Nick Morgan, Public Words

From ‘Yes We Can’ to ‘I don’t quit’ -- a rhetorical analysis of President Obama's State of the Union speech

President Obama gave his first official State of the Union address last night.  He gave a similar speech at a similar time last year, but he had just taken office, so the White House did not call that one a State of the Union.  This time, it’s POTUS’s first SOTU, as the insiders would say. 

How did he do?  The classic dictum has it that ‘you campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose’.  President Obama fully embodied that wisdom last night.  The speech was pugnacious, tried to settle a number of scores, and spent a lot more time justifying this new administration’s actions than it did painting a picture of the future.  In some ways, it was a post-modern political speech for a post-modern era, an era of irony, diminished expectations, and even sarcasm. 

POTUS’s first SOTU was prose.  He’s moved from ‘Yes We Can!’ to ‘I don’t quit.’

The candidate said this:

Farmers and scholars, statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least 20 more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

The office-holder says this:

If there's one thing that has unified Democrats and Republicans, and everybody in between, it's that we all hated the bank bailout. I hated it. I hated it. You hated it. It was about as popular as a root canal.

The language is simple, direct, and repetitive.  It’s prose, not poetry.

One of the revealing verbal habits of candidate Obama was that he rarely used the word “I” and often used “we.”  President Obama, at least in his State of the Union address, uses the “I” word constantly: 

But when I ran for president, I promised I wouldn't just do what was popular -- I would do what was necessary. And if we had allowed the meltdown of the financial system, unemployment might be double what it is today. More businesses would certainly have closed. More homes would have surely been lost.

So I supported the last administration's efforts to create the financial rescue program.

This trend is not a good one; presidents should make their speeches about the audience, not about themselves. 

But in addition to this increasingly self-referential language, there is a new humility:

Our administration has had some political setbacks this year and some of them were deserved. But I wake up every day knowing that they are nothing compared to the setbacks that families all across this country have faced this year.

That’s a first, at least in recent memory – a president taking some responsibility for things that went wrong. 

Another possible first – the president resorted to sarcasm:

Rather than fight the same tired battles that have dominated Washington for decades, it's time to try something new. Let's invest in our people without leaving them a mountain of debt. Let's meet our responsibility to the citizens who sent us here. Let's try common sense. A novel concept.

What does this new pugnacious, sarcastic, blunt, simple populist language mean for the public discourse?  Coming from a local congressperson, it would not be remarkable.  But this language is coming from the President Obama who recently said the following in Oslo – 

A decade into a new century, this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats. The world may no longer shudder at the prospect of war between two nuclear superpowers, but proliferation may increase the risk of catastrophe. Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale.

This new tone represents a remarkable departure for President Obama.  The cynical would say, a new speechwriter got the SOTU assignment.  But presidents control their rhetoric, and they pay particular attention to the State of the Union, since it’s the one speech that everyone listens to each year.  So the new tone is deliberate.

Perhaps it’s a new realism.  Perhaps Obama has been bruised by a very tough first year in office.  I welcome the directness of the realism, but I also think that the country needs both poetry and prose from the Commander in Chief. 

 

Basic principles of nonverbal communication – 7

IN THIS SERIES

• Principle 1: Align your body language with what you say.
• Principle 2: Establish an open relationship with your audience before you begin to speak.
• Principle 3: Be authentic.
• Principle 4: Don't be afraid to get emotional.
• Principle 5: Understand how your brain controls your gestures.
• Principle 6: See yourself as others see you to become conscious of your body language.
• Principle 7: Learn to master your own unconscious behavior.
• Principle 8: Focus on the underlying intent or emotion that you’re trying to convey.
• Principle 9: Align your words with your emotional intent.
• Principle 10: Be open, connected, passionate and listen to your audience.

Principle VII: To master the ‘second conversation’, you must make yourself aware of your own unconscious behavior and that of others.

Our brains analyze and react to a constant stream of environmental cues 24/7 in order to keep us alive and safe.  The huge majority of that work is undertaken by our unconscious brains, and ranges from reacting to movement to sound to perceived threats of any kind, as well as checking out interesting new creatures entering our personal awareness and deciding whether they’re good to eat, to play with, or simply to acknowledge.

All of this behavior is ancient, and the system works incredibly well.  What doesn’t work so well is how we react to modern situations that look to our unconscious minds like they might be threats to our safety, but are in fact part of the world of work, or social interaction, or daily life.

Ever wonder why it can be so stressful just to walk down the streets of a large city, one with lots of human and mechanical traffic?  It’s because your unconscious brain is working overtime trying to notice and catalog everything, and decide – long before any of it reaches your conscious mind – how to react.  You may consciously be happy to be there, but your unconscious brain is on high alert.

Of course, it’s deciding that it can safely ignore lots of the images, actions, sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and touches rushing past it, but all of those decisions take energy. 

Similarly, giving a speech looks to the unconscious mind like confronting a mob.  The speaker's body tenses, going into defense mode, ready for attack.  The exquisitely tuned unconscious minds of the audience do the same.  This communication loop takes place long before anyone is consciously aware of it, and the result is a disaster for effective speechmaking. 

Becoming aware of even some of this unconscious behavior similarly takes an enormous effort on the part of your conscious brain.  To think consciously about even a small amount of your own body language and the body language of some of the people around you is a tall order – especially if you have to be thinking and speaking about something else at the same time.

So why do it?  To be a successful communicator, you must become aware of this ‘second conversation’.  People signal their intentions, they make up their minds, and they reveal what they’re about to do through their body language long before they offer insights verbally, if they ever do.  Bodies rarely lie; words do all the time.  Bodies speak first; words follow.  Bodies are authentic; words often fail their speakers.

If you’re going to be an effective communicator, you can’t rely on words alone.  What’s more, you can’t rely on your unconscious awareness of nonverbal communications.  You need to do the hard work of learning to read your own – and others’ – body language, consciously.

Basic principles of nonverbal communication – 6

IN THIS SERIES

• Principle 1: Align your body language with what you say.
• Principle 2: Establish an open relationship with your audience before you begin to speak.
• Principle 3: Be authentic.
• Principle 4: Don't be afraid to get emotional.
• Principle 5: Understand how your brain controls your gestures.
• Principle 6: See yourself as others see you to become conscious of your body language.
• Principle 7: Learn to master your own unconscious behavior.
• Principle 8: Focus on the underlying intent or emotion that you’re trying to convey.
• Principle 9: Align your words with your emotional intent.
• Principle 10: Be open, connected, passionate and listen to your audience.

Principle VI:  To become a persuasive communicator you must first consciously master and then control your ‘second conversation’ – your body language.

Many people balk at this idea, that mastery and control of body language is essential to becoming an effective communicator – or leader.  They say, “Why should I spend all that effort worrying about how I come across.  I just want to be myself!”

Here’s why that’s not such a good idea.  Being yourself is fine when you’re in comfortable circumstances, among friends, let’s say, at a casual get-together, or curled up in bed reading a book.   The stakes are low, there’s little or no pressure, and no one’s keeping score.

But put yourself in front of the Board, or a group of worried employees, or your boss, and the stakes are higher.  Just being yourself under these circumstances means displaying the tension, the anxiety, and even the fear that most probably goes along with the raised stakes.  Is that really how you want to come across?

And it’s not just about you.  If you radiate tension, anxiety or fear, the other humans in the room will unconsciously pick up that fear and respond with their tension, anxiety, fear, and even anger.  Is that really what you want to provoke?

What if your goal in that meeting or with that speech is to save the company or to get funding for a particular project?  Do you really think shared fear is the way to reach your goal?

‘See yourself as others see you’ is an ancient maxim that is the beginning of successful communication.  You must become conscious of your body language – your second conversation – and then learn to master and control it if you want to become an effective communicator.  Yes, it takes work at first.  But in the end you won’t want to go back.  And you’ll be ready for much higher-stakes poker.

The basic principles of nonverbal communications – 5

IN THIS SERIES

• Principle 1: Align your body language with what you say.
• Principle 2: Establish an open relationship with your audience before you begin to speak.
• Principle 3: Be authentic.
• Principle 4: Don't be afraid to get emotional.
• Principle 5: Understand how your brain controls your gestures.
• Principle 6: See yourself as others see you to become conscious of your body language.
• Principle 7: Learn to master your own unconscious behavior.
• Principle 8: Focus on the underlying intent or emotion that you’re trying to convey.
• Principle 9: Align your words with your emotional intent.
• Principle 10: Be open, connected, passionate and listen to your audience.

Principle V:  The source of our nonverbal conversation is deep in the oldest part of the brain, in emotions, survival, and relationships – all that’s fundamental to our connections with others and with our surroundings. 

Recent brain research has shown us something about the way our minds work that’s deeply counter-intuitive:  we gesture before we think.  We believe it’s the other way around because we’re aware, naturally enough, of our conscious thoughts first.  But in some very important ways, we ‘think’ with our bodies, nonverbally, first.

What’s going on is that our unconscious brain is always busy sizing up our surroundings, connecting with people, with the environment, and with our own place in it all.  We are rarely aware of all that unconscious work.  It’s only in occasional flashes of what people call ‘intuition’ or ‘gut’ or ‘instinct’ that we sense our unconscious minds at work.

In fact, it’s a good thing that we’re constructed this way; if we had to be consciously aware of all that activity, we’d react far too slowly to threats and opportunities in the environment, because our conscious minds work much more slowly than our unconscious minds do.

The unconscious is incredibly fast, extraordinarily proficient at what it does, and that’s a good thing.

What does the speed of gestures and other unconscious 'thought' have to do with public speaking?

One very simple thing.  If you think consciously about your gestures as a speaker, you’re likely to gesture too late and as a result you’ll look stiff and awkward, like a badly coached politician.  The natural progression of gesture and speech works like this:  intent – gesture – thought – speech.  But if you think consciously about your gestures, you will do this:  thought – speech – gesture.  The problem is that your gesture will happen too late in the sequence.  Since we are all extraordinarily good at unconsciously evaluating gesture, we will notice – unconsciously – that you’re gesturing oddly, and we will think that you are inauthentic, or fake, or foolish as a result.

So if you’re determined to use certain gestures in your public speaking, make sure they happen before the words they’re connected to, or you’ll look like a Saturday Night Live sketch, and not in a good way.

The basic principles of nonverbal communication – 4

IN THIS SERIES

• Principle 1: Align your body language with what you say.
• Principle 2: Establish an open relationship with your audience before you begin to speak.
• Principle 3: Be authentic.
• Principle 4: Don't be afraid to get emotional.
• Principle 5: Understand how your brain controls your gestures.
• Principle 6: See yourself as others see you to become conscious of your body language.
• Principle 7: Learn to master your own unconscious behavior.
• Principle 8: Focus on the underlying intent or emotion that you’re trying to convey.
• Principle 9: Align your words with your emotional intent.
• Principle 10: Be open, connected, passionate and listen to your audience.

Principle IV: Decision making is largely an emotional, and therefore a nonverbal, process.

We’ve had an idea for a long time that decision making is best done by the rational mind rather than the emotional mind. Indeed, a good deal of business and organizational thinking sets the rational (good) against the emotional (bad). But recent brain research shows us that it’s time to turn this old way of thinking on its head.

The part of the brain that most directly governs the emotions is sometimes incapacitated by a stroke or other brain damage. And then a very interesting thing happens: the victims are unable to make decisions.

It turns out that emotions are essential to decision-making, and to try to take them out of the process is wrong-headed. Here’s how to think about it. Our brains ‘tag’ memories with emotions, depending on how significant those memories are. So, to take a very simple example, if you burn your hand by touching a hot stove, that memory gets tagged with a strong emotion. That makes it easy to make the right decision – avoid all future hot stoves – thereafter. Take the emotion away, and we’re liable to prod warm cooking surfaces at every opportunity.

Hence, we need our emotions to make decisions at all. To try to decide without them hangs us up completely, because we don’t know what’s important to us. So don’t try to make decisions without emotions; it won’t work very well.

What does this insight have to do with public speaking? As a speaker, you’re taking your audience on a decision-making journey. In order to make that journey possible, you have to include appeals to emotions. Otherwise the audience won’t care and won’t go with you. It simply won’t be able to decide.

Moreover, since emotions are largely signaled – and experienced – nonverbally and unconsciously, you need to make sure you are completely clear about the emotional journey you’re going on as the speaker. If you send out mixed messages, you’ll confuse and distract your audience, and neither you nor it will get to where you want to go.

The basic principles of nonverbal communication – 3

IN THIS SERIES

• Principle 1: Align your body language with what you say.
• Principle 2: Establish an open relationship with your audience before you begin to speak.
• Principle 3: Be authentic.
• Principle 4: Don't be afraid to get emotional.
• Principle 5: Understand how your brain controls your gestures.
• Principle 6: See yourself as others see you to become conscious of your body language.
• Principle 7: Learn to master your own unconscious behavior.
• Principle 8: Focus on the underlying intent or emotion that you’re trying to convey.
• Principle 9: Align your words with your emotional intent.
• Principle 10: Be open, connected, passionate and listen to your audience.

Principle III: Persuasion is leading someone else to make a decision, and it happens when the verbal and nonverbal conversations are aligned. This is the essence of leadership communication.

The writing on leadership is vast and endless amounts of ink have been spilled trying to explain what separates a great leader from a poor one. But at heart, it’s really quite simple. Great leaders can persuade others to act on behalf of some larger cause. Great leaders therefore change other people’s minds.

And that’s an act of communication. The ability to communicate persuasively is the first and most important skill a leader must possess, or nothing else will happen. And you can’t communicate persuasively if your content and your body language are not aligned. If you send out mixed messages, your audience will pick up on them unconsciously and resist you because you don’t appear honest to them.

With alignment comes authenticity, and that is the essential for leaders today. We have been spun, lied to, sold, and manipulated for so long that we long for straight talk and honesty. If you’re authentic with us – more specifically, if you have an authentic persona – then we’ll listen. If not, we’ve already moved on.

And that is one basic reason why Martha Coakley lost the special election for Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts yesterday. Politics aside, Martha’s persona did not appear authentic at this very basic level. I’m not talking about her real personality when she’s among friends. I’m talking about the way the majority of voters interacted with her – in news clips on TV, in TV ads, perhaps on the Internet. In that kabuki play, her smile rarely reached her eyes, her body language was stiff and closed in a myriad of subtle ways, and her overall demeanor was not open to the voters even while she asked for their votes.

That very basic lack of alignment between content and body language does not inspire trust and does not get read as authenticity. The first step in creating a connection with an audience is to be open, and Coakley never appeared open. As I talk about in Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, if you can’t appear open, the rest of communication never happens. The door to your audience is closed.

The basic principles of nonverbal communication – 2

IN THIS SERIES

• Principle 1: Align your body language with what you say.
• Principle 2: Establish an open relationship with your audience before you begin to speak.
• Principle 3: Be authentic.
• Principle 4: Don't be afraid to get emotional.
• Principle 5: Understand how your brain controls your gestures.
• Principle 6: See yourself as others see you to become conscious of your body language.
• Principle 7: Learn to master your own unconscious behavior.
• Principle 8: Focus on the underlying intent or emotion that you’re trying to convey.
• Principle 9: Align your words with your emotional intent.
• Principle 10: Be open, connected, passionate and listen to your audience.

Principle II: We interpret body language unconsciously in terms of intent.

Recent brain research has turned our common-sense relationship to our bodies – and the bodies around us – upside down. Because we’re naturally aware of our conscious minds, we think that’s what’s in control of our bodies. I meet a new person, so I direct my hand to reach out and shake the hand that’s reaching out to me, for example.

But in fact, the unconscious brain has already begun a process of dealing with this newcomer long before I’m consciously aware that the other person is there. Neurons responsible for tracking threats in the environment around us have already fired to alert my adrenaline system – and a host of other systems – that there is potential danger in the area.

And all those systems have already begun to prepare, evaluating the intruder for signs of friendliness or its opposite. Is the person brandishing a club? Is the person moving quickly? Or is the person approaching me slowly with a big smile on his face?

All of this has happened long before I’m consciously aware of the new person in my space. In fact, the ratio of unconscious thought to conscious thought is something like 10,000,000 to 1. The unconscious brain is much bigger, faster, and more efficient than the conscious brain.

What does this have to do with public speaking? Long before you open your mouth to speak in front of an audience, you have already begun to send out unconscious messages to that audience, and it has done the same to you. You have already established a relationship. Neither you nor the audience is consciously aware of what that relationship is, but it is already determining your success or failure as a speaker.

As I talk about in Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, if you don’t do the work of establishing an open relationship with your audiences to begin with, long before you start speaking, you’ll never be able to succeed with them. Only if you’re open with audiences, so that they can be open with you, can you connect with them. It’s that simple, and that complicated.

The basic principles of nonverbal communication -1

IN THIS SERIES

• Principle 1: Align your body language with what you say.
• Principle 2: Establish an open relationship with your audience before you begin to speak.
• Principle 3: Be authentic.
• Principle 4: Don't be afraid to get emotional.
• Principle 5: Understand how your brain controls your gestures.
• Principle 6: See yourself as others see you to become conscious of your body language.
• Principle 7: Learn to master your own unconscious behavior.
• Principle 8: Focus on the underlying intent or emotion that you’re trying to convey.
• Principle 9: Align your words with your emotional intent.
• Principle 10: Be open, connected, passionate and listen to your audience.

The beginning of a year is a good time to go back to basics. With this blog, I’m starting a series on the basics of nonverbal communications, as detailed in my book, Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma (Jossey-Bass, 2009).

Principle I: When your verbal and nonverbal messages are aligned, you can be an effective communicator. When they are not, your audience will believe the nonverbal every time.

Because we interpret the intent and emotion of other people primarily through their nonverbal gestures – their facial expressions, their posture, they way they wave their hands – we assume the nonverbal to be the accurate signal of that emotion or intent. If you see a loved one looking sad, and ask, “What’s the matter?” that loved one may say, “Nothing,” but you don’t believe it. You just work a little harder to get the truth out of that person.

The lack of alignment between verbal and nonverbal is a more urgent problem for speakers than most people realize. Many speakers begin their presentation saying something like, “It’s great to be here today.” But their body language says something more like, “I’m scared.”

Of course, most audiences expect a little nervousness from a speaker at first, and will forgive it, especially if it quickly gets better with time.  But once that mismatch begins, it can be hard to get over, because the body tends to feed on its own signals of nervousness or panic, and get progressively worse. 

That’s why it’s so important to spend some time before you begin to speak focusing on the emotion that you want to convey at the opening of your speech.  And to begin with an appropriate ‘frame’ for the speech, rather than meaningless drivel about how nice it is to be there.  At the beginning of most speeches, for most speakers, it’s not nice to be there, so don’t pretend that it is.  Instead, begin the presentation with a story, a question, a statistic, or an audience-involving exercise that puts everyone into the real business of the speech. 

If you think as hard about the nonverbal ‘conversation’ you’re going to have with the audience as you do about your verbal content, you’re well on the way to figuring out how to align the two successfully.  And then you can both begin and end well, as a persuasive communicator. 

The Future of Conferences, Part Five – How to Involve the Audience

 

Conferences ask a lot of passivity from their audiences – audiences made up of people who are normally quite active.  The traditional model involves sitting in a seat for 2 or 3 days, occasionally allowed to ask questions, but basically only invited out of the seat for meal and bathroom breaks.  Any networking that’s done happens at the bar afterward, or perhaps at one of the lunches, if people are feeling communicative. 

By contrast, the first time I attended the Renaissance Weekend in Hilton Head I was astounded to learn the extent to which I would be involved in sitting on panels, running seminars, leading questions, and generally taking quite an active part.  It was a liberating, energizing experience, and I started to wonder, why aren’t all conferences like this? 

The Renaissance model requires a good deal of pre-conference planning on the part of the folks running the event, as well as input from the attendees.  That cooperation is not simple to get from busy folks, but it is well-rewarded in the richness of the offerings, the level of participation it encourages from participants, and the loyalty it generates from one year to the next. 

Another kind of conference model takes this even further:  the peer conference.  This model has been championed by Adrian Segar for over 20 years, and I chatted with him recently to find out how peer conferences work and what the benefits are to attendees.

Segar, who has a PhD in Physics, has run a solar manufacturing business, and consulted in IT for many years, pioneered the concept after observing that same kind of passivity in academic conferences he attended over the years.  He noted that typically he’d find one or two people that he’d really connect with, but was left with the nagging feeling that there were more interesting people at the conference than that, and he was missing out. 

How does a Segar peer conference work?  They involve 25 to 60 people, ideally, but can handle as many as 100.  They are open (unlike the Renaissance Weekend, which is invitation only) and private (meaning that, like the Renaissance Weekend, the proceedings are not published or open to the press).  They are convened by someone like Segar.  But after that, they’re up to the attendees.

A peer conference begins with a round table during which everyone involved answers 3 questions:

1.  How did I get here?

2.  What do I want to happen here?

3.  What expertise do I have to share on this subject?

Then a small group of conveners organizes the conference around the answers.  Everyone can sign up for the sessions offered, and the meeting is underway.  Segar reports that the networking is powerful and easy because everyone has been introduced to everyone else and know something about their interests.  And often peer conferences lead to action, because Segar closes by asking people, during a ‘groupspective,’ what they would like to see happen as a result of the meeting of minds.  The group commitment that results is usually very durable and leads to powerful initiatives. 

One of the longest-standing peer conferences that Segar started is known as edACCESS, a conference on IT for small colleges and schools, which has been running successfully for nearly 20 years.  Segar has just published a book on peer conferences, Conferences that Work, and I recommend his thinking highly as a necessary part of the future of conferences. 

Traditionally shaped conferences can encourage attendee participation in many ways before during and after the actual event, but even more participatory are audience-driven conferences like Renaissance Weekend and Segar’s peer conferences.  The collective power of a group of people with aligned interests can be amazing – why leave the audience passive in its chairs when you can draw upon their combined knowledge, experience and wisdom?

The Future of Conferences, Part 4 – What Would the Ideal Conference Look Like?

Think about all the people, products, and processes that have to work well in order for you to have a good experience at a conference.  From the flight (or drive) there, to the check-in at the hotel, to your first impression of the room, to the registration desk for the event, to the first meal, to your MC or initial speaker, to the whole roster of speakers, to the breakouts, to the guy sitting next to you – it all has to go smoothly so that you have a good time and don’t write a cranky note on the evaluation form. 

Meeting Planners don’t have it easy.  It’s a tough job.  They have to coordinate a myriad things over which they don’t have perfect control, everyone in their company or association feels entitled to offer unsolicited advice and feedback, and no one notices a job well done – only when something goes wrong. 

What follows is my list of 5 ways to make an ideal conference – and by the way make the meeting planners’ job easier. 

1.  The ideal conference should focus on the future, not the past.  It’s OK to have awards banquets; that’s how half the associations in the world persuade people to attend their meetings.  But if the conference isn’t mostly focused on the future, it’s wasting everyone’s time.  The point of a conference should be to let attendees have a glimpse of the future, in as many ways as possible.  That’s continuing education.  That’s why the Consumer Electronics Show makes news and so many others do not. 

2.  The ideal conference should involve the audience in creating it, running it, and making things happen afterwards.  The best conference I’ve ever attended is the Renaissance Weekend meeting over New Year’s (the one that the Clintons made famous).  Everyone there gets involved, taking turns chairing, speaking, asking questions, and generally taking charge of the content, which is based on questionnaires the participants submit in advance.  In a real sense, the participants own the event, though of course the RW folks remain very much in charge. 

3.  The ideal conference should tell a story, not offer a buffet.  Most conferences offer a theme, but it’s usually so vague as to be little more than a thematic suggestion.  As a result, attendees find meetings alternating confusing, overwhelming, and dull depending on their level of interest in a particular session.  Meeting planners need to do more than top and tail a conference with expensive outside speakers and offer breakouts in between.  That’s not planning, that’s scheduling.  I’ve blogged before on this tendency to create conferences for the convenience of the planners, not the edification of the attendees.  It’s time to raise the ante on the industry. 

4.  The ideal conference should be both green and community-oriented.  My conversation with Tim Sanders for part 3 of this series offered a number of ways that conferences can improve their green credentials.  They also should think hard about doing more than descending on a community, creating a lot of hot air and waste, and then departing in clouds of jet exhaust.  Every conference should build community service into its agenda – and specifically service to the community in which the meeting is held.  See Tim’s book, Saving the World at Work, for more stories and ideas on this subject. 

 

5.  The ideal conference should begin before the attendees gather and end (long) afterward.   Pre-work means that you can get more out of the day and a half or two days that people are together.  It needn’t be onerous; it can be as simple as finding out who the attendees are and what they’re interested in, like the Renaissance Weekend.  And every conference should aspire to publishing a useful record in some medium after the fact.  If you’re getting all those people together for several days, surely the collective genius can manage a set of predictions, a report on the state of the industry, or something that the larger world can care about.  TED produces extraordinary videos that are a wonderful resource for new ideas and interesting speeches.  Other conferences should take note. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Future of Conferences, Part Three: What is a green conference?

 

I talked with author, speaker, and former Yahoo! executive Tim Sanders recently about the future and green conferences.  Tim is the author most recently of Saving the World at Work, as well as two highly regarded earlier books, Love is the Killer App and The Likeability Factor.  If you’ve never seen Tim speak, catch him live at your earliest opportunity.  He’s a dynamic speaker with a huge talent for connecting with an audience. 

Nick:  Tim, your recent book is all about doing well by doing good, and a part of doing good for any organization is hosting a green meeting.  Has the green revolution in meetings survived the economic downturn?

Tim:  Absolutely.  People still want to make a difference.  I always say that meetings are the movies of the business world.  They’re high profile, and people care about how they’re done and the image they create.  What we’re seeing now is a lot of ‘greenskating’ -- that is, people who are cheapskates for environmental reasons.  They’re saving money and going green. 

Nick:  What form is greenskating taking?  How are people doing both at the same time?

Tim:  Three ways.  First, they’re calculating ‘event miles’.  Those are like the food miles that Whole Foods started and Walmart has taken on in a big way, only for meetings.  In other words, so much of the carbon footprint of a meeting comes from the travel to the meeting and back home again that it makes sense to site the meeting in a place that involves the least travel for most attendees.  So a company in Dallas might pick Phoenix over Orlando, for example.  What companies are finding is that keeping your event miles low saves money – as well as the planet. 

Second, there’s a huge trend toward ‘digitization’ of all the paper and plastic that has been involved previously in putting on a meeting.  Instead of paper you have electronic registration.  Instead of the conference bag, you get a USB stick with everything on it.  Meeting planners are finding that this dramatically lowers costs, again.

And finally, I’m seeing a renewed emphasis on real recycling.  Making sure, in other words, that meetings add as little as possible to the garbage stream.  For example, rather than using cornstarch cups for drinking, which can’t be recycled, meetings are using recyclable plastic.  As you can imagine, recycling has a dramatic impact on the trash normally generated by a meeting. 

And I guess I’d add a fourth way:  green meetings are being talked about more, in breakouts, on the platform.  Being green is an integral part of the conversation now, in spite of the downturn.  It’s inevitable and it’s gathering momentum every day.

Nick:  Talk to me about the lifecycle of an event.  Where is the biggest impact in terms of the carbon footprint? 

Tim:  Beyond getting people to and from meetings, the next biggest area is what is thrown out after a conference or a meeting.  All that garbage, the food and drink, and the conference materials.  Especially the conference materials – all of that suddenly becomes waste.  How many people want to take a huge binder home in addition to the luggage they came with, and that present for the 8-year-old waiting back in Omaha?

Ray Anderson, the Chairman of Interface, the company that ‘greened’ the industrial carpet business, calls waste “stealing from our grandchildren.”  Increasingly, people at meetings are becoming conscious of the future of the planet and transforming meetings to be more green. 

Nick:  Why not just go virtual and have everybody stay home?

Tim:  Virtual meetings can’t substitute for in-person meetings.  Influence happens face-to-face, and it’s still the ultimate offset.  Like the quality revolution, like the focus on change and leadership in previous decades, the 2010s will be the decade of green, of sustainability.  Companies that get it will thrive; companies that don’t will look increasingly like dinosaurs. 

Nick:  Tim, thank you very much. 

PS:  download Tim's Dirty Dozen Rules of Green Meetings here: 
http://sanderssays.typepad.com/DDRGreenMeetings.pdf
 

 

 

 

 

 

The Future of Conferences – Part Two: What are the current trends?

It took a year for the conference world (and the traveling public) to recover from 9/11.  How long will it take for conferences and meetings to rebound from the financial meltdown of Fall 2008?

In a way, the comparison is misleading; what we’re in now is a recession much like, the experts say, the 1991-92 one in its sharpness.  9/11 was a discrete event.  Different things. 

And this recovery may be slow; it may well take longer than a year.  That seems to be the consensus in the conference world; from a low of 13% in June 2009, the number of meeting planners who think conditions ahead are favorable has only bounced back to 19% (in October, the latest figures available).  That’s according to Meeting Professionals International (MPI), one of the two big organizations of conference people.   

So there’s not much optimism out there yet, though anecdotally I see and hear that business for professional speakers is picking up already from 2009. 

What are the current trends beyond the difficult financial times?  Below I highlight four trends that I’m seeing from my window on the industry.

Not surprisingly, it’s a no-frills era.

After all the bad press that organizations like AIG received when they continued to send top executives to fancy spas for retreats at enormous expense, the whole focus now is on the low-key, the no-frill, and the minimal.  That’s not such a bad thing as long as companies don’t go crazy trying to save money.  Somewhere between designer sheets and a lumpy mattress at a truck stop there’s a good balance to be struck.  Business travel is stressful and difficult these days, so people shouldn’t wear the hair shirt just for appearance’s sake. 

The good news is that ‘green’ still is a ‘go’. 

Partly because environmental awareness has become – slowly, with a long way to go – a part of business consciousness, it has become a part of the meeting planners’ world, too.  Again, that’s a good thing.  Minimizing the enormous waste that’s generated by meetings, from the bottled water to the bags of loot to the paper trail, is relatively easy and a boon for the environment.  And it saves money, too.  I’ll have more to say about this in a blog later in this series when I interview Tim Sanders, speaker extraordinaire and author of Saving the World at Work.  

The bad news is that planning cycles are shorter. 

The days when you started planning the next annual meeting as soon as the last one ended are gone.  Some conference planners are now getting used to the idea of planning a small meeting in 30 days – an extraordinary shortening of the cycle.  Because businesses can’t predict a year out, they can’t plan a conference a year out.  This shift puts enormous stress on meeting planners, but in an era of instant thinking and goldfish-length attention spans, they’re just going to have to get used to it. 

We can expect more virtual meetings in lieu of face-to-face sessions.  

This is perhaps the worst news to come out of the conference recession.  While of course virtual meetings have the enormous advantage that you never have to leave your office, or your den, to take part, they have the enormous disadvantage that you simply cannot achieve the same things that you can in a face-to-face meeting.  Trust, understanding, commitment, bonding, group cohesion – all of these are huge aspects of meetings, and they simply don’t happen virtually.  Virtual meetings can work well where there is already a relationship established, but they are very poor ways to initiate human relationships.  Any regular reader of this blog will know why this must be so.  Certain things only happen between people in personal and intimate space.  Perhaps the most important of these is trust. 

Next time, I’ll talk in more depth about green meetings and the future.  

 

 

 

 

The Future of Conferences – Part One: Do We Still Need Conferences?

 

I’m starting a series of blogs on the future of conferences.  Last year was a difficult one for the meetings and conferences industry, and as we start another year, it’s good to take stock.  What is the state of conferences today?  What does the future hold?  What should the industry be doing in order to stay ahead of the game and continue to provide worthwhile activities for organizations thinking about sending their employees away from the office for a day or more?

I invite everyone to join in and share your ideas for what makes a worthwhile conference, what you wish conferences would do differently, and what you particularly like about them.  I’ll be talking to some knowledgeable industry watchers to bring in their perspectives, and I’d be delighted to include yours. 

I’m going to kick off the series with 5 reasons why we still need conferences.  Although the industry took a hit last year, and trends like virtual meetings and videoconferencing gathered momentum, it’s still important both to get people out of the office and get them together.  Why?

1.  Conferences offer work teams and individuals a change of perspective. 

Organizations that never get out of their usual ruts run the risk of missing the trend, the rival, the new market that could change their business or their mission forever.  If you don’t take active measures to continue to scan the horizon for what’s out there, it’s going to get you.  Conferences are a good way to get out of your rut.

2.  Conferences offer organizations and their employees the opportunity for powerful face-to-face encounters. 

Because of the way our brains are constructed, with mirror neurons that fire with the emotions of the people around us, we get important experiences from face-to-face meetings that we can’t get virtually.  Organizations that are experiencing change – or wanting to make change happen – simply can’t motivate their employees as strongly via webconferences and phone calls.  As I’ve said before in this space, the only significant things that happen between people happen in personal and intimate space.  If you’re an executive, you owe it to your people to give them an opportunity to have these experiences with others beyond the immediate office environment. 

3.  Conferences offer people a chance to focus in an information-saturated world. 

Many industries and professions use conferences for various forms of continuing education.  It’s a good use of everyone’s time.  In an information-saturated world, there’s no way that most busy employees can keep up with their industry and professional changes from year to year.  A conference allows you to ensure that your team or organization knows what’s current and what’s developing in their particular areas of expertise. 

4.  Conferences offer busy, stressed-out employees a chance to think about the office away from the office.

When you don’t see your way out of a particular issue with an employee, or you’re stuck in some unhelpful work pattern and can’t seem to break it – or if you’re just so busy you think you’re becoming immortal because the CEO will never let you die until you finish everything – then you desperately need a couple of days away to get some distance on your problem.  Paradoxically, the best way to solve an intractable business problem is often to put down your tools and go away.    

5.  Conferences allow you the chance to create new coalitions and alliances in a neutral setting. 

It can be hard to approach a potential partner, joint venture participant, or even a prospective employee if you have to do it formally, in a meeting set up solely for that purpose.  It’s often better to approach the person or group in the casual-but-focused context of a conference or meeting.  You’re already there, you’ve got a natural reason to talk about the industry, or the topic, or the trends in your field.  What better way to get to know someone, find out how much they know, and gage their interest? 

What reasons beyond these do you see for conferences?  Let me know.  Next time, I’ll talk about the current state of the industry. 

7 Simple New Year’s Resolutions for Improving Your Public Speaking

 

1.  I will construct all my speeches to focus on one main point, removing all information that doesn’t support that central point.

 

2.  I will streamline, condense, and eliminate most of the data from my presentations, replacing numbers with stories and anecdotes to illustrate my idea. 

 

3.  I will cut down on the number of slides I use in my presentations, averaging about 1 slide for every 3 minutes of talk – or fewer. 

 

4.  I will eliminate the agenda slide from any talk less than 100 minutes long.

 

5.  I will never, ever use clip art again in my slides.  Instead, I will use high-quality photographs and images to illuminate my talk. 

 

6.  I will deliver my presentations with energy and enthusiasm, but I will keep my feet under control and not wander randomly around the stage. 

 

7.  I will adhere strictly to my allotted time and end before it has run out.