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How Janna Levin Told Her Moth Story

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In case you are not familiar with The Moth, it is a not-for-profit devoted to ‘true stories told live.’  The stories are short, intimate, and funny.  Most Moth storytellers, including Janna Levin, draw from one (or several) moments of profound personal transformation; more often than not, these moments were catalyzed by foolishness, futility, character flaws, or failure. While polished in plot, setting, and character development, the best Moth stories retain raw, honest sincerity and offer an uplifting moral.

In this post, I’ll deconstruct Janna Levin’s Life on a Mobius Strip, the lead-off story in The Moth’s new book.  I recommend you enjoy the video below and then read my analysis.

 

Tip #1: Develop a richly plotted story

Plot, setting, and dialog-rich character are the key elements that add texture to a story.  Let’s examine how Janna developed the first element, plot.  As shown in the table below, notice that Janna impressively wove dual-plots that converged in the end.

Boiled down, the essence of plot is the topsy-turvy journey characters must undergo is search of the answer to a profound question.  The types of questions that work best do not have an obvious or even a single answer; in fact, depending on the path taken, diametrically opposed answers may be equally viable.  Despite that challenge, storytellers (usually) share their answer to the question at the end in the form of a revelation that allows the protagonist to achieve her goals and live happily ever after.

Sometimes characters know the question the storyteller is exploring, and sometimes they do not.  In Plot A, Janna as protagonist knows the question and frames it early on as, “The hazard for a scientist working on something so esoteric is the possibility that it just might not be true or it might not be answerable.”  She is asking: Is it worth dedicating your professional life to fundamental scientific research when it is unlikely that your effort will amount to anything? In Plot B, in contrast, Janna as protagonist does not know the question: Do we get to choose who we love?

Quite cleverly, these two plots share a common theme summarized by the overarching question: Are our lives determined by fate or free will? At the end of her story, Janna discovers the answer in the symbolism of her anatomically unusual son – Love, like the universe, is unpredictable, improbable, circular, and worthwhile.

[table]

,Plot A,Plot B
Once upon a time and every day…, (1) I was working at Berkeley as an astrophysicist obsessed with an esoteric\, probably unanswerable topic, (2) I met Warren\, an uneducated obsessive compulsive musician\, in a coffee shop in San Francisco

Until one day…, (4) My fellowship ended and I accepted a job in Cambridge\, England,(3) Warren moved in with me

And because of that…, (5) I shifted to the exciting topic of Black Holes and got to hang out with Nobel laureates,(6) Warren worked as a dishwasher and focused on his music

Until finally…, (8) I wrote a book about the universe and the unraveling of an obsessive compulsive mind,(7) Our relationship ended explosively

And after that…, (9) I returned to San Francisco…,(10a) … and saw Warren working in the coffee shop ~~ (10b) We married a year later ~~ (10c) We had a son whose internal organs (harmlessly) are reversed

And the moral of the story is…,[attr colspan=”2″](11) Love\, like the universe\, is unpredictable\, improbable\, circular\, and worthwhile

[/table]

 

Tip #2: Get laughs early and often

Compelling personal stories, including if not especially traumatic ones, need generous helpings of humor.  I find that humor can typically be classified in three buckets: superiority (ex: laughing at people with bad judgement, particularly those in positions of authority); surprise (ex: absurd overstatement or understatement); and emotional release as a salve to embarrassment, discomfort, or fear (ex: gallows and scatological humor).

Janna used all three types early and often.  She got her first laugh with superiority humor a mere nine seconds into her story with the following: “Einstein famously said, ‘Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity.’ Then he added, ‘And I’m not so sure about the universe.” Though it may be painfully obvious, this is superiority humor because implies that people are infinitely stupid.  Since Einstein’s and Janna’s audiences were in on the joke, they get to feel superior to the rest of the world.

(Note: I advise speakers to avoid quoting famous people, especially at the opening or closing of a speech.  Of course, there are exceptions to every rule.  The main exception is when the speaker either knows the famous person or heard the quote first-hand.  Janna reveals another exception which is when the quote perfectly sets up the fundamental theme of the story and ties to a major story element – in this case, Janna is an astrophysicist studying whether or not the universe is infinite.)

Janna’s second laugh relied on surprise humor in the form of understatement as follows: “Warren came charging past me the first day I saw him and pinned me with his blue eyes and said, ‘You’re the astrophysicist.’  (pause) Which I knew.”

She employed release humor a bit later on when she recounted living in low-cost accommodations upon arriving in England, “… we spend a few weeks in a coin-operated bed-sit in Brighton. If you ran out of pound coins, your electricity went off and the lights went out. We often ran out of pound coins, and towards the end we were so despondent we would just sit in the dark.”

By the end of her 16 minute 20 second story, Janna garnered 31 laughs – a rate of 1.9 laughs per minute. While shy of the stand-up comedy standard of four to six laughs-per-minute, the rate is both impressive and typical of entertaining personal stories. If the laughter density is too low, below 1 laugh-per minute, a story becomes heavy and dull; if the laughter density is too high, above 4 laughs per minute, a story loses meaning and becomes just a pleasant, in-the-moment experience.

 Tip #3: Be vulnerable

Over the course of the story, the audience learns that Janna holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from MIT, did post-doctoral work at Berkeley, hobnobbed with Stephen Hawking and Nobel laureates at Cambridge, wrote and published a book that “came out of me fully formed,” and has a healthy, happy family.  If Janna had led with all of this, or even any of this, the audience would have immediately disconnected from her.  However, she paired vulnerabilities with each of her bona fides – foolishness, frustration, futility, and failure always preceded good fortune:

  • The futile pursuit of fundamental science precedes Janna’s disclosure of being an MIT-trained astrophysicist.
  • The frustration of living in squalor precedes Janna’s opportunity to work at Cambridge with Stephen Hawking.
  • The failure of her relationship precedes Janna’s book deal.
  • The foolishness of falling in love with the wrong kind of man precedes Janna’s happy family life.

 

The Bottom Line

While I have touched on the most powerful insights that I drew from Janna’s story, there is much more richness to explore in character and setting development as well as in Janna’s engagingly raw verbal and non-verbal delivery.  Please listen to her story and share what struck you as valuable in the comments section below.

Meaning of Color Across Culture for Presentation Design

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While I was able to find a number of excellent articles on the web explaining the meanings of colors across Western and Eastern cultures, I found most of them too long.  Here is a very simple, in some cases perhaps too simple, lookup table for using color in presentation design.  I have included primary meanings for each color and indicated the most common secondary meaning in parenthesis.

[table]

Color,Western Cultures,Eastern Cultures

Black,Formality (Death),Masculinity (Magic)
Blue,Trust (Masculinity),Trust (Femininity)
Brown,Earthy (Boring),Mourning (Earthy)
Gold,Wealth,Wealth
Green,Health (Envy),Health (Infidelity)
Grey,Wisdom,Wisdom
Orange,Attention (Warmth),Death
Pink,Femininity,Femininity (Happiness)
Purple,Nobility,Royalty
Red,Danger (Passion),Good Fortune
Silver,Modern,Modern
White,Purity (Simplicity),Death (Birth)
Yellow,Attention (Warmth),Nobility

[/table]

 

Here are the references I used in case you want to delve deeper:

http://openhighschoolcourses.org/mod/book/tool/print/index.php?id=10941

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2012/06/color-and-cultural-design-considerations/

http://globalpropaganda.com/articles/TranslatingColours.pdf

http://www.deborahswallow.com/2010/02/20/meaning-of-colours-across-cultures/

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in-cultures/

http://www.illuminantpartners.com/2011/01/17/color/

 

Should Leaders Get Out of the Way?

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While “give people an objective and get out of the way” sounds like great advice, it is not always sound advice.  As with most things in life, the degree of leadership involvement is nuanced and highly dependent on the employee and the situation.  I learned this the hard way a few years ago when I received feedback that I was treating every person on my team as low on will but high on skill.  This meant I was the polar opposite of a micro-manager – often inspiring people but leaving them to stumble in the dark. That was when I learned the invaluable lesson of situational leadership – to adapt coaching to the skill and the will of the individual on the project.

This being annual review season at my company (and many others), I have been thinking more deeply about what role a team leader should play.  Or, more specifically, when a leader should intervene and when a leader should get out of the way.  Here are the questions I ask myself:

 

1. Does the individual have a clear sense of WHAT they need to do?

Most organizations have a clear top-level business objective.  In for-profit business, the objective is quite obviously profit maximization with a healthy dose of ethics and global citizenship mixed in.  In the not-for-profit space, the objective typically relates to boosting the quality and quantity of life (human or non-human).

Some employees have reached the point where they are able to identify a potential set of granular objectives that serve the top-level corporate objective, prioritize among them, and focus.  In those cases, I get out of the way.  In the other cases, I do not simply tell people what to do; rather, I teach them the skill of identifying and prioritizing objectives so that they too can learn to lead.

 

2. Is the individual highly motivated (the WHY) to pursue their objective?

I’m a huge fan of all of Chip & Dan Heath’s work, and in particular, their book Switch. In that book, the Heath brothers use the leadership metaphor of a rider on an elephant headed down a path toward a destination.   The destination is the WHAT from the first question above.  The emotional elephant and the analytical rider are two sides of the motivation coin.  Here, I’ll use the more clinical terms – intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

If an employee has strong motivation, I get out of the way.  If they do not, I first turn to intrinsic motivation since that is easier to address in real-time and (according to research cited in Daniel Pink’s excellent book Drive) is the more effective lever for the knowledge-workers I interact with on a daily basis.  When I sense a person’s intrinsic motivation is low, I relate our team’s North Star, our vision, to the individual’s specific wants and needs.  Moreover, I try to express my love for what we are doing in the hope that my belief and my enthusiasm are infectious.

I rarely have to adjust extrinsic motivation in the type of work that I do. However, if you need to do so, remember that extrinsic motivation can come in the form of carrots or sticks.  The sweetest carrot is obvious – money; however, there are non-monetary carrots such as extra vacation time and appropriate gifts.  The big stick is job security – something that should only be threatened as a last resort in response to serious, well-documented performance issues. A more subtle stick is restating the cultural norms (or actual rules) of your team.

 

3. Does the individual have the skill (the HOW) to complete this objective?

My big mistake when I first led people more than a decade ago was assuming everybody was highly skilled.  When they are, I get out of the way.  However, when the individual does not know the methods or best practices to excel on their objective, they will appreciate learning HOW to do something.  As with coaching in other areas, your goal as a leader should be to coach people how to figure out how so that they can be independent on future projects. You can do that directly or using the Socratic method.

By way of example, I strive to coach people to become experts at bright spot analysis (another concept from Switch).  In broad brush strokes, the process is as follows:

a. Pick an objective (ex: increase sales productivity)

b. Pick a population of people that influence the objective (ex: sales managers)

c. Using an objective measure (ex: average sales per team member over a period of time), stack rank the population to identify the top 10% and the bottom 10%

d. Figure out what the top performers are doing that the bottom performers are not.  You will be able to partially figure this out using existing quantitative data.  However, you will also need to tease out qualitative insights through anthropological observation (i.e. ride-alongs, role-plays) or interviews where you are careful to ask the two populations to describe actual recent experiences rather than abstract, inspirational behaviors.  (I very rarely conduct large-scale electronic surveys unless I have no alternative. When I do conduct such surveys, I ask only the questions that inform burning, specific decisions.  This helps keep the surveys as short as possible – often just one or two questions.)

e. Conduct a pilot to verify that (i) I have synthesized the right best practices (ii) I have found the right approach to spread those best practices.  Ensure that whatever you are piloting is practical and economically attractive at scale.  Define the scope of the pilot.  Identify what constitutes success from the pilot sufficient to broaden to full-scale launch.

f. Scale-up once the pilot is successful. (And yes, if the best practices are urgent, obvious, easy to deploy, and low-risk, you can skip the pilot).

 

4. Does the individual have the materials (the WEALTH) they need to complete the objective?

Referring back to the Heath brothers’ metaphor in Switch, leaders may need to “shape the path.”  If the individual has the resources (financial, human, etc.) and tools to get the job done, I get out of the way.  If not, leaders must intervene to remove such obstacles.

Relationships are often the biggest obstacles to address since people must influence at a distance in order to move their projects forward.  Sometimes, leaders merely need to help associates identify stakeholders and partners who will be instrumental in making the project a success. However, due to ever-present politics or lack of positional authority, associates often need leaders to take more active role.

 

5. Does the individual have a feedback mechanism to assess their progress?

If an individual if proficient at establishing metrics (leading- and lagging- key performance indicators) and at defining milestones, I get out of the way.  If not, intervene by coaching them how to manage projects in this way so that they can lead independently in the future.

 

Try it out!

If you boil all this down, you only have to remember two things.  The first is that great leaders adapt their involvement to each individual in each situation.  The second is that great leaders teach their people to fish. When you do that, you empower generations of future leaders instead of simply empowering employees.

Create the Minimum Viable Presentation

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In the field of entrepreneurship, and more broadly in the arena of new product development, the term minimum viable product (MVP) is very much in vogue.  Coined by Frank Robinson and popularized by Eric Ries and Steve Blank, an MVP is a prototype with just enough features for early adopters to test and provide feedback to the developers.

I’m always on the hunt for new metaphors and it struck me today that this concept translates nicely into presentation design and knowledge-work in general. Instead of minimum viable product, consider the minimum viable presentation.

Imagine a person senior to you, perhaps your boss or another executive, asks you to create a presentation or requests some data.  They have asked you for a WHAT and maybe they were even prescriptive about HOW to assemble the information.  Regardless of their positional authority, you have the right and the obligation to work with them to understand the business objective (problem or opportunity) they are trying to address.

What strategic lever are they trying to pull?  What decision are they trying to make that will lead to incremental action?  In the course of problem solving to find the “WHY,” you may find: (a) the request was spot-on, (b) the request was not necessary, (c) the request was reasonable but there is a better way to address it, (d) there is an even bigger question you agree to go after.  By analogy, start-ups must identify the core customer need their product addresses.

With the “WHY” established, turn your attention to the designing (at least in broad brushstrokes) what the optimal solution would look like.  For the executive who requested the information from you, perhaps the solution is a mobile-friendly, real-time dashboard with alerting and visualization. For start-ups, the analogy is scoping the ultimate product to build if time and money were no object.

Finally park the optimal solution in the back of your mind and build the minimum viable presentation.  This is the presentation that answers just the WHY… no more and no less. Often, you do not need a presentation at all – a conversation, Excel spreadsheet, or email may suffice.  Even if you need to create slides, just address the WHY in the most efficient way possible.  As you build the “infrastructure” to answer the question, knowledge of the optimal solution tells you where to apply brute force and where to design for reuse or expansion.

Actionable Tips From Dave Paradi’s 2013 Annoying PowerPoint Survey

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With so many opinions expressed about public speaking (something I too am guilty of),  I was excited to see Dave Paradi’s fact-based survey exploring the most annoying behaviors of presenters.

With Dave’s permission, I have taken the annoyances he found and transformed them into actionable tips:

 

I. Content

– Have a clear, primary purpose (to inform, persuade, inspire, or entertain)

– Have a single message framed from the audience’s perspective as: To (what) so that (why/outcome/benefit). This will help eliminate information overload and ‘data dump.’

– Apply a narrative flow that supports your purpose & message

– Customize your content (at least to a degree) for your specific audience

 

II. Delivery

– Instead of reading text from slides, use them as a launching and landing point

– Limit the amount of time you spend facing the screen

– Rehearse to figure out what slides belong in your presentation. Delete or Appendix the rest.  Never skip slides.

– “Mute” your slide by going to black (hit the “b” key) when you want to focus your audience’s attention on you

– Use pauses to eliminate filler words

– Plan where you will stand and where you will move to (avoid standing projector’s line-of-sight)

 

III. Design

– Make sure text is large enough to be read easily by people seated in the back of the room

– Proofread your slides to eliminate typos

– Use short bursts of text (or bullets), not full sentences

– Use the simplest diagram possible to support/prove the message of a slide. (Tables are rarely the best choice.)

– Use a harmonious color palette and apply intentional use of contrast

– Avoid clip-art and random images that just dress-up a slide

– Use video sparingly and only when contextually relevant (and well tested in the environment/room you present in)

– Builds are fine but avoid decorative animation

 

IV. Odds & Ends

– Ask yourself if the topic warrants a presentation or could be handled more efficiently with an email or a conversation

– Recognize that design software can be used to create presentations or documents.  Create one or the other depending on where and how you will use it.

 

Try it Out!

Dave Paradi also has a couple great, free self-assessments.  Check them out at:

Best Practices for Effective PowerPoint Presentations Assessment

PowerPoint Skills Inventory

How Dan Pallotta Delivered His TED Talk

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Dan Pallotta is a humanitarian, author, speaker, social entrepreneur, and activist involved with countless charities.  His focus is primarily on heath and human services causes.  His TED2013 talk already has nearly 3 million views.  In this post, I deconstruct the factors that make his talk so popular.

 

Tip 1: Share an idea worth spreading

The most powerful TED Talks generally have a single idea worth spreading.  Having more than one tends to water down the message. However, Dan’s talk proves the exception to the rule by combining two intrinsically linked ideas where one is at the macro/societal level and the other is at the personal level.

a. (Macro/Societal) To scale charitable giving from 2% of GDP to 3% of GDP, focusing the resulting $150 billion increase on health & human services charities so that we can have real change

b. (Personal): To judge charities on the scale of their dreams, their progress, and their resources so that the not-for-profit sector can play a massive role on behalf of people in most desperate need

 

Tip 2: Build the narrative by raising and answering a series of questions

In How to Deliver a TED Talk, I outlined three structures for highly-effective presentations. One is the classical hero’s journey structure. The second is the inductive logic group which consists of an introduction, a series of supporting points that could be re-ordered without much loss of clarity, and a conclusion.  Dan went with the third approach which I call a logic chain.  A good way to spot a logic chain is that the speaker builds his or her narrative by raising and answering a series of questions that grow progressively more nuanced and profound.

 

[table ]

Element,Premise,Proof

Ice Breaker,(1) I’m here to talk about social innovation and social entrepreneurship. ,(2) I have triplets and am gay which is the most socially innovative thing I have done.

Introduction,(3) What we have been taught about the NFP sector is undermining the causes we love. , (none)

Part 1,(4) Does the NFP sector have a role to play in changing the world with the emergence of FP social business?, (5) FP sector is having a positive impact. But\, NFP establishes a markets for laughter\, compassion\, and love (ex. Center for the Developmentally Disabled) that creates a world that works for everyone.

Part 2,(6) But why is the NFP sector struggling to affect change in cancer\, homelessness\, poverty?, (7) The NFP rulebook is broken in 5 ways: ~~a.Incentive compensation viewed as parasitic\, so top MBAs stay away ~~b.Paid advertising viewed as wasteful overhead ~~c.Risk-taking is punished by reputation destruction ~~d.NFPs face expectation of instant (time) return-on-investment. ~~e. NFPs have no access to capital markets so few NFPs have achieved scale

Part 3,(8) Why do we impose these restrictions on NFP sector?,(9) Charity was way for Puritans to do penance at 5 cents on the dollar for their profit-seeking behavior. In 400 years\, nothing has intervened to change this.

Part 4,(10) How does this ideology get policed today?,(11) “This ideology gets policed by the question\, ‘What percentage of my donation goes to the cause versus overhead?’” We confuse morality with frugality.

Conclusion,(12a) To scale charitable giving from 2% of GDP to 3% of GDP\, focusing the  resulting $150 billion increase on health & human services charities so that  we can drive real change ~~(12b)  To assess charities on the scale of their dreams\, their progress\, and their resources so that the NFP sector can play a massive role on behalf of those most desperately in need, (none)

[/table]

(Note: NFP = Not-For-Profit; FP=For-Profit)

 

Tip 3:  Expose your passion and your emotion

Every speaker has a persona. The more their on-stage persona matches their off-stage persona, the more powerful the talk.  For the majority of his talk, Dan’s (genuine) tone is a thoughtful and concerned humanitarian.  At 14:45, his tone intensifies (genuinely) to outraged activist when he says, “On one day, all 350 of our great employees lost their jobs (pause to compose himself) because they were labeled as overhead.”

At 17:20, he makes one more (genuine) tone shift to hopeful visionary when he says, “The next time you are looking at a charity, don’t ask about the rate of their overhead. Ask about the scale of their dreams, their Apple, Google, Amazon scale dreams, how they measure their progress toward those dreams, and what resources they need to make them come true regardless of what the overhead is…”

 

Tip 4: Stay contextually relevant at all time

Dan’s talk is extremely powerful, but I have one tiny nit to pick.  Everything inside a talk should be contextually relevant to the idea worth spreading.  I am not a big fan of Ice-breakers at the beginning of talks.  They can work when they bridge the content of previous speakers to a new theme as Ken Robinson did in the beginning of his TED Talk.

At the beginning of his talk, Dan built rapport with his audience by introducing the audience to a photo of his children; but, in hindsight, his personal life did not have strong contextual relevance to the rest of his material.  Additionally, at the end of his talk, Dan used a video to ‘call-back’ his lovely children who said,  “That would be a real social innovation.”  To me, this ending felt formulaic and took away from the momentum he built.  While his kids are cute and touching, I did not feel they belonged in this talk – they might have been an effective addition if he were talking mainly about children’s charities.

Again, this was a small nit and other viewers could easily argue that his icebreaker and video clip ending were clever and emotionally effective.  Either way, his powerful talk earned him a standing ovation and, more importantly, will drive critical change in charitable giving.