The Mobile Presenter

We're in the process of looking for speakers for our next TEDxStuttgart; and, as always, it's a mixture of frustration and delight. Frustration because of the huge amount of very weak proposals we get. Which only increases the delight when we find someone who actually has something to say.

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.