Q: What makes a TED presentation special?
A: Turns out that there are many ways to do it. If there were a formula, frankly, it would get stale. Each speaker brings his or her own distinctive style. But the ground rules are simple: the person must have something remarkable to say that connects with a general audience. All the best presentations have some sort of ‘wow’ factor. That may be a big idea, or a new lens through which to view the world. It may be a spectacular visual or an amazing personal story. There are plenty of things that kill a presentation, but there is no set formula for making a great one.
Q: Why are the talks only 18 minutes?
A: It’s long enough to be serious and short enough to hold people’s attention. It turns out that this length also works incredibly well online. It’s the length of a coffee break. So, you watch a great talk, and forward the link to two or three people. It can go viral, very easily.
The 18-minute length also works much like the way Twitter forces people to be disciplined in what they write. By forcing speakers who are used to going on for 45 minutes to bring it down to 18, you get them to really think about what they want to say. What is the key point they want to communicate? It has a clarifying effect. It brings discipline.
Q: Sometimes speakers go through that discipline onstage — at the 15-minute mark they realize they have a few minutes left.
A: Yes, but we’re trying to avoid that. We’ve seen in the past few years speakers putting in an extraordinary amount of time in preparation, including full rehearsals. Having so many great talks up online has served as a good template for other speakers.
Q: What kills a presentation?
A: One of the most common killers is a lack of clarity. A presenter has a lot to say but they fail to put it together in a compelling and understandable narrative. There’s too much jargon, or a bit too much chopping and changing. Some people will try to cram too much in, and the audience doesn’t feel like it’s been brought along on a thrilling journey. Too much personal ego can also get in the way. Or if there’s an obvious agenda in which they’re trying to persuade you to buy a product, the result can be truly dismal.
Audiences also don’t respond to a person who already knows how great they are. It’s easy for someone to spend 18 minutes on stage thinking they’re a godsend to humanity, but the audience just rolls its eyeballs. One of the TED commandments is: thou shall not stroke thy ego. The key part of the TED format is that we have humans connecting to humans in a direct and almost vulnerable way. You’re on stage naked, so to speak. The talks that work best are the one where people can really sense that humanity. The emotions, dreams, imagination.
Q: What role should slides and visuals play?
A: Every talk is different. Some of the best presentations don’t need slides at all. It’s a human being telling their story and hearing their vision, with all eyes focused on them. Other talks involve sharing a piece of art or photography, and that’s when visuals absolutely come to the fore. What we try to avoid is the traditional PowerPoint text-heavy presentation where people follow the template and essentially have their talk up on the screen. They’re reading the bullet points. The audience is always ahead of you and focused on the screen instead of the speaker. This is a horrible horrible way to give a presentation.
Q: How have TED presentations evolved over the years?
A: Every year the bar gets raised. I remember that at my first year at TED, in 1998, my heart sank a few times when a speaker would get up there and say "On my way driving down here, as I was wondering what to say….." In the past few years, we’ve seen people who are motivated by the talks online and have started putting in astonishing amounts of time and preparation. And it shows. I think people have really begun to relish presenting something that is fine-tuned. Of course, sometimes you see people who are so prepared that they know every word of their presentation by heart and sound like they’re reciting it. That doesn’t work either.
Q: What are your favorite TED moments?
A: When I first showed up in 1998, I didn’t fully get it. I found it intriguing, but I had a busy life and I didn’t fully know why I was listening to technologists, and people in fields outside the one aside I was working in. Then Aimee Mullins, a disabled sprinter, walked up on stage and told the story of not only her disability, but how she acquired new legs and won races on them and what it meant to her. Then she removed a prosthetic leg. The dots connected and I understood why people found it inspiring. That was my first "TED moment." Sherwin Nuland, the best-selling author and neurosurgeon, also gave a fascinating talk on electroshock therapy. He then paused, and told us something he never revealed to anyone -- that he had once been in a mental institution where he received a series of electroshock treatments and it cured his condition. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
Q: How do you choose who is going to present?
A: More and more, it’s become a product of crowd sourcing. So many people feel engaged in TED at some level that we get thousands of speaker suggestions. And people have a good sense of who might make a good speaker, so we have a vast pool to choose from. We want them to be incredible in their area, but they must also be a good speaker and show they can communicate. Some people can be absolutely brilliant in their field, but if they can’t find the language to share their passion. It’s a tragedy, but it’s true.
Q: Who would you like to have who hasn't yet presented?
A: Many. We’ve put feelers out to Warren Buffet for the past few years. He’d be great, especially considering what the economy has been through recently. He has a wonderful ability to be a clear voice of wisdom able to condense complex financial issues into a compelling language. One year he absolutely has to come to TED. We’re always looking out for interesting women. It’s an easy critique of any technology conference that there are aren't enough women speakers and it’s true. But it certainly isn’t for want of looking and trying. We’d like to have (PepsiCo CEO) Indra K. Nooyi.
Q: What's next for TED?
A: It’s an exciting moment in our evolution. This is the year where our talks have opened up to the world in a new way. We have an Open Translation Project where talks are being translated into other languages, so we’ve seen the audience from non-English speaking countries quadruple.
We’ve also seen a lot of TEDx events — these are smaller self-organized events, done locally, with committed and passionate TEDsters. There’ve been more than 300 and more than 300 are set up. There has been some kind of zeitgeist that TED has very fortunately tapped into. It’s a form of human-to-human communication that got underplayed. TV never really connected in that very personal way: it played to the things we’re familiar with. The drama, the talking heads, the snippets, the sound bites. It turns out that people really love the opportunity to sit down and listen to others say something that really matters. It’s a renaissance of knowledge and exploration and discovery and all kinds of people can participate in different ways.
James Daly is a San Francisco Bay Area-based freelance writer and editor and frequent contributor to Bizmore.
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