ON THE WEB In “An Open Letter to Conference Organizers,” at scottberkun.com, Scott Berkun argues that although speakers are at the center of conference agendas, they often are neglected by meeting planners who are distracted by a whirlwind of logistical details and critical tasks. Read Berkun’s list of 10 suggested ways to set things right at convn.org/berkun-letter.
› Crowd size is irrelevant — what matters is having a dense crowd.
And then No. 2 is making sure that I have the opportunity, if I choose, to go to the room and do a sound check and make sure my slides look okay before I’m supposed to speak. That I have a chance to just check stuff out early, and that I have time to fix problems.
Does a multigenerational audience affect how you present? A lot of it depends on context. It does make things a little bit more challenging. But let’s say that the event is about basketball, and I’m going to speak about the Boston Celtics. Now, even though every- one in the room is older or younger, and has dif- ferent perspectives and different ways of speaking, they’re all in the room because they’re interested in the Boston Celtics. So, as long as I am telling stuff that, on a basic
level, is interesting and is addressing the reasons why everyone chose to be in the room, then I can transcend the gaps, because they chose to come [to the talk]. If [the audience] were forced to show up, then those issues become a lot harder. But there’s nothing that prevents me from telling an anecdote that maybe connects better with older people than with younger people. Nothing prevents me from making sure that I address everyone who is there.
And that goes back to your point about having the demographics of the audience. Exactly.
. Barbara Palmer is senior editor of Convene.
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Book Excerpts
Change only happens when someone does something
different, which a lecture cannot do. Often I am hired to be inspirational and tell people tales of how great innovations came to be. The problem with inspiration is that it is hard to take with you. What’s thrilling in the lecture hall feels awkward in front of your boss. Someone has to leave the lecture, go back to his everyday world, and take the risk of doing something different with what he’s learned. No speaker can ensure this happens.
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Only well-chosen pictures are worth a thousand words,
and even then, they can only be valuable if they are displayed long enough for the audience to comprehend their meaning. If you find natural ways to draw attention to things that illustrate your point, use them.
Crowd size is irrelevant — what matters is having a
dense crowd. If ever you face a sparsely populated audience, do whatever you have to do to get them to move together. You want to create a packed crowd located as close as possible to the front of the room. This goes against most speakers’ instincts, which push them to just go on with the show and pretend not to notice it feels like they’re speaking at the Greyhound bus station at 3 a.m. on Christmas morning.
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All good public speaking is based on good private
thinking.
Most venues for speaking and lecturing in the modern world
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are dull, grey, uninspiring, poorly lit, generic cubes of space. They are designed to be boring (which is why it’s hard to stay awake during lectures) so they can be used for anything. And like a Swiss Army knife, this means they suck at everything. Your average conference room or corporate lecture hall is bought and sold for its ability to serve many different purposes, though none of them well.… Blame speakers all you want — and we deserve most of the blame — but some fraction of hate should go to whoever chose the crappy room to stick the audience in.
If the aliens landed during the TED conference, they’d
obviously assume the guy standing on stage holding the microphone was the supreme overlord of the planet. For much of the history of civilization, the only public speakers were chiefs, kings, and pharaohs. But few speakers use the enormous potential of this power. Most speakers are so afraid to do anything out of the ordinary that they squander the very power the audience hopes they will use.