TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

THE POWER OF PARABLE Some stories are carefully designed as metaphors. There’s a useful word for this type of story: parable.

Traditionally, a parable is a story that carries a moral or spiritual lesson.

What’s satisfying about each of these talks is the way they draw out the meaning from the story. You don’t want to insult the intelligence of the audience by force-feeding exactly the conclusion they must draw from the tale you’ve told. But you absolutely do want to be sure there’s enough there for your listeners to be able to connect the dots.

There are plenty of other risks in going the parable route. Sometimes the analogy doesn’t quite fit. It can mislead as much as enlighten. Or you can spend so much time telling the story that you miss drawing out the necessary conclusions. But in the right hands, a parable can entertain, inform, and inspire all in one.

There is another powerful function that stories offer: Explanation. For this purpose they aren’t usually the main attraction, but more the support. And they usually come in the form of short inserts designed to illustrate or reinforce an idea.

Meanwhile, remember this: Stories resonate deeply in every human. By giving your talk as a story or a series of related stories, you can greatly increase your connection with yo...

An opening line anchored in the here and now, but immediately creating intrigue.

Do you feel a little spark of curiosity? That’s the first step to a successful explanation. Once a mind is intrigued, it opens up. It wants new ideas.

While continuing to stoke our curiosity, Gilbert just slotted in the first concept he’ll be building on:

That’s a key building block. It was dropped into place courtesy of a simple metaphor, the flight simulator. We already know what that is, so it’s possible to imagine what an experience simulator might be.

A single vivid example of the simulator in action, and you totally get it. But now the talk takes an intriguing twist.

This cool new concept of the experience simulator has suddenly taken you to a place you didn’t expect. A baffling place. The facts you’re presented with make no sense. You’re experiencing a knowledge gap and your mind is craving that it be filled. So Gilbert proceeds to fill it, by offering another new concept.

By putting a name on it—impact bias—the mystery somehow becomes more believable. But our curiosity is burning more brightly than ever in its attempt to bridge this gap.

And to make it clear, Gilbert uses another metaphor, that of the immune system. You already know what an immune system is, so to think of this as a psychological immune system is easy. The concept is not delivered in a single leap but piece by piece, and with metaphors to guide and show how the pieces fit together.

But already we’ve seen enough to reveal the core elements of a masterful explanation. Let’s recap:

Step 1. He started right where we were.

Step 2. He lit a fire called curiosity.

Step 3. He brought in concepts one by one.

Step 4. He used metaphors.

Step 5. He used examples.

At the end of his explanation, our mental model of the world has been upgraded. It’s richer, deeper, truer. A better reflection of reality.

Explanation is the act that consciously adds a new element to someone’s mental model or reorders existing elements in a more satisfying way.

Unfortunately, this isn’t that easy. We all suffer from a cognitive bias for which economist Robin Hogarth coined the term “the curse of knowledge.” In a nutshell, we find it hard to remember what it feels like not to know something that we ourselves know well.

In The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, Steven Pinker suggests that overcoming the curse of knowledge may be the single most important requirement in becoming a clear writer.

Pinker suggests that simply being conscious of this bias is not enough. You have to expose your drafts to friends or colleagues and beg for ruthless feedback on anything they don’t understand. The same is true for talks, and especially those talks that seek to explain something complex. First share a draft script with colleagues and friends. Then try it out in front of a private audience.

A speaker has to be sure that listeners know how each sentence relates logically to the preceding one, whether the relationship is similarity, contrast, elaboration, exemplification, generalization, before-and-after, cause, effect, or violated expectation. And they must know whether the point they are now pondering is a digression, a part of the main argument, an exception to the main argument, and so on.

This is often where the curse of knowledge strikes hardest. Every sentence is understandable, but the speaker forgets to show how they link together. To him, it’s obvious.

Equally important is the precise sequencing of sentences and concepts so that understanding can build naturally.

At TED we have a guideline based on Einstein’s dictum, “Make everything as simple as it can be. But no simpler.”6 You don’t want to insult your audience’s intelligence. Sometimes specialist terms are essential.

There’s one other key explanation tool. Before you try to build your idea, consider making clear what it isn’t. You’ll notice I’ve used that technique in this book already, for example, by discussing talk styles that don’t work before going on to those that do.

If you can explain something well, you can use that ability to create real excitement in your audience.

You can’t give a powerful new idea to an audience unless you can learn how to explain.

That can only be done step by step, fueled by curiosity.

Each step builds on what the listener already knows. Metaphors and examples are essential to revealing how an idea is pieced together. Beware the curse of knowledge! You must be sure you’re not making assumptions that will lose your audience. And when you’ve explained ...

If explanation is building a brand-new idea inside someone’s mind, persuasion is a little more radical. Before construction, it first requires some demolition. Persuasion means convincing an audience that the way they currently see the world isn’t quite right. And that means taking down the parts that aren’t working, as well as rebuilding something better. When this works, it’s thrilling for both speaker and audience.

Most of us spend our whole lives under the assumption that the daily news is forever getting worse and that wars and terrorism and violence are out of control. When you replace that with the possibility that, even though things can be bad, they’re actually on an upward trend, what a cloud that lifts! Persuasion can alter someone’s outlook forever.

Once people have been primed, it’s much easier to make your main argument. And how do you do that? By using the most noble tool of them all, a tool that can wield the most impact over the very long term. And it’s named using an old-fashioned philosophical word that I love: Reason.

THE LONG REACH OF REASON The thing about reason is that it’s capable of delivering a conclusion at a whole different level of certainty than any other mental tool. In a reasoned argument, provided the starting assumptions are true, then the validly reasoned conclusions must also be true and can be known to be true. If you can walk someone through a reasoned argument convincingly, the idea you have planted in her mind will lodge there and never let go. But for the process to work, it must be broken down into small steps, each of which must be totally convincing.

Undercutting the credibility of the opposite position is another powerful device, but it needs to be handled with care.

This device can be used to turn the most daunting topic into something truly intriguing. A regular challenge for speakers is how to turn difficult subjects like disease or starvation or human degradation into talks that audiences will show up for and engage with.

The power of this structure is that it taps deep into our love of stories.

There are lots of tools you can use here, in addition to the intuition pumps mentioned earlier, or the detective story approach.

Inject some humor early on.

Add an anecdote.

Offer vivid examples.

Recruit third-party validation.

Use powerful visuals.

But not every talk that is reason based will see such immediate success. These talks are generally harder to process than some others, and they may not be the most popular.

In three sentences . . . Persuasion is the act of replacing someone’s worldview with something better. And at its heart is the power of reason, capable of long-term impact. Reason is best accompanied by intuition pumps, detective stories, visuals, or other plausibility-priming devices.

Connection, narration, explanation, persuasion . . . all vital tools. But what’s the most direct way of gifting an idea to an audience? Simply show it to them.