Representing data in a unique and compelling way

This brief presentation by Hans Rosling revolutionized the way I understand statistical data. He gave this presentation at the TED Conference in February 2006. The TED Website explains:

Rosling is professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did.

What sets Rosling apart isn’t just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling’s hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus.

Rosling’s presentations are grounded in solid statistics (often drawn from United Nations data), illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends clear, intuitive and even playful. During his legendary presentations, Rosling takes this one step farther, narrating the animations with a sportscaster’s flair.

The good news is that since Google bought the rights to Professor Rosling’s Gapminder software, anyone can create these animated demonstrations of their own statistical data and use them in presentations. What’s not to like about that?

It’s worth downloading the Hi-Res version to get the impact of the charts on a full screen, or click on the icon below to watch the low-res version.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (268.3MB)

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A speech is more than a collection of dry facts. Stories make your talk come alive. Storytelling is a powerful way to drill your message into the listener’s mind. Stories are a great way of emotionally connecting with an audience. Stories engage the audience and raise their levels of motivation, acceptance, and approval. No matter how dry the topic, a personal story will build trust with the audience since you’ll come across as human. These 10 ideas will help you give a talk that connects with an audience, moves them to action and leaves a positive impression.

1. Power Opening. Start your story with a bang! Captivate and create an emotional bond with the audience. What is the one idea you want the audience to hear, remember, and act on? This one idea is the thesis of the speech. Introduce it early in a powerful opening.
2. Embrace Humor. But never tell jokes. Self-depreciating humor works best. The audience who smiles with you is more sympathetic to your argument. Make sure that you connect humor to the point you are making. Keep it short and sweet, not long and drawn-out. Avoid saying, “This is a funny” before you speak. Avoid offensive and off-color humor.
3. Learn theatrical techniques. Doug Stevenson (www.storytheater.net) shows speakers how to tell stories using powerful performance techniques. Doug teaches how to tell stories in present-time, stepping IN and OUT of your persona when on stage.
4. Make the audience the hero of the story. Turn the ‘I’ in your story into the ‘we’. Use metaphors and analogies to help explain new concepts. Analogies are best taken from common experiences that everyone shares.
5. Develop a compelling plot. Keep the story-line simple. Build a story arc. Consider starting the story in the middle – this is a real attention-grabber. Set the scene and introduce the characters. Stories with conflict are interesting. Create an obstacle, then describe and how it was overcome.
6. Develop Case Studies. A good case study is more than just a description. Discuss the issues involved. List the options – the range of possible solutions. Highlight the dilemma faced – make it interesting. Explain how a decision was arrived at. Summarize with a conclusion.
7. Be authentic. Authenticity is crucial. Your story must be congruent with your tongue, feet and wallet. Put yourself into the story. Tell compelling stories which are grounded in everyday reality. Make the story something you care about, something from your background.
8. Connect with the audience emotionally. The best way to engage an audience is to tap into their emotions. A story is the emotional fast lane to the brain allowing people to feel genuine emotion. Don’t just present dry facts. Deep learning takes place when the audience experiences stories that create triggers the listener feels emotionally, not just thinks about conceptually.
9. Ground the story in the context of the moment. Prepare your story to fit the climate, culture and mission of the audience without losing the spirit of your message. Show, don’t tell.
10. Use Specific details. The more specific, concrete, details you include, the clearer the situation will be to the audience. Leverage a known name or brand. Instead of a bar of soap say Irish Spring. Use the largest unit of measurement. Over a quarter century is a more compelling statement than saying 25 years.

Speakers who use some of these ideas in developing their next speech will connect with the audience in ways they would not dream possible. Don’t just read stories to your kids. Tell us a story.

Fifteen members and guests of the National Speakers Association Northern California Chapter paid a visit to the Cisco TelePresence Suites in Santa Clara yesterday.

Cisco has publicly available suites available for hire by the hour at two locations in the US (Santa Clara and Boston) and seven in India. “Hundreds more” will come online in 2009. They’re not cheap – rates start at $299/hr a room (and you need to rent at least two) up to $899/hr for a room that seats 18 people. Compared to the price to flying 18 people to, say, India, this is of course a huge bargain, not to mention way more environmentally friendly.

We are, needless to say, in the ‘early adopter’ phase of the product life-cycle. Remember what you paid for digital cameras when they first came out? Expect the price to drop as Cisco roll out more locations and competitors like the HP Halo rooms open up to the public.

Right now, these rooms are corporate jet replacement options (how timely!) HP, Cisco and other multinationals like P&G, Pepsi and Dreamworks are the main users as a cost- and time-effective option for CEOs and senior managers to hold meetings from their own office instead of flying across the country or around the world. Cisco CEO John Chambers mentioned in the speech I profiled recently, that his company is a heavy user of these studios for internal and customer meetings.

So what did the NSA/NC visitors think of this?

“Awesome experience”; “Wow!”; “Much more impressive than I expected”; “Totally immersive”; “Can you, like, teach karate in here?”

While many public speakers and individual entrepreneurs teaching a class (probably not karate, perhaps Ikebana) or presenting a seminar might still be priced out of this market, NSA/NC are now ahead of the curve – knowing what is possible and, like Wayne Gretzky, skating toward where the puck is going. As well as a lower price-point, we’d benefit if (when?) Telepresence is available in auditorium-sized theaters, not just small conference rooms. Expect the technology to become more attractive over the next 12-18 months.

Meanwhile, Cisco are willing to host groups and individuals for a free demonstration hour at their Santa Clara facility. Contact Bret Chesman bchesman@cisco.com – tell him Ian sent you.

Thanks to a posting by Chris, I’ve just enjoyed watching an excellent speech delivered by Sir Ken Robinson at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) called Changing Paradigms.

Sir Ken Robinson is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources.

His speech (almost an hour long) has a quirky, academic quality to it, but without the dry-as-dust content many insecure PhD’s include when trying to impress with their command of the facts.

He uses self-depreciating humor to win over the British audience. Some of the humor sounds weird to those of us who live in the US. He gets appreciative chuckles when he tells them “I live in California, and you don’t…”. He speaks with sincerity and passion about challenges in education and the mis-diagnosis of kids today as ADHD.

I especially like the graphics he uses around 43:00 minutes into the talk showing the relative size of the Earth to the vastness of interstellar space. A great way to represent statistical data in a presentation.

A speech worth watching as an example of an informative and persuasive argument supported by data.

There’s just one thing I can’t get over – it looks like he & Michael Cain were separated at birth. I’m sure no-one has ever told him that…

“Everything we do is around Social Networking.”
– John Chambers, CEO, Cisco

Building the Next Generation Company: Innovation, Talent, Excellence

MIT World Lecture, Oct 15, 2008

Cisco CEO John Chambers gets Social Networking.

MIT reports:

In the 1990s, he predicted that networks would transform the way the world works, becoming platforms for communications and other IT, and Chambers placed Cisco at the center of that transformation. Today, he envisions a Web 2.0 premised on collaboration and social networking that will similarly transfigure all business life. Since 2001, he’s been positioning Cisco to catch this massive market transition, and indeed, is “betting the company’s future on it.”

In “phase two of the Internet,” says Chambers, “Content will find me; I will not search for it.” Any device, anywhere, will be able to receive any kind of content. We will be dealing with licenses for things like music, rather than worrying about compatibility issues between our digital tools and what’s streaming through them. Web 2.0 will also bring “effective collaboration,” by which Chambers means network-enabled visual tools, which will make “working together for a common goal truly possible.” Expect much faster business processes and revved up productivity, says Chambers.

Based on Cisco’s own experience in the past several years, organizations will completely restructure around these new capabilities. Indeed, he offers up his company as a paradigm of this vision. Once a hierarchical, command and control-based organization, Cisco is now much flatter, a company running “off of social networking groups.” Councils with cross-functional responsibilities suggest and take on many more projects (from emerging markets, to video, and smart grid boards); from one to two major ventures per year, to this year’s 26 launches. The next generation company is “built around the visual.” Cisco employees do non-stop teleconferencing with collaborators around the world. The company hosts 2500 such virtual meetings per week. It also employs Webex, Wikis and blogging to move work along.

With this kind of communication and carefully managed process to match, “operations can be turned on a head,” says Chambers. It’s the recipe for market-dominating speed and scale. Chambers is “loading the pipeline” with projects that assume other companies will want what Cisco has and makes. “If we’re right, we’re developing a huge wave of revenue opportunity.” Perhaps this is one reason why he’s “an optimist on global productivity, global economy and our ability to handle the challenges.”

This video supports the December 2008 Fast Company profile painting Cisco as a Revolutionary San Jose company – a socialist enterprise at the level of a democratized style of decision making; probably less so with compensation packages or an iron rice bowl.

Highlights of the video are when Chambers describes upper- and mid-level management resistance to the new culture of collaboration (17:40) and reveals that 20% of upper management left because they could not let go of the command and control mindset they learned in B-School (43:00).

Chambers reveals how the company used to be run by the top 10 executives who reported to him. Now it is the top 500 who make the decisions, soon to be the top 2,500 (24:00).

His evaluation of the effect of the radical introduction of Social(ized) Networking is that after a period of initial resistance, a balance has been achieved between command and control and self-managed boards and councils using collaborative technology (54:23).

The question, as Fast Company asked, is if Cisco-style collaboration really works elsewhere? They used to ask that about web pages and email when Web 1.0 was taking off in Silicon Valley. Would it play in Peoria? I’m not betting against Web 2.0. It’ll just take a little longer to catch on.

See Chambers in action and decide if these innovations are right for you.

Times are tough. As the world economy lurches from crisis to crisis many leaders – from the President of the United States and captains of industry to school principals and Scoutmasters – will have to give speeches which motivate the audience to overcome obstacles and achieve tough goals in challenging times. Such speeches are never easy, but done well they make a huge difference. These ten tips help you tell it like it is.

1. Tell it like it is. Authenticity is a rare commodity, especially when people speak to an audience. Avoid abstractions and keep it simple and concrete. Honest words win people over.
2. Find common ground. Meet the audience at the place they are, then take them to the place you want them to be. Say ‘we’ more often than ‘I’ and create a bond with your audience.
3. Deal with uncertainty and doubt. Admit to shared doubts and concerns. Identify challenges. Discuss the potential for failure if we don’t rise to the challenge.
4. Be realistic. Don’t sugar-coat the situation. But quickly bridge to a vision of a better alternative. Ground the vision in reality. Share your vision with energy and enthusiasm.
5. Put things in perspective. Both positive and negative stories can motivate. Tell how things are often much worse elsewhere. Show how others faced greater odds and came through. Set stretch goals and paint a picture of the rewards of achieving them.
6. Speak from the heart. The best way to engage an audience is to tap into their emotions. Make your case with passion and purpose. Avoid the passive voice and use of qualifiers.
7. Match your actions to the words of the speech. It is crucial that you are seen to ‘walk the walk’. Don’t fly in on a corporate jet to ask for a subsidy, and don’t award yourself a bonus when laying people off.
8. Be aware of non-verbal communication. People will judge you on how you look as much as what you say. Use open gestures. Consider every aspect of your dress and manner.
9. Keep your sense of humor. No matter how serious the situation, self-depreciating humor can break the ice. The audience who smiles with you is more sympathetic to your argument. Make sure that you connect humor to the point you are making. Keep it short and sweet, not long and drawn-out.
10. Conclude with a call to action. At the end of your pitch, ask for something concrete. Outline specific steps that must be taken.

Speakers who follow these tips will meet the challenge of presenting in challenging and dynamic times in ways the audience will feel is honorable and worthy of respect. Great challenges offer great opportunities. More than in easy times, speeches delivered in tough times make a difference.

I noticed in my blog stats page that the search terms ‘financial crisis explained’ and ‘current financial crisis explained’ were showing up in the top 10 search key phrases for my blog. When I entered them in Google I couldn’t believe my eyes:

I mean, if this is the #1 search result on Google for something of this magnitude?

Not that the article I posted is really what I think, it’s just a recommendation to two articles in the Sunday New York Times which struck me as appropriate to the subject of my blog (executive communications) since, I noted:

Both articles shed light on the dynamics of executive communications when group-think rules. Thinking outside the box before the box imploded was not encouraged or rewarded. Pity.

But c’mon people, this can’t be the #1 explanation of the current financial crisis, can it? Say it ain’t so.

At the recent San Francisco Writers Conference I attended an excellent introduction to podcasting. The class was taught by Britt Bravo.

Britt specializes in telling, and helping others to tell, stories about creating social change. She writes for two blogs, produce two podcasts, and teaches people how to blog and podcast. Her local paper, the East Bay Express, named her the Best Podcaster/Blogger Most Dedicated to Social Change in 2007.

Britt speaks and leads workshops about blogging, podcasting, how nonprofits can use social media, and how people can create work they love. She has spoken and done trainings for events like the Bioneers, Stanford Women’s Leadership Conference, Making Media Connections Conference, Writing for Change Conference, the United Way of Kern County’s Professional Development Conference for Nonprofits, and the FIELD project’s Scale Academy grantee meeting (a program of the Aspen Institute). Britt interviews individuals involved in creating positive change for her Big Vision Podcast.

I caught up with Britt after her class at the Writers Conference. She shared her insights on podcasting and why some writers have difficulty getting up to speed with the world of blogging and podcasts. To hear what she told me, click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:29 — 1.3MB)

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In the third and final extract from my speech at the Ragan Speechwriters Conference I discuss the technical nits & nats of podcasting.

In this segment I discuss the three main types of podcasting.