Rory Sutherland garners quite the laughs in his TEDxAthens talk ‘Perspective is Everything’. He opens his talk wonderfully with an anecdote that immediately grabs the audience’s attention while at the same time deftly demonstrates his main point. He shows us an electronic cigarette and muses that it has revolutionized his life ever since it became illegal to smoke in public places in England. He says if you’re at a cocktail party and you stand by a window, staring blankly out of it without smoking a cigarette, you look like a friendless idiot, but if you do the same thing while smoking a cigarette, you’re suddenly a philosopher.
This is a great, simple and visual way to introduce his main point that perspective is everything. When one little detail changes, the entire situation is different. One situation feels great, Sutherland says, and the other situation feels terrible. He goes on to detail a few other situations that aptly mirror the cigarette example. Unemployed young people are unhappy, while unemployed old people are happy. Their perspectives are vastly different, which changes the entire way they look at their seemingly similar situations.
Sutherland is an energetic, bordering on frenetic, presenter. His first slide does nothing for his talk, as it’s a classic Death by PowerPoint slide fit with four bullet points and lots of text. Worse, he doesn’t speak to it whatsoever. It’s plainly distracting; forcing the audience to read the text and miss what he’s saying and worse, stop tracking with him because we’re too busy being confused as to why that slide was included at all. (Did we miss something important? Should I have read that slide? Should I have listened?)
Make sure to take note of inconsistencies like this. If you go against all astute advice and brave the Death by PowerPoint slide, at the very least make sure you cover all the bullet points and text on the slide to ensure your audience is tracking with you. Or better yet, don’t include it at all.
Sutherland’s talk is highly intelligent, and demands strict attention to be fully understood. He references relevant studies by various scientists and psychologists throughout, but breezes past their names and their significance very quickly. The secondary material nuances his argument, to be sure, but it would have lent more strength to the talk if he had slowed down and explained more clearly.
Undoubtedly, Sutherland is especially engaging when it comes to disseminating examples and telling stories; these greatly strengthen his argument. And it’s refreshing to laugh, (ok, lightly chuckle) throughout a TED talk because how often does that happen? His slides get much better as the talk goes on as they become focused on visuals rather than text. He also shares interesting ideas that could easily be implemented encouraging the audience to wonder curiously, “Why haven’t we done that already?” This kind of probing is good. It encourages the audience to take action, to do more research, to change certain aspects of their lives.
Indeed, Sutherland’s argument is compelling. We track with him, we like what we hear, but the real setback of his talk is its lack of structure. Rather than follow a well planned, easy-to-track outline of the points he is going to make, the talk is haphazard and he is prone to ramble. Accordingly, there’s no neat conclusion to Sutherland’s talk. He just sort of stops, probably because time’s up. Unfortunately, eighteen minutes is a short amount of time for someone who seems like he could go on forever.
