A month on from TEDGlobal: The magic needs some help

CORD’s Joanna Wheeler offers a critical reflection about her experience preparing and performing a TED Talk during the TEDGlobal 2014 event in Rio de Janeiro, this past October. Stay tuned for a video of Joanna’s talk, as it is released in the coming weeks. This blog has been reposted from the Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation website. 

By: Joanna Wheeler

‘That’s the magic of TED,’ said Chris Anderson—‘you can walk up to anyone and talk to them.’ This was the advice that he gave the speakers at TEDGlobal 2014 at the opening reception in Rio de Janeiro a month ago. It is true for me that it was possible to have many interesting conversations with a whole variety of people—from lost Mexican baroque manuscripts to the idea of storytelling while on a boat to Antarctica—I certainly had some unexpected and surprising insights as a result of the people that I met during the event.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my experience at TED over the last month. It was a slightly surreal mix of ideas, people, sounds, and nerves soaked with nice coffee and a beautiful setting. There were some really brilliant talks, but, for me, there was something about the whole model of TED that didn’t quite add up as it should have. I can’t help but think about how even the TED magic needs a little help now and then.

The TED format is based on a ‘one-to-many’ model of communication—as a speaker, you are sending your talk out to many others, hoping that they will understand it. This is where the model of TED could be pushed further. All the energy, excitement, dissent, and insight that is generated during the live TED event dissipates very quickly to the individual level. It doesn’t become more than the sum of its parts. There is not enough within the structure of TED that allows for interaction, co-creation, and debate—for building something new beyond what is put on stage. And this is a real missed opportunity given the efforts TED organizers go to, to bring diverse and interesting perspectives together in the first place.

The truth is that people very rarely change their beliefs or behaviours because they watch a 15-min talk, no matter how good it is (and a lot of the talks were very good). The power of ideas to change things comes through the discussion of those ideas, through channels of communication that allow for interaction and debate—that can take ideas and expand and stretch them by applying them to different contexts and experiences.

The TED format has been hugely successful at getting attention for people and ideas that may not normally be heard. It’s become a powerful brand, at least in the English-speaking world. And it has also attracted its fair share of criticisms.

The underlying assumption about how TED works is that the speaker/performer delivers a well-crafted, compelling statement or performance. As a speaker, after working through multiple versions of a script, I was encouraged to ‘be relaxed’ and to try and communicate my personality through my talk. All of the effort that goes into preparing the talk (and there is a lot) is about delivering something that will succeed in convincing people who watch it about the importance/relevance of your idea (and to a certain extent, about the importance of you). Essentially, it is still the conventional model of a conference, but done with better food, nicer surroundings, and a serious PR machine.

Delivering a TED talk is like trying to send a silver bullet out into the ether in the hopes of hitting a target you can’t quite see—you want it to land with maximum impact on your audience, both live and virtual. But really, once you let the bullet fly, you have no idea where it will go from there.

As a facilitator and participatory researcher, I have learned that people don’t gain the most through being told something by me—the inputs that are given are important, but the real insights and gains are made in the ways that people interact with those inputs. Beyond watching a TED talk, what is more important is how people react to the ideas, generate new ones, disagree, challenge, and make something new in the process. There are many examples of how this can be done.

TED is hyper-individualised—there’s a quasi-celebrity cultivated around the speakers, and to me it felt like the audience was sitting there waiting to be impressed. I wanted TED to ask more of the audience and the speakers—instead of just passively receiving ideas, or delivering them in a 15-minute slot.

I want to know what would happen if there was an attempt to channel the energy and ideas that TED generates collectively. The only formal session of TED that was interactive was a town hall session of about 30 min in which about 10 people from the audience of 1000 were able to make a short statement. This is not really constructive in terms of really generating something new, and it’s not enough time for meaningful debate. With all the creativity that TED brings to the conventional format of a conference, there is still the opportunity to go much further and innovate around the model itself.

I couldn’t resist thinking about what I would do if I had free rein to add something creative, collaborative and interactive to the TED format. I would invite members of the audience and speakers to come together around a topic or question, to snowball actions and ideas, to be iterative, and to produce a live pitch about what comes out of this process, using technology and creativity (and maybe a story or two!). It would be something unexpected and different from the carefully crafted and staged talks. Then I would get people to talk about this experience and why it matters.