The Speechwriter

The Labour Party Conference v The UK Salsa Congress

In the last few weeks I have been to the Labour Party Conference and the UK Salsa Congress. Both events took place in Bournemouth. It was interesting to compare the two. You chat a lot at the Labour Conference, but the performance standards are poor. At the Salsa Conference you held on to people in the lessons, but there wasn't much conversation. Some of the dance performances are breathtaking, and oddly moving.

The compère of the Salsa UK event was a bit of a disappointment, as was the compère of the Labour Party Conference, Gordon Brown.

To witness the skill of handling an audience and leading people to places they haven't been before, you had to go to the salsa conference. One reggaeton lesson by Elisa Aloe I will not forget for a while. She was very confident public speaker and she got about 150 novices to shake bottoms, wave their hands in the air and cavort across the room.

Then Kwenda Lima, a Cape Verdian dance teacher, got about 100 people to hold hands then hug each other, when preparing to give a lesson on 'kizomba'. In 'kizomba' you have to connect directly with your partner, so you're basically squashed together.

Both lessons left you with a strange euphoria. I like the idea of dance teachers being healers and mystics. Isn't that what we want from leaders? The world was somehow different after these lessons. And we didn't even take any drugs.

Contemporary politics could never do that.

Memorising Your Speech

I'm reading a very intriguing book called, Don't Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor. It's about how to train dogs and dolphins using reinforcement, stimulus and shaping. But guess what, it works on humans, too. (Though Karen says the best results come when you don't reveal what you're trying to do to the subject).

She talks about behaviour chains. For example, if you go to a dog show, you'll see dogs perform half-a-dozen different tasks, one after the other. These are done in response to cues.

Pryor applies this lesson to memorising speeches. Since you can't reinforce a subject if it doesn't recognize the cue, behaviour chains should be learnt backwards.

So if you're memorising a speech, you should break it up into five parts, and memorise the last part first. Memorizing a text from the beginning means you're ploughing from easy to more difficult. If you learn the end first, you're always moving from weakness to strength. And it's supposedly more pleasurable because you are reinforcing. I shall try it.

Finding the Source of Quotations

Every now and again if I find a good quotation, I do a Google on the person who said it. Sometimes you turn up some treasure, like Laurence J Peter, an educator and "hierarchiologist". Here are some of his aperçus:

You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. Don't let yourself indulge in vain wishes.

Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.

The hardest thing in life is to learn which bridge to cross and which to burn.

Don't believe in miracles - depend on them.

If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Don't Try This At Home

I really admire David Cameron for the way he spoke at the Conservative Party Conference today without notes. He kept it going for about an hour, without faltering. He told lots of stories and he revealed things about himself.

His speech was a lot more immediate than Gordon Brown's last week. He did have a go at Gordon for repeating the same old stuff, though I couldn't help noticing that a lot of Dave's stuff was quite familiar also.

One problem with this quiet approach was that it didn't make compelling listening on the TV. I snoozed off at one point on the sofa, and a friend I called up did the same. A speech needs theatrical energy to keep us interested.

Full marks for courage, though. I once memorised a speech for a humorous speech contest and a couple of moments into the talk my mind went blank. I felt like Munch's The Scream. I recovered but never again would I take that risk.

I Do Stories

Every now and again you make lucky discoveries on the internet.

I've found Professor Jay Conger of the Henry R. Kravis Research Chair in Leadership Studies, Claremont McKenna College, speaking up for what I do.

Click here to see his video

He explains how important it is when you communicate with people to tell appropriate stories which illustrate your points. People just do not remember PowerPoint slides or dull old statistics. You need to tell entertaining stories. The Harvard Business School site looks excellent. I found it when I was checking out Bland's Law which was featured in The Times. Christopher Bland, Chairman of BT, explains his observation that the amount of skulduggery in an organisation is in direct proportion to the nobility of its goals.

Click here