The Mobile Presenter

The motto of TED, as you surely know, is "ideas worth spreading". The idea - revolutionary, evolutionary, novel, or just a new take on something long established - is at the heart of every TED talk. All else must stand back.

There's a nice park near the place where I live, so I occasionally (though not often enough, I guess), I go there for a walk. Due to the park's location and layout, I always end up going around it in the same direction. It has enough variation in terms of smaller sideways and alternative routes, but I've always been going on my round counter-clockwise without thinking much about it.

The other day, on a whim, I decided to walk my usual route the other way around. Which resulted in me coming up to corners and pathways and wondering where I was - until I recognised that I was in a familiar spot that only looked unfamiliar since I was looking at it from a different direction.

In trying to find new ways to explain story structure and the benefits of storytelling, I came up with the following very simple sketches (don't laugh):

It's an involuntary gesture and I'd bet it has happened to all of us: You want to point out something on your slides but instead of pointing to the projected slide that the audience sees, you're pointing to your laptop's screen or the preview monitor.

My background is in talks at technical conferences where the CfP, the infamous "Call for Papers", rules. When a conference is announced, a call goes out to potential speakers to submit a proposal for a talk. When following that call, you are confronted with a form that you have to fill out. Specifically, it asks you to submit a title for the talk and a short description of the content (commonly known as the "abstract"). Once submitted, you wait for the conference committee to accept your talk - and only then do you actually start working on it.

There's a flaw in this approach. Can you spot it?