The TED Fellow Program

The TED Fellows program brings to TED accomplished young people from around the world and from a variety of fields who would not ordinarily be able to afford TED. It's become much more than that. Under the very special mentorship of Tom Reilly it has become a tight supportive community.  There are 53 of them here in Banff and their camaraderie is palpable - and loud. At a TED Fellows main stage session, the TED Fellows clap the most and cheer the loudest for their colleagues. And if a speaker hesitates, or loses their composure, the clapping and cheering just accelerates and buoys them along. It's lovely to watch.

The TED Fellows presentations are some of the best of the conference. Future posts will describe some of these talks. But I can't talk about the Fellows without talking about the inimitable Tom Reilly.

Tom  runs the Fellows program. He is burly, energetic, brash, loud, charismatic, hilarious and completely irreverent. He used to give a hilarious stand-up comedy routine roasting the TED speakers at the end of the conference. I miss those days.

But Tom has a serious side and he has hefty responsibilities these days. He does an incredible job with the Fellows. Clearly the sense of community starts with him. All of the Fellows I have met describe Tom as changing their life. He is an extraordinary, inspiring person. He's my hero.

TEDx Global Forum

It's called the Global Forum and it is truly global. In my two days here I've interacted with people from Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Costa Rica, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, UK, and lots from across the US and Canada. Everybody here has hosted one or more TEDx events (up to 30 for one person), and they all behave like global citizens. An astonishing number are living outside their home country, the Canadian in Bangkok, the Italian in Japan, the Australian in Singapore, the Belgian in the Netherlands, the Brit in Poland, the German in India, the American in Bangladesh. Even those who still live in their home country have a global perspective and attitude and they're absolutely fascinating and invigorating.

The Forum has featured three major workshop breakouts around Passion, Purpose and Action. Many of the TEDx community are chafing at the bit to do more with the incredible platform represented by TEDx events. The TED team originally expected a handful of TEDx events a year, but there are now about 3,000. There were pictures of some really interesting ones. The one from Jeddah was both disturbing and inspiring: while a screen separated the women from the men in the audience, male and female speakers mixed on stage. I guess the good news is that at least the women got to go but disturbing to see the audience segregated at an event to spread ideas.

Because the TEDx experiment has been so successful, and so many people have several events under their belt already, people are eager to take the platform to the next level. To start with, one of our breakouts was about trying to capture what TEDx does now, and I think a young guy in our breakout room really nailed it "to spread local ideas globally and global ideas locally".

Then, on to what could be next. In the Action breakout session, many themes emerged. There was considerable support for  loosening the rules for TEDx organizers (tricky to do without risking the brand) with the feeling that something like TEDx LAB might let people test different approaches to explore what could work.

My own personal wish is that TED's passion for opening minds would spread beyond those who already think that way. If TED and TEDx could help more people to think with an open mind, rather than based on prejudice and unfounded myths, could it actually help the world be a better place. As one participant in our session put, could TEDx make a contribution to shining light on the pools of ignorance in the world. A lofty ambition, but that's the kind of thinking being bandied about here!

By the way, all of our badges mention three things people should ask us about. I chose Innovation, Travel and Blockchain for my badge. I keep getting asked to explain blockchain. Don Tapscott is one of the speakers here and he is also hosting a breakout session, so I think the requests for explanations will die down quickly once the expert who's written the book has elucidated the subject!

The X Factor

"One of the top ten jobs in the world"  - that's how TED's Chris Anderson described Astro Teller's job as leader of X, Google's moonshot factory. Moonshot because the projects are high-risk and high-opportunity, and factory because of the intent to operationalize.  The talk fit beautifully into TED's theme for this year's conference, Dream.



Teller laid out the rules at X:

• Dream Big: Look for huge problems that affect millions of people, then propose a radical solution based on a breakthrough technology. Google's driverless cars fit that frame. And Project Loon to use balloons to deliver highspeed Internet to remote locations looks very promising.
  
  
• Expect Failure: If you're going to dream, or innovate, you have to prepare for failure and ruthlessly kill failed projects. Otherwise you end up with what my friend Scott Anthony calls 'zombie projects', walking dead projects that suck resources and morale. X is said to have killed 100 projects over the last year. They killed vertical farming because of the inability to grow staple crops like rice and grains. 

• Fail Early: Innovation projects involve knocking down obstacles one by one, gaining information each time about how to proceed. Teller emphasized the importance of tackling the toughest constraint first so you can kill quickly before spending too much money. The moonshot to build a buoyant cargo ship was abandoned because building a prototype would have been too expensive. "You don't want to spend $200 million on your first data point"
• Celebrate Failure: Since acknowledging failure goes against human nature, X explicitly encourages such behaviour. When a project leader declares a project a failure, there's a big celebration - high fives, cheers, clapping and shouting. And, most importantly, a promotion.

These are all lessons I try to get across in my own innovation lectures. I'll certainly be using Teller's talk to help bring those lessons to life.

Teller was speaking at the opening session of 2016, which was live-streamed to a number of cinemas around the world. Our theatre in Toronto was sold out, perhaps a harbinger of more such events in the future.

TED in Canada

Well, I finally made it to TED after yesterday's fiasco at the airport. What a pleasure to arrive at Vancouver's spectacularly beautiful airport. Made me proud as a Canadian that all these TEDsters would be greeted with this beauty, and grateful their first impression of Canada didn't come from the Toronto airport.


The traditional TED banners on the street outside the convention centre have a maple leaf on them - no coincidence that TED's colours are red?

The main theatre is magnificent. I took a peak this afternoon and was in awe.  Specially architected for TED, the entire edifice was built in just a week. It feels very Canadian and very TED.  I heard people mentioning it felt more like the intimacy of Monterey (original home of TED) than Long Beach (where it was held for the last several years). As Chris Anderson said, having a totally empty space was both intimidating and inspiring, and the architects did a beautiful job.  I don't have a camera to give a full panoramic view, but here is the lovely space from several angles. There are comfortable and diverse seating areas all around, with a real feeling of openness and intimacy.

The entire space is built of wood, as you can see from this shot of the stairs, and you can smell the fresh wood! The interior stairs are equally interesting, covered in some sort of soft spongy carpeting that looks, and feels, like a forest floor.


The infamous TED clock that so thoroughly intimidates speakers is there, and bigger than ever. See it there reading 00 under the big screen?

Canadiana continued as Chris Hadfield earned a standing ovation with his lyrical description of the sense of wonder and fulfilment as he achieved his childhood dream of going into space, his fear when he went blind in one eye (and then two) on a space walk and  overcoming that fear because of training and relentless practice. That Canadian flag on his space suit was pretty special to Canadians in the audience, I'm sure.

He ended with a snippet of the Bowie song he made famous on YouTube here.

The decor theme for the party was very Canadian too.

World Toilet Day - What a Load of Crap

Did you notice that yesterday was UN World Toilet Day? Lack of sanitation is a big problem in the developing world.  According to the Gates Foundation, which has adopted sanitation as one of its key priorities, 40% of the developing world practises open defecation or has poor sanitation - that's 2.5 billion people - a direct cause of 1.5 million child deaths from diarrhea a year.

The Gates Foundation's 2012 Reinvent the Toilet competition awarded prizes to university researchers at California Institute of Technology, Loughborough University and University of Toronto and awarded second round grants to other institutions. A common theme of these toilets is to extract energy and clean water from human waste - win-win for sure.  See the Gates Foundation press release here.





For a great introduction to this topic, watch Rose George's witty and informative TED talk entitled Let's Talk Crap.

The New TED Stage

For me, one of the attractions of the TED 2014 conference was its location in Vancouver, on a stage specially constructed to optimize presentation of talks.   The designer David Rockwell gave an overview of the new stage on the Charlie Rose show here starting at 13:15.

One of (many) ways that Long Beach was less enjoyable than Monterey as the locale for TED was that the seats were uncomfortable.  You may think this is a frivolous criticism, but just try sitting from 8:30-6:30 for days on end.  I wasn't the only one who complained about the seating.

TED has always tried to encourage people to sit outside the main hall, watching the speakers on HD video while lounging on soft seating and a variety of other seating.  I for one never took advantage of that seating - there's an electricity in sitting in the main hall where speakers are live.  And it was a particular thrill when I sat in the onstage seating for one session.  It seems that the new design aims to combine a variety of seating right within the main hall.  I look forward to trying it out.  :-)

William and the Windmill

My friends Sandy and Archie went to see William and the Windmill and contributed this review:

William and the Windmill was an excellent film - very inspiring and a tribute to human ingenuity.  The story is narrated by his mentor from the US who helps William and ultimately gets him from his small town in Malawi to high school and then Dartmouth College in the US after a drought in Malawi put his farming family into hunger and desperation, so they had to take their son out of school.

William, a teenager, was inspired to find a solution to the problems of his family and his village.  He went to the library to continue his learning and found a book about energy.  As a result, he builds a windmill in his small town using locally scrounged materials like his dad's bicycle generator and bottle caps.  Later, he goes back to his home town, and everyone is seeking his advice.  He initiates the building of a new public school because of his passion for education.

When we think about how so many grandiose plans fail, this reminds us how simple low cost solutions championed and executed by local can make such a difference to people's lives.

We particularly liked watching William's reaction to the modern outside world - fascinated but not intimidated.  The film ends when William begins college so his future is still to be seen.

We gave the film a 5/5.  An added bonus was that the film was at our local Fox theatre in the beach, part of Hot Docs effort to expand the footprint of the Festival to new parts of Toronto.  Our only disappointment was that the film makers didn't show up, so we missed having a Q&A.

Note from Lib:  William' story has its origins in the William's talk at TED Global in Arusha Tanzania in 2007.  Tom Reilly on the TED team was instrumental in getting William's book published and was the executive producer of the film.  Participant Films, always attendees at TED, were also involved.  Nice story of TED involvement in getting a story wide publicity. 

TED Moves to Vancouver

There was blockbuster news this week with the announcement of TED's move to Vancouver with TED Active in Whistler, at least for the next two years.  The choice of Vancouver is not all that surprising when you think about it.  Chris Anderson, TED's owner and curator, has a place in Whistler, so he's clearly familiar with the area.  Also, TED's logistics are managed by Vancouver-based Procreative Design Works, owned by sisters Janet and Katherine McCartney.

Of course, there is more behind it than convenience.  At the 2012 conference, there was quite a buzz of discontent: the conference was too big, it was getting somewhat impersonal, the seats were dreadfully uncomfortable (when the program run 8:30-6:30 for four days and you've paid that much to be there, a back ache is really irritating), the conference was dividing into two classes of citizens, those who'd paid the regular (stiff) price, and patrons, who'd paid double and got in before the doors opened, and got all the best seats.  In short, old-timers who'd been to Monterey were yearning for the old locale.  And for the first time in my memory, the 2013 conference was not sold out by the time the 2012 conference got under way.  Because you usually have to confirm for the next conference before the previous one begins, it creates a long lag time for feedback about abating demand for the TED team.

Clearly, on the 30th anniversary next year, TED is working to overcome that softening of demand.  The conference will have 200 fewer paid attendees, addressing one of the currents of discontent and incidentally creating fewer seats to fill.

Vancouver is well known as one of the most beautiful cities in the world and the convention centre, as you can see on the right, is new and gorgeous.  Moreover, they're building (with support from Vancouver apparently) a custom-designed-for-talk theatre to "maximize the impact of talks, permitting multiple configurations for sitting, listening and connecting with the speaker".  This could add destination pizazz.  Long Beach is not exactly gorgeous as Monterey was.  Chris says they're also inviting back the 100 best TED speakers of all time, which sounds pretty darned exciting.  Apparently we're going to be able to vote for who those 100 are.  I skipped TED 2013, but I think I'll be back for 2014.  I wonder how many others will be like me.

This is considered a major coup for Vancouver, as described in this Vancouver Sun article.  A senior Vice President of Canadian Tourism was summoned to Vancouver to participate in the talks and the agreement was kept under tight wraps until announcement day.   The deal is for two years.  I'm sure  the city will be fighting to keep the conference there beyond the two years.

TED and the Enlightenment

TED's just hit a billion!  One billion views of those magical talks about big ideas.  In a world characterized by an insatiable appetite for salacious gossip about celebrities, TED talks have been viewed one billion times.  Wow.

TED set out to celebrate Ideas Worth Spreading.  And, as they say on the web site, "an idea, when received by a prepared mind, can have extraordinary impact".

Having just studied the Enlightenment in my World History course on Coursera, this TED milestone really got me thinking.  Everything about TED echoes the intellectual ferment in 18th Century Europe known as the Enlightenment*.

Enlightenment thinkers believed there were natural laws - about science, politics, technology, sociology -  that governed the way the world worked, and that those laws were discoverable by men who were all born with the ability to reason. (It took longer for general acknowledgement that women might also be capable of reason!)  One could/should rely on these natural laws - determined through observation and experimentation - to explain the world rather than relying on religious or classical texts or absolute rulers.  Men should be free and should participate in governing themselves.

Moreover, it was your duty to spread these ideas and influence everyone to live by the tenets discovered. That spread was enabled by the increased availability of books, the establishment of scientific societies, publication of scientific journals, and the collision of ideas and debate in informal settings like coffee houses and salons.  Ideas flowed both geographically - indeed bringing those ideas to other parts of the world was used as a justification for colonization - and vertically through different strata of society with the increase in literacy.  As our professor put it, ideas were packaged up for easy dissemination and thus became commoditized.

TED's dedication to Ideas Worth Spreading is highly evocative of these Enlightenment ideas.   Clearly, there's the dedication to ideas, from all spheres of human endeavour.  And there is a passion to spread those ideas to as many people as possible.  TED.com enabled the spread of those ideas well beyond the confines of the fortunate few who attend TED.  TEDx conferences empowered people who love ideas to create local conferences, and add to the cauldron of ideas that is the TED community.

Bravo TED and Chris Anderson, whose passion is behind this incredible phenomenon known as TED.

*  Here's a link to a description of what Coursera's all about.  And you can look here, here, here and here for my feeble efforts to summarize lectures to help consolidate my own learning.  I'm way behind.

Coursera and Peer Evaluation

Readers of this blog know how enthusiastic I am about taking a course on world history on Coursera.  I've loved learning the history, and the experience has provoked many thoughts about the future of education (see this post).  Education is undergoing the process of disruptive innovation, and it's about to explode.

I've just discovered a TED talk by Daphne Koller, one of the founders of Coursera from TED Global this summer.  It outlines some of the motivations of the founders of Coursera and talks more about data on the efficacy of online teaching.

She quoted Thomas Friedman's article in the New York Times:

Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. 

How true that is.

MOOCs (massive online open courses) in the social sciences must figure out a way to include written work as part of the course.  For a class of more 80,000 students, like The History of the World Since 1300,  what is desperately necessary - evaluation of those essays - meets what is suddenly possible - mass technology-enabled anonymous peer evaluation.

But can peer evaluation be effective and fair?  Koller showed some fascinating data on peer evaluation (which she acknowledged was based on relatively small samples).  Here's her chart of the very high correlation between peer grades and the grade a teacher would offer.

Even more surprising was the chart showing that self-evaluation correlated even more highly with the teacher grade (given some software that prohibited perfect scores).

I'm eager to see what my peers think of my first essay handed in a few days ago.  Coursera also asks students to self-evaluate their essays.  Coursera is so cleverly designed that I'm sure this data will all be collected and form the basis of future publications on the effectiveness of peer evaluation.  It is truly a new age!

Daniel Kahneman

I first heard Nobel-prize-winning Daniel Kahneman at TED a couple of years ago, when he talked about the difference between experience and the memory of experience (see my post here and watch the TED video here).  Kahneman is a great thinker, and delightful to listen to.  He introduces ideas in a very gentle, intuitive way and takes rather simple and intuitive concepts and formalizes them.  As you reflect on these ideas, their significance grows and sheds light on other things you've observed.  So I signed up quickly for his talk in the Rotman Speaker Series this week. 

In this talk, Kahneman was presenting ideas from his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.  He described two modes of thinking, which he calls System 1 and System 2.

System 1 is all about fast thinking; in the blink of an eye we exploit our past experience, our intuitive reactions and our emotions to come to an answer.  We make all kinds of decisions without even knowing we're making them, using our automatic thinking processes.  It's good to have System 1 thinking, because it would be too exhausting to think through everything with System 2.  For instance, we judge a person's mood by looking at their expression unconsciously and automatically.  We handle the myriad decisions around driving a car in a sort of auto-pilot mode.  When someone says 2+2, we immediately respond 4.

System 2 is more deliberative and thoughtful.  It is more logical.  We are aware that we are thinking.  But it takes much more energy and time.  We would use System 2 to come up with an answer to 17x24. 

Kahneman points out that people are lazy, and we often use the effortless System 1 to answer a question, avoiding the thoughtful effort of thinking it through with System 2.  Take the old chestnut question about a bat and a ball:

A bat and a ball together cost $1.10.

The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.

How much does the ball cost?

Most people whip out the answer ten cents, without taking time to check the answer, which is patently wrong.  Ten cents is a System 1 answer, given instinctively and without thinking.  Since System 1 thinking is easy, we often don’t apply System 2 thinking when we should and we don’t even use it to check our System 1 thinking.  Kahneman pointed out that giving the wrong answer to that question is not a case of ignorance – even students at MIT get it wrong about 50% of the time, and at some universities up to 85% get it wrong.

When a question is really hard, and demands effortful System 2 thinking, we often substitute an easier question and use System 1 to answer that question.  He described an experiment where students were asked “How happy are you?”  It’s a fairly hard question to come up with an answer to how happy you are because it involves so many factors.  After answering this question, students were asked “How many dates did you have last month?”  This is a relatively easy, quantitative question with a single answer. When asked in this order, there was no correlation between the answers to the two questions.  However, if the students were asked first about the number of dates and then about how happy they were, there was a high correlation.  The students were using number of dates as a proxy for the happiness question – in other words switching to an easier question and using System 1 to answer it.

System 1 is extremely weak at dealing with statistics – it prefers to deal in stories.  And the more coherent the story, the more (unfounded) confidence we have in our System 1  conclusions.  Kahneman described an experiment where people were asked the following two questions before taking a trip, around a time when there had been significant news about terrorist activities:

How much would you pay for travel insurance that pays $100,000 in case of death for any reason?

How much would you pay for travel insurance that pays $100,000 in case of death in a terrorist incident?

People are willing to pay more for the second type of insurance.  The explanation is that System 1 thinking is involved in the second question – the words ‘terrorist incident’ arouse emotions that cause us to make an intuitive System 1 response, although paying more for the second insurance than the first insurance is not a rational decision.

Kahneman told a cute story about himself.  He ran into a colleague in a small hotel in Australia, and was greatly surprised at the coincidence.  What’s the probability, after all?  Two weeks later he met the same colleague at the theatre in London.  Clearly the second incident had even lower probability.  But Kahneman observed he was less surprised in London – he’d already laid in the experience that he tended to meet this colleague in unusual places.  His reaction was based on System 1.

People in marketing understand this dichotomy.  For better or for worse, appealing to System 1's intuition and emotion can be more compelling than appealing to System 2's logic.  The same is true for fundraising: a pure System 2 appeal is not likely to be effective for most people.

For me, Kahneman’s message was rather discouraging.  It put more scientific evidence around what we often observe when people make decisions solely on emotion, undeterred by facts, whether in response to a politician or a commercial.  When Kahneman was asked how one might train children to be more reflective and use System 2  thinking more often, his only suggestion was to lead by example.   So, get out there and use System 2 thinking as often as possible.

Ideas worth spreading

While in Jaipur we met up for a coffee with a delightful young man, Ajit, who had mounted TEDx Jaipur last year and has another conference being planned for this year. Ajit had been introduced by Becca, who works for TED and is a former MBA student of mine, and co-organizer of a TEDx conference in Toronto last year.

Ajit works in the family business making technology equipment for the dairy industry in India and other southeastern Asian countries. What a delightful young man, full of enthusiasm spreading good ideas, and bringing together people who are interested in ideas. He has some great plans for his conference to keep attendees totally engaged, and some fascinating speakers already lined up. He was keen to hear what I'd learned as curator of TEDxIBYork last year, and we had a lively discussion of what makes for a good TEDx and how to wring the best out of speakers. It was great to hear what he'd learned and how he experience differed a bit between Canada and India.

Chris Anderson has truly succeeded in his vision of making TED a global community, when you can walk into a foreign country and have instant rapport with someone who shares a passion for expanding their knowledge and impressions of the world and for ideas worth spreading.

Acclamations for TED, TED.com and TEDx

There have been a couple of articles recently about TED and TEDx that people might find interesting reading.  The New York Times article talks about the incredible spread of TEDx conferences and how TED makes learning exciting.  It's to that thirst for learning that the Times attributes the incredible popularity of the TEDx concept.  The Fast Company article argues that if you were to set out to create the perfect Harvard University today, you might just do it by bringing together great ideas and making them openly available to everyone, which is what TED.com is all about. 

Interesting reading.

Arriving at TED

Arrived at TED this year with a touch of nostalgia - this is to be the last TED in Monterey, breaking a 20-year tradition. Chris Anderson, the curator, believes that the facility in Long Beach will retain the intimate feeling of current TED location, yet accommodate more people in the Main Hall, so all attendees can have a Main Hall pass.

The program guide this year has been designed to meet C2C goals. C2C stands for Cradle to Cradle, a concept popularized by William McDonough's book of that name. C2C aims to create production methods that involve not reduced waste but are essentially waste-free: technical components are designed to be reused with no loss in quality and biological components to be composted or consumed. McDonough spoke at the first TED conference I attended, and his presentation still rings in my mind. Clearly he made a huge impression on other TEDsters, as more and more things at TED are adhering to C2C principles. The pencil tucked into the program guide is equally interesting - made from recycled Chinese newspaper rolled around the graphite and stuck with nontoxic soy-based glue. It lasts 2-3 times longer than wood ones.

The gift bag is also made of post-consumer recycled beverage bottles and there were 800 different colour combinations to choose from. The bag was not as full as last year's gluttonous collection. While my ecological and logistical (how can I ever get this stuff all back home?) head agrees with that, the child in me misses the Christmas morning feeling of past conferences when it could take literally hours to go through all the gifts.

Since I'm fighting a stomach flu, I skipped the party last night, although I did take my scheduled test drive in a Lexus hybrid (smooth!), grabbed a smoothie from the Google snack bar which is here again, and hit the bed by 7 pm. Keep your fingers crossed that I stay well - this conference takes stamina!

Anticipating TED

As the time for TED draws nearer, my excitement starts to build.

This year, I've found an increasing number of people who know just what a treat I'm heading to. The availability of TED speakers online has definitely increased the number of people who can appreciate the TED experience.

I've just finished reading one of theTED book club selections, The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The title derives from the notion that until you've seen a black swan, you tend to believe that all swans are by definition white. While seeing nothing but white swans for decades doesn't prove that all swans are white, seeing one black swan does prove the negative. Similarly, the fact that the farmer has fed the turkey every day and treated it well, doesn't prepare the turkey for the fateful day just before Thanksgiving when the pattern changes dramatically, unexpectedly and catastrophically - the turkey's black swan day. These Black Swan Events, while rare, have a huge impact on the course of history, yet people tend to underestimate the likelihood and magnitude of them. This is exacerbated by a very flawed belief that most things follow a Guassian (normal or Bell curve) distribution suggesting that most events or observations cluster around the mean. This is only true for a few categories of things.

The book was quite dense and at times bleak to read, and Taleb was not inhibited by any tendency to soften his works when he described economics practitioners he didn't respect! I wouldn't be surprised to see some real fireworks when he speaks at TED.

I just saw a black swan on a visit to the Phoenix Wildlife Zoo and thought it would be great to include in this post.