A Four-Time TEDx Curator Shares His Simple Method for Delivering a Great TED Talk Anywhere, Anytime. — By Adam Braus, at MakeSchool.com

Sir Ken, arguably the best TED speaker ever.

Nowadays people want everything in TED format. They don’t want to listen to you talk for an hour, they want an inspiring 20 min and then Q&A, break out groups, interaction, and discussion.

As a 4x TEDx organizer, curator, and speaker coach (1x Bangkok and 3x Madison), I have a drop-dead simple format that I believe roughly all the best TED talks conform to. I want to share it with you so that you can turn your next class, business meeting, or toast into a great talk.

Vulnerability Hook (1–3 min)

This is a counter intuitive way to start— right when you think you should be puffing your self up and being the most important in the room, instead you should poke a little fun at yourself, talk about your family, tell an antidote about when you made a mistake or learned something the hard way.

Credibility Shim (5 seconds)

After your 1–3 minute long Vulnerability Hook, take half of one sentence to establish some credibility. “In the 30 years I’ve worked with autistic children I’ve learned . . .” or “After my time as the head of product at Facebook I’m here to tell you . . .” This credibility hook prefaces your idea worth spreading.

Your Idea Worth Spreading (10 seconds)

Have an idea worth spreading and say it in one sentence after your credibility shim.

The idea worth spreading is the hardest and most valuable part of your talk. Most of us don’t take the time to encapsulate what we are doing or what we’ve done into an easy to understand statement of action. Its strange that we can accomplish so much without ever truly organizing our vision into a pithy statement. The discipline it takes to do this always clarifies the thinking of speakers and excites and motivates them. Its as if they remember and feel concretely why they became an educator, inventor, or rebel.

Say something new that turns common knowledge on its ear. Watch the old TED to get a better sense of this. Most new TED talks have abandoned it. Now they palavering about sh*t people already believe. Its not a bad idea to empower women or be altruistic or make well designed objects or show off this or that new technology or point out that this or that social class or race has something beautiful to offer, all of these things are true but are already known and therefore nauseatingly boring to hear rolled out again and again.

The basic structure of an idea worth spreading is this: take what is common knowledge and turn it on its head. Sir Ken Robins says in essence “You think schools make kids smart and are good for them? I think they destroy creativity. Let’s change that.”

Common Knowledge: Schools are good for kids.

Idea worth spreading: Schools are destroying creativity and need to be redesigned from the bottom up.

If your idea just confirms what is already common knowledge or just kinda spins common knowledge a new way, dig deeper, take some risks on scratch paper or in conversation with a trusted advisor or coach. When I worked with Heather Kirkorian on her talk about interactive media and children, we started out just confirming common knowledge: “Television is bad for young children, maybe interactive media is not as bad.” Boring! Through discussion and brainstorming we tracked towards something much more sophisticated, interesting, and inspiring:

Common Knowledge: Television is bad for young children, maybe interactive media is not as bad.

Idea worth spreading: Early research into interactive media suggests that we could use commoditized interactive media to close achievement gaps present even before students start school, but we won’t achieve it without a “Sesame Street Project” in educational interactive media that engages educators, technologists, and families.

Say something unconventional, inspiring, and hopeful and then by telling stories your audience will believe you and see your vision.

Tell 3–5 Detailed, Personable Stories (10–15 min)

Don’t argue your idea with facts and reasons (how boring and slow!), instead use real stories about people you know or have experienced. Use as many specifics as you can to paint a picture, dates, times of day, places, idiosyncrasies, tiny details, names, etc. Names are very important, so if you want to preserve someone’s anonymity, use an anonymous name.

You only have 18 min so use the heart, its is faster than the mind

If you are presenting something scientific introduce the scientists and their universities. If it is design, bring up a user and their situation. If it is about education, talk about students, parents, schools, and teachers. If its about art, introduce the artist or tell stories about the art being shown, bought, displayed. Use challenges, struggles, wins, and funny stories to illustrate your idea.

Of course sometimes you need to or ought to show data, in that case make sure it is drop dead easy to understand the insight the data presents, and then explain the insight with a concrete example. E.g. Airquality statistics — “this means Bobby won’t have to go the ER for his asthma attack I told you about before”. You dig?

Sometimes you have a list of things: 5 ways to fix global warming, 3 effects of micro financing, etc. This is very acceptable, but always include a story in each of these points along with any other data or facts.

Sign off (20 seconds)

Generally a sign off just restate your idea worth spreading and a call to action. Try not to be cheesy or sentimental and if you did everything else right then you can’t mess this up.

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