6 minutes for a big idea: Disciplined communication courtesy of TED!

Okay, an admission first: My TEDxToronto talk was longer than the planned 6 minutes. And it didn’t just turn out that way, I knew it in advance!

But regardless of whether it was 7 minutes or 8 minutes, there is an incredible discipline of communication that comes with this kind of strict and tight timeline, especially if you’re trying to explain a new or complex idea in a compelling way. This was surprisingly challenging for me, especially given that I’ve probably delivered 600-800 speeches in the past 10 years.

I spent a lot of time on crafting this talk — probably close to 20 hours total, including ideation, various drafts, and practice — and thought that I would share a few things I learned along the way:

1. What do you want to say? - This should be obvious, but it was harder for me than it sounds. I spent a whole lot of time thinking about how I was going to say what I was going to say before really honing in on my key message. It was extremely helpful when Darius from the TEDxToronto organizing team asked me: “Tell me what you really want to say, in words you would use at a party.”
2. Is that your authentic voice? - My good friend and co-founder of EWB, Parker Mitchell, brought me down to earth just a few days before the talk with the question: “What gets you up in the morning?” Until that time, I was crafting a talk that was very intellectual, trying to summarize ideas that weren’t quite my own in a voice that wasn’t quite my own. Once I returned to what get’s me up in the morning, it became very clear that I was going to give a talk about how EWBers combine their heads and their hearts in a powerful way to achieve social change.
3. Are you inspired? What’s the source? – I spent a lot of time re-reading these incredible posts from EWBers in 2007. I kept coming back to them for inspiration: Would they be proud of the talk I was about to give? Am I inspired about the talk I’m about to give in the same way that I’m inspired by this post? I think that inspiration is a big part of a great talk.
4. Did you change your talk 8 times? - My talk went through at least 8 iterations. Each one was a lot better than the former. I started by writing something that was probably 25 minutes long, and evolved the ideas and whittled down from there. I didn’t ever get hung up on whether I had sunk costs into previous draft, which meant there were no sacred cows of either ideas or sentences. I think this made the ultimate talk much better, and allowed me to be very open to feedback and new ideas from other people.
5. Have you practiced until you no longer need to memorize the words? – As I mentioned above, I spent a lot of time on this talk. A lot of that was practicing articulating the ideas/sentences to a lot of different people. This happened formally during practice, but I worked the ideas/stories into conversation for a couple of weeks in advance. I actually took my knowledge of the talk way past memorization — what I mean is that I no longer needed to stick to the script and think about what was coming next, but instead I just felt the words and ideas. This allowed me to be very present during the talk.

What could I have done better?

Well, a lot, but the main failure was that I gave too much of a speech instead of having a conversation with the audience. I think the best TED Talks are a great conversation, and I’m not sure I was quite there.

While the talk won’t be available on the TEDxToronto website for a few weeks, I’ve pasted the text of it below if you are interested in reading what I delivered!

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http://www.ewb.ca/en/whatsnew/story/98/combining-our-heart-and-head-together.html

Delivered September 23, 2011.

Combining our heart and head, together

I’d like to share two stories with you.

First, I want to tell you about this amazing kid, Mohammed. He lives in Northern Ghana, in a village called Nyologo. For six months of the year it’s hot, dusty and dry, and for the other six months it’s rainy with green fields filling the space between sparse trees.

When you and I talk about people who live on under $2 a day, Mohammed’s one of them. I stayed with him and his family for a few days 6 years ago, gathering water, working on his father’s small farm, just living life together. We’ve stayed in touch ever since.

I’m really proud of him: He’s at the top of his class in high school and has ambitious plans to attend University, and he dreams of changing Ghana.

This past August, Sari, my partner, and I had the privilege to visit Mohammed, just to hang out and catch up. While we were chatting one day Mohammed let me know some tough news: That his father’s harvest wasn’t good, one of his younger kids got sick, and someone stole some money from him – and so Mohammed’s father wouldn’t be able to pay his school fees. For lack of a hundred and fifty bucks, Mohammed wasn’t going to be able to go to school this year. Sari and decided we would pay Mohammed’s school fees.

As you can imagine, when we shared this news with Mohammed, he was ecstatic. His eyes lit up, he father was beaming, his mum was giggling. Sari and I were smiling that smile that hurts your cheeks! Man, it felt great!!

But here’s the thing – I know that Mohammed is only one kid out of thousands. I know that his father might run out of money next year, because the rains fail or because of any number of events that may happen that are beyond his control. I know that when Mohammed goes to school his class is packed and his teacher might not show up and that there’s no responsive local government to address those problems.

I know that Sari and I have helped a person, but we haven’t addressed the root of the problem.

And that’s where my second story comes in. It’s about Malawi.

Malawi has 15 million people, and ideally, every one of them would have convenient access to a safe and plentiful source of water. According to official counts, about 2 million people don’t – nearly the population of Toronto.

But the reality on the ground is different than official statistics. When I visited two years ago I would walk through some villages where there would be 3, 4 or even 5 water pumps for a few hundred people, but there were other villages with only a single pumps – this inequitable distribution leaves many wanting.

And then there were the broken water pumps. In fact, 25% of people in rural areas don’t have access to clean water because their water systems are broken.

I visited one particularly offensive project, a Canadian funded water system, built by a Canadian engineering firm. In the shadow of one of the last functional taps of over a hundred, were the remnants of an American funded, American built water system identical to the Canadian one.

This is outrageous. Broken water systems on top of broken water systems.

This caused us at Engineers Without Borders Canada to ask: Does Malawi really need another new water pump?

Instead of building more infrastructure, we focused on understanding and solving the systemic problems.

One bottom-up innovation we’ve developed along with our Malawi government partners is a way to collect and simply display information about every existing village and waterpoint in a given district.

Now, for the first time ever, people like our partner and Malawi colleague Mr. Chaponda has all the information at his fingertips to prioritize repairs and locations for new wells, based on legitimate needs.

But that one innovation took three years and tens of thousands of volunteer hours to develop and refine, and we’ve still only brought it to a quarter of Malawi. And of course, this tool is not a silver bullet – it’s only one piece of a much bigger and more complex puzzle.

We’re focused on solving the larger systemic problem, but in the meantime a lot of people still won’t have water.

So how do these two stories come together? For me, they represent the choice each of us is often forced to make when supporting international development, and especially when supporting Africa.

Should I follow my heart?

Or should I follow my head?

I know that following our hearts can be profound – $10 bucks for a bednet, volunteering at an orphanage in Tanzania for a couple of weeks, $150 for Mohammed’s school fees – these are tangible, personal and immediate. But they are rarely enough.

On the other hand, following our heads leads us to lobby our government for better aid policies, make investments in patient capital or undertake work like EWB’s in Malawi. But these approaches alone risk creating tools that don’t reflect ground-realities, they risk representing people with numbers that can just be moved around in a spreadsheet. Employing the head along can leave you de-motivated by the enormity of the challenge, and cynical about the $50billion development industry.

My journey over the past 12 years of dedicating my life to international development has taught me that the true power – the true big idea – is eschewing this false choice between heart and head. I’ve learned that the true power of change comes from combining the heart and the head.

For me and thousands of EWBers who have contribution millions of hours over the past few years, this has meant balancing tensions: Feeling urgency, while having the patience for change. Employing rigorous management, while caring about people. Listening and being humble, while pushing forward big ideas.

For me bringing the heart and head, together, has been powerful.

Bringing the heart and head, together, has brought partnership.

Bringing the heart and head, together, has brought empathy.

Bringing the heart and head, together, has brought true meaning.

The real magic of this approach is in personalizing it – we can each make it our own. And so I give you that challenge, to discover how you’ll combine the heart and head as global citizens, as investors in Africa’s development and perhaps as practitioners.

What’s truly beautiful, is that it’s also bringing the heart and head together that will propel Mohammed to learn what he needs to learn, whether a teacher is there or not, to get himself to University and ultimately to drive Ghana’s development, from Ghana.