists could make their products more appealing by listening to the ideas of human-centered designers and creative entertainers? Maybe architects, designers, and entertainment-industry leaders could expand their sense of possibility by understanding new developments in technology?

And so it proved. After a wobbly start, and a personality clash between the founders (which persuaded Harry to sell his 50 percent stake to Ricky for a dollar), TED took off in the 1990s, accompanied by the rise of CD-ROM-fueled multimedia, Wired magazine, and the early Internet. In his earlier life, Ricky had coined the term information architecture and had become obsessed with making obscure knowledge accessible. This skill helped him drive speakers to find the most interesting angle on their idea, the angle that others outside their fields might enjoy or find relevant. And he had another personality trait that would obliquely prove core to TED’s success: impatience.

Ricky easily became bored by long talks. As TED developed, he began giving speakers shorter and shorter time slots. And he simply walked on stage and cut people off if they went on too long. He also banned audience questions, on the grounds that it would be more interesting to cram in another speaker than hear some audience member promote his own business under the guise of asking a question. This may have been really annoying to a few individuals, but for the audience experience overall, it was a godsend. It made for a fast-moving program. You could put up with the occasional dud talk because you knew it would be over soon.

On my second day at TED, I began to truly appreciate the short-talk format. Even though I wasn’t yet certain of the relevance to me and my work, I was certainly being exposed to a lot of topics. Video games for girls, the design of chairs, a new way of exploring information in 3D, a solar-powered airplane. They all followed each other in a rush. There was an exhilaration in learning how many different types of expertise there were in the world. And something was starting to spark. A comment made by a speaker in one field would somehow resonate with something someone in a completely different field had said the day before. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I was starting to get excited.

Most conferences serve a single industry or knowledge specialty. There, everyone has a common language and starting point, and it makes sense to allow speakers time to go really deep and describe some specific new learning. But when the content and audience are wide-ranging, a speaker’s goal isn’t to exhaustively cover a niche topic. Instead, it’s to make her work accessible to others. To show why it’s interesting. To show why it matters. That can usually be done in less than 20 minutes. And that’s good, because for someone outside your field, that’s probably all the time they’ll give you. As listeners, we may be willing to invest 45 minutes or an hour on a university subject we have to learn, or on someone who works directly in our field. But to give someone outside our normal work life that kind of time? Not possible. There aren’t enough hours in the day.

On day three, something really strange happened. My overstimulated brain began sparking like a lightning storm. Every time a new speaker got up and spoke, it felt like a new thunderbolt of wisdom. Ideas from one talk would connect in a thrilling way with something shared by others two days earlier.

And then came Aimee Mullins.

Aimee had had both her legs amputated at age one, but that hadn’t stopped her from leading a full life. She sat on stage and spoke of how, three years earlier, as a college freshman, she had run her first race as a sprinter, and how, aided by a pair of beautifully designed sprinters’ legs, she had rocketed through trials for the US Paralympics Team. And then she casually removed her prosthetics and showed how she could replace them easily with other legs for other situations.

As Aimee spoke about her surprising successes and embarrassing failures, I sat at the back of the theater, shocked at the tears running down my cheeks. She was so alive, and so full of possibility. She seemed to symbolize something I’d sensed time and again that week. That it was possible to own your future. No matter what life had served you, you could find a way to shape it, and in so doing make a difference for others too.

By the time I had to leave the conference, I understood why it meant so much to people there. I was thrilled by all I’d learned. I felt a greater sense of possibility than I had experienced in a long time. I felt like I’d come home.

Two years later, when I heard that Ricky Wurman was looking to sell the conference, I became tantalized at the thought of taking it over. For my entire entrepreneurial life, my mantra had been to follow the passion. Not my passion — other people’s. If I saw something that people were truly, deeply passionate about, that was the big clue that there was opportunity there. Passion was a proxy for potential. That was how I justified launching dozens of hobbyist magazines, covering everything from computing to mountain biking to cross-stitching. Those topics might be deeply boring to most people, but to those the magazines were targeted at, they were passion-driven gold.

The passion I’d seen and experienced at TED was off the charts. People who had done amazing things with their lives had told me this was their favorite week of the year. So even though it was only a small annual conference, there was every possibility that something more could be built out of that passion.

On the other hand, it was a new business to get involved with, and I would be following in the shoes of a man with a much bigger, brasher personality than mine. What if I failed? The public humiliation would be pretty intense. I consulted friends, lay awake at night trying to imagine every possibility, but couldn’t get to a decision.

What finally convinced me to go for it was, believe it or not, a passage in a book I happened to be reading at the time, namely David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality. In it he asked a provocative question: Is it really true that knowledge has to become ever more specialized? That the only way we can achieve success is by knowing more and more about less and less? The specialization of every field — medicine, science, art — seemed to suggest this. But Deutsch argued convincingly that we must distinguish knowledge from understanding. Yes, knowledge of specific facts inevitably became specialized. But understanding? No. Not at all.

To understand something, he said, we had to move in the opposite direction. We had to pursue the unification of knowledge. He gave lots of examples in which older scientific theories were replaced by deeper, broader theories that tied together more than one area of knowledge. For example, an elegant worldview based on the sun sitting at the center of the solar system replaced massively complex explanations of the whirling motions of individual planets around Earth.

But more importantly still, Deutsch argued, the key to understanding anything was to understand the context in which it sat. If you imagine a vast spiderweb of knowledge, you can’t really understand the intricate knots in any small part of that web without pulling the camera back to see how the strands connect more broadly. It’s only by looking at that larger pattern that you can gain actual understanding.

I read this when I was dreaming about TED, and a light bulb flashed on. Of course! That was it! That was why the TED experience felt so thrilling. It was because the conference itself was reflecting the reality that all knowledge is connected into a giant web. TED truly did have something for everyone. We might not necessarily have realized it at the time, but by thinking about such eclectic ideas, we were all gaining understanding at a much deeper level than we had before. In fact, the individual ideas mattered less than how they all fit together — and what happened when we added them to our existing ideas.

So actually what made TED work was not really just the synergy between technology, entertainment, and design. It was actually the connectedness of all knowledge.

Framed that way, TED was an event that would never run out of things to talk about. How many venues were there where you could explore that connectedness? And explore it in a way that any curious person could find accessible and inspiring? I couldn’t think of any.

I hopped on a plane to visit Ricky and his wife, Gloria Nagy, at their home in Newport, Rhode Island. And to cut a long and complicated story short, by the end of 2001, I had left the company I’d spent fifteen years building to become the proud, albeit slightly nervous, curator of TED.

In the years since then, I’ve become ever more convinced of the significance of the connectedness of knowledge, and I have encouraged TED to expand from the original T-E-D to pretty much every field of human creativity and ingenuity. I don’t see this framing of knowledge and understanding as just a recipe for a more interesting conference. I see it as the key to us surviving and thriving in the brave new world that’s coming. Here’s how I’d make the case:

THE AGE OF KNOWLEDGE

Many of our assumptions about the value and purpose of knowledge and how to acquire it — including the structure of our entire education system — are leftovers from the industrial age. In that era, the key to success was for a company, or country, to develop massive expertise in production of physical goods. This required deep specialist knowledge: the geology required to locate and extract coal and oil; the mechanical engineering needed to build and operate industrial-scale machinery; the chemistry needed to efficiently produce a massive array of materials; and so forth.

The knowledge economy requires something different. Increasingly, the specialist knowledge traditionally wielded by humans is being taken over by computers. Oil is not located by human geologists but by computer software churning through vast amounts of geological data, looking for patterns. Today’s best civil engineers no longer need to hand-calculate the stresses and strains on a new building; the computer model will do that.

Almost no profession is untouched. I watched an IBM Watson demo seeking to diagnose a patient with six specific symptoms. While doctors scratched their heads and ordered a range of tests to get more data, Watson, in just a few seconds, read through 4,000 recent relevant research papers, applied probability algorithms to each symptom, and concluded with 80 percent certainty that the patient had a rare condition only one of the human doctors had even heard of.

At this point people start getting depressed. They begin asking questions such as, In a world in which machines are rapidly getting super-smart at any specialist knowledge task we can throw at them, what are humans even for?

It’s an important question. And the answer to it is actually quite thrilling.

What are humans for? Humans are for being more human than we’ve ever been. More human in how we work. More human in what we learn. And more human in how we share that knowledge with each other.

Our giant opportunity for tomorrow is to rise. To rise above our long history of using specialist knowledge to do repetitive tasks. Whether it’s the backbreaking work of harvesting rice year after year or the mind-numbing work of assembling a product on a manufacturing line, most humans, for most of history, have made a living doing the same thing over and over again.

Our future won’t be like that. Anything that can be automated or calculated ultimately will be. Now, we can be fearful of that, or we can embrace it and take the chance to discover a richer path to life fulfillment. What will that path look like? No one knows for sure. But it’s probably going to include:

More system-level strategic thinking. The machines will do the grunt work, but we’ll need to figure out how best to set them up to work effectively with each other.

More innovation. With the massive capabilities of a connected world available to us, there is huge advantage for those who can genuinely innovate.

More creativity. Robots will make a lot of our stuff, allowing for an explosion in demand for genuine human creativity, whether in tech invention, design, music, or art.

More utilization of uniquely human values. Human-to-human services will flourish, provided the humanity inherent in them is cultivated. It may be possible to develop a robotic barber, but will the service alone be enough to replace the chatty interaction with a great human hairstylist-cum-therapist? I doubt it. The doctor of the future may be able to ask for Watson’s brilliance in diagnostic assistance, but that should allow more time for that doctor to really understand the human circumstances of her patient.

And, if any of that proves to be true, it’s likely to require a very different type of knowledge than the industrial age asked of us.

Imagine a world where any piece of specialist knowledge is available to you instantly, on demand. If you have a smartphone, that’s pretty much the world you’re already living in. And if it isn’t today, for your kids it will be. So what should we — and they — be learning for the future?

Instead of ever-greater amounts of ever-more-specialized knowledge, were going to need:

• Contextual knowledge,
• Creative knowledge, and
• A deeper understanding of our own humanity.

Contextual knowledge means knowing the bigger picture, knowing the way all the pieces fit together.

Creative knowledge is the skill set obtained by exposure to a wide variety of other creative humans.

A deeper understanding of our own humanity comes not from listening to your parents or your friends, nor to psychologists, neuroscientists, historians, evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, or spiritual teachers. It comes from listening to all of them.

These types of knowledge aren’t the domain of just a few professors in a few great universities. They aren’t what you discover in a dominant company’s apprenticeship program. This is knowledge that can only be assembled from a massive variety of sources.

And that fact, right there, is one of the main engines powering the renaissance in public speaking. Were entering an era where we all need to spend a lot more time learning from each other. And that means far more people than ever before can contribute to this collective learning process. Anyone who has a unique piece of work or a unique insight can productively participate. And that includes you.

But how? Whether you’re a brilliant astrophysicist, a talented stonemason, or just a wise student of life, I don’t need to learn from you everything you know. Of course not. That would take years. What I need to know is how your work connects to everything else. Can you explain the essence of it in a way I can understand? Can you share your work process in layman’s terms? Can you explain why it matters? And why you are passionate about it?

If you can do this, you will expand my worldview. And you may do something else. You may spark new creativity or inspiration in me. Every field of knowledge is different, but they are all connected. And they often rhyme. This means that something in the way you describe your process may give me a crucial insight or catalyze a new thought in me. This is how ideas form when we spark off each other.

So the first great driver of the public-speaking renaissance is that the knowledge era we are entering demands a different type of knowledge, encouraging people to be inspired by those outside their traditional specialties, and in so doing to develop a deeper understanding of the world and their role in it.

But that’s not all.

DMU Timestamp: April 04, 2024 12:44