Technology refers to any story that has some form of technology in the narrative.

Mark Lovett

Hans and Ola Rosling: How not to be ignorant about the world @ TEDSalon Berlin

/in , , , , /by

I had the pleasure of attending a special TED event in 2014. TEDSalon Berlin was just a one day affair, yet it featured a number of compelling talks that served as examples of impactful stories on global issues. This post is an analysis of a talk given by Hans Rosling & Ola Rosling on how knowledge, or a lack of knowledge, shapes our view of the world. For a better future, we need to understand today.

Watch Hans and Ola Rosling’s TED Talk. The numbers that are being presented represent serious topics, yet the focus in not on digging into the trends, but to highlight how our perceptions about these trends are so often wrong. It’s a fun talk to watch, which doesn’t often happen with statistics, yet inspires us to use caution before jumping to conclusions.

Transcript

(my notes in red)

Hans Rosling: I’m going to ask you three multiple choice questions. Use this device. Use this device to answer. The first question is, how did the number of deaths per year from natural disaster, how did that change during the last century? Did it more than double, did it remain about the same in the world as a whole, or did it decrease to less than half? Please answer A, B or C. I see lots of answers. This is much faster than I do it at universities. They are so slow. They keep thinking, thinking, thinking. Oh, very, very good.

Quite different from the reserved style of most TED speakers, Hans brings the energy level up immediately with the tone, volume, and passion in his voice. The digital interaction with the audience also differentiates this talk from a simple narration and makes the audience a character within the narration.

And we go to the next question. So how long did women 30 years old in the world go to school: seven years, five years or three years? A, B or C? Please answer.

And we go to the next question. In the last 20 years, how did the percentage of people in the world who live in extreme poverty change? Extreme poverty — not having enough food for the day. Did it almost double, did it remain more or less the same, or did it halve? A, B or C?

Now, answers. You see, deaths from natural disasters in the world, you can see it from this graph here, from 1900 to 2000. In 1900, there was about half a million people who died every year from natural disasters: floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruption, whatever, droughts. And then, how did that change?

Gapminder asked the public in Sweden. This is how they answered. The Swedish public answered like this: Fifty percent thought it had doubled, 38 percent said it’s more or less the same, 12 said it had halved.

This is the best data from the disaster researchers, and it goes up and down, and it goes to the Second World War, and after that it starts to fall and it keeps falling and it’s down to much less than half. The world has been much, much more capable as the decades go by to protect people from this, you know. So only 12 percent of the Swedes know this.

Hans uses a chart to map the answers for the first question based on a research study, then displays the actual answer as a line which proceeds across the chart along the time axis. It’s a powerful way to overlay a statistical answer in conjunction with a prediction of the answer.

So I went to the zoo and I asked the chimps. The chimps don’t watch the evening news, so the chimps, they choose by random, so the Swedes answer worse than random. Now how did you do? That’s you. You were beaten by the chimps. But it was close. You were three times better than the Swedes, but that’s not enough. You shouldn’t compare yourself to Swedes. You must have higher ambitions in the world.

Adding humor to a statistical story block isn’t the easiest thing to do, but Hans is a natural comedian alongside his talent at following the science. Can you insert a lighthearted comedic moment while sharing data? Some topics don’t lend themselves to humor, so be mindful.

Let’s look at the next answer here: women in school. Here, you can see men went eight years. How long did women go to school? Well, we asked the Swedes like this, and that gives you a hint, doesn’t it? The right answer is probably the one the fewest Swedes picked, isn’t it? Let’s see, let’s see. Here we come. Yes, yes, yes, women have almost caught up. This is the U.S. public. And this is you. Here you come. Ooh. Well, congratulations, you’re twice as good as the Swedes, but you don’t need me —

So how come? I think it’s like this, that everyone is aware that there are countries and there are areas where girls have great difficulties. They are stopped when they go to school, and it’s disgusting. But in the majority of the world, where most people in the world live, most countries, girls today go to school as long as boys, more or less. That doesn’t mean that gender equity is achieved, not at all. They still are confined to terrible, terrible limitations, but schooling is there in the world today. Now, we miss the majority. When you answer, you answer according to the worst places, and there you are right, but you miss the majority.

Beyond the numbers themselves, and how different groups faired when predicting, Hans offers an insight as to why so many people got the answer wrong. We tend to be more aware of where problems exist, not successes. He doesn’t mention it, but in my experience that’s because the news focuses on problems over successes. I’d like to see that topic analyzed in parallel, but that would make for a much longer talk.

What about poverty? Well, it’s very clear that poverty here was almost halved, and in U.S., when we asked the public, only five percent got it right. And you? Ah, you almost made it to the chimps. That little, just a few of you! There must be preconceived ideas, you know. And many in the rich countries, they think that oh, we can never end extreme poverty. Of course they think so, because they don’t even know what has happened. The first thing to think about the future is to know about the present.

This last line is a fundamental perspective that Hans is bringing into this talk – that we need to know about the present and understand what is really going on now in order to consider what the future might look like.

These questions were a few of the first ones in the pilot phase of the Ignorance Project in Gapminder Foundation that we run, and it was started, this project, last year by my boss, and also my son, Ola Rosling. He’s cofounder and director, and he wanted, Ola told me we have to be more systematic when we fight devastating ignorance. So already the pilots reveal this, that so many in the public score worse than random, so we have to think about preconceived ideas, and one of the main preconceived ideas is about world income distribution.

Look here. This is how it was in 1975. It’s the number of people on each income, from one dollar a day. See, there was one hump here, around one dollar a day, and then there was one hump here somewhere between 10 and 100 dollars. The world was two groups. It was a camel world, like a camel with two humps, the poor ones and the rich ones, and there were fewer in between.

Continuing with his fun approach to numbers, Hans uses a prop to not only point at the graph behind him, but to elicit a laugh from the audience. Props are an old trick, but you don’t see them so often anymore, so it’s a refreshing change.

But look how this has changed: As I go forward, what has changed, the world population has grown, and the humps start to merge. The lower humps merged with the upper hump, and the camel dies and we have a dromedary world with one hump only. The percent in poverty has decreased. Still it’s appalling that so many remain in extreme poverty. We still have this group, almost a billion, over there, but that can be ended now.

The challenge we have now is to get away from that, understand where the majority is, and that is very clearly shown in this question. We asked, what is the percentage of the world’s one-year-old children who have got those basic vaccines against measles and other things that we have had for many years: 20, 50 or 80 percent?

Now, this is what the U.S. public and the Swedish answered. Look at the Swedish result: you know what the right answer is. Who the heck is a professor of global health in that country? Well, it’s me. It’s me. It’s very difficult, this. It’s very difficult.

However, Ola’s approach to really measure what we know made headlines, and CNN published these results on their web and they had the questions there, millions answered, and I think there were about 2,000 comments, and this was one of the comments. “I bet no member of the media passed the test,” he said.

So Ola told me, “Take these devices. You are invited to media conferences. Give it to them and measure what the media know.” And ladies and gentlemen, for the first time, the informal results from a conference with U.S. media. And then, lately, from the European Union media. You see, the problem is not that people don’t read and listen to the media. The problem is that the media doesn’t know themselves. What shall we do about this, Ola? Do we have any ideas?

Ola Rosling: Yes, I have an idea, but first, I’m so sorry that you were beaten by the chimps. Fortunately, I will be able to comfort you by showing why it was not your fault, actually. Then, I will equip you with some tricks for beating the chimps in the future. That’s basically what I will do.

But first, let’s look at why are we so ignorant, and it all starts in this place. It’s Hudiksvall. It’s a city in northern Sweden. It’s a neighborhood where I grew up, and it’s a neighborhood with a large problem. Actually, it has exactly the same problem which existed in all the neighborhoods where you grew up as well. It was not representative. Okay? It gave me a very biased view of how life is on this planet. So this is the first piece of the ignorance puzzle. We have a personal bias.

The talk pivots in two respects at this point. Hans give the floor to his son, Ola, and it shifts from demonstrating that the public and media has a lack of awareness when it comes to important statistics, to explaining why that is and what can be done about it.

It’s pretty much at the half way mark, which is common in a problem / solution style talk. It’s important that your audience have a solid understanding of your topic before you present your idea for creating better outcomes in the future.

We have all different experiences from communities and people we meet, and on top of this, we start school, and we add the next problem. Well, I like schools, but teachers tend to teach outdated worldviews, because they learned something when they went to school, and now they describe this world to the students without any bad intentions, and those books, of course, that are printed are outdated in a world that changes. And there is really no practice to keep the teaching material up to date. So that’s what we are focusing on. So we have these outdated facts added on top of our personal bias.

What happens next is news, okay? An excellent journalist knows how to pick the story that will make headlines, and people will read it because it’s sensational. Unusual events are more interesting, no? And they are exaggerated, and especially things we’re afraid of. A shark attack on a Swedish person will get headlines for weeks in Sweden. So these three skewed sources of information were really hard to get away from.

Having presented the reasons for our general lack of knowledge, Ola uses a slide to help focus the audience’s mind on those three topics – Personal bias, Outdated facts, and News bias. The subject is far more complex than this, but for a talk under 20 minutes, it’s important to direct your narrative to the most important ideas. See if you can do that in three or less.

They kind of bombard us and equip our mind with a lot of strange ideas, and on top of it we put the very thing that makes us humans, our human intuition. It was good in evolution. It helped us generalize and jump to conclusions very, very fast. It helped us exaggerate what we were afraid of, and we seek causality where there is none, and we then get an illusion of confidence where we believe that we are the best car drivers, above the average. Everybody answered that question, “Yeah, I drive cars better.”

Okay, this was good evolutionarily, but now when it comes to the worldview, it is the exact reason why it’s upside down. The trends that are increasing are instead falling, and the other way around, and in this case, the chimps use our intuition against us, and it becomes our weakness instead of our strength. It was supposed to be our strength, wasn’t it?

So how do we solve such problems? First, we need to measure it, and then we need to cure it. So by measuring it we can understand what is the pattern of ignorance. We started the pilot last year, and now we’re pretty sure that we will encounter a lot of ignorance across the whole world, and the idea is really to scale it up to all domains or dimensions of global development, such as climate, endangered species, human rights, gender equality, energy, finance.

All different sectors have facts, and there are organizations trying to spread awareness about these facts. So I’ve started actually contacting some of them, like WWF and Amnesty International and UNICEF, and asking them, what are your favorite facts which you think the public doesn’t know?

Okay, I gather those facts. Imagine a long list with, say, 250 facts. And then we poll the public and see where they score worst. So we get a shorter list with the terrible results, like some few examples from Hans, and we have no problem finding these kinds of terrible results. Okay, this little shortlist, what are we going to do with it?

Well, we turn it into a knowledge certificate, a global knowledge certificate, which you can use, if you’re a large organization, a school, a university, or maybe a news agency, to certify yourself as globally knowledgeable. Basically meaning, we don’t hire people who score like chimpanzees. Of course you shouldn’t. So maybe 10 years from now, if this project succeeds, you will be sitting in an interview having to fill out this crazy global knowledge.

Part one of the solution is to create a knowledge certificate…

So now we come to the practical tricks. How are you going to succeed? There is, of course, one way, which is to sit down late nights and learn all the facts by heart by reading all these reports. That will never happen, actually. Not even Hans thinks that’s going to happen. People don’t have that time. People like shortcuts, and here are the shortcuts. We need to turn our intuition into strength again. We need to be able to generalize. So now I’m going to show you some tricks where the misconceptions are turned around into rules of thumb.

Part two of the solution is how to achieve that knowledge…

Let’s start with the first misconception. This is very widespread. Everything is getting worse. You heard it. You thought it yourself. The other way to think is, most things improve. So you’re sitting with a question in front of you and you’re unsure. You should guess “improve.” Okay? Don’t go for the worse. That will help you score better on our tests. That was the first one.

There are rich and poor and the gap is increasing. It’s a terrible inequality. Yeah, it’s an unequal world, but when you look at the data, it’s one hump. Okay? If you feel unsure, go for “the most people are in the middle.” That’s going to help you get the answer right.

Now, the next preconceived idea is first countries and people need to be very, very rich to get the social development like girls in school and be ready for natural disasters. No, no, no. That’s wrong. Look: that huge hump in the middle already have girls in school. So if you are unsure, go for the “the majority already have this,” like electricity and girls in school, these kinds of things. They’re only rules of thumb, so of course they don’t apply to everything, but this is how you can generalize.

Let’s look at the last one. If something, yes, this is a good one, sharks are dangerous. No — well, yes, but they are not so important in the global statistics, that is what I’m saying. I actually, I’m very afraid of sharks. So as soon as I see a question about things I’m afraid of, which might be earthquakes, other religions, maybe I’m afraid of terrorists or sharks, anything that makes me feel, assume you’re going to exaggerate the problem. That’s a rule of thumb. Of course there are dangerous things that are also great. Sharks kill very, very few. That’s how you should think.

With these four rules of thumb, you could probably answer better than the chimps, because the chimps cannot do this. They cannot generalize these kinds of rules. And hopefully we can turn your world around and we’re going to beat the chimps. Okay? That’s a systematic approach.

Ola provides four methods of improving your odds when it comes to guessing trend lines, but are you convinced they will work? I’m not speculating either way. I’m simply asking the question because if you’re creating a problem / solution, idea-driven narrative, what will matter most is whether the audience buys into your idea.

Now the question, is this important? Yeah, it’s important to understand poverty, extreme poverty and how to fight it, and how to bring girls in school. When we realize that actually it’s succeeding, we can understand it. But is it important for everyone else who cares about the rich end of this scale? I would say yes, extremely important, for the same reason. If you have a fact-based worldview of today, you might have a chance to understand what’s coming next in the future.

We’re going back to these two humps in 1975. That’s when I was born, and I selected the West. That’s the current EU countries and North America. Let’s now see how the rest and the West compares in terms of how rich you are. These are the people who can afford to fly abroad with an airplane for a vacation. In 1975, only 30 percent of them lived outside EU and North America. But this has changed, okay?

So first, let’s look at the change up till today, 2014. Today it’s 50/50. The Western domination is over, as of today. That’s nice. So what’s going to happen next? Do you see the big hump? Did you see how it moved? I did a little experiment. I went to the IMF, International Monetary Fund, website. They have a forecast for the next five years of GDP per capita. So I can use that to go five years into the future, assuming the income inequality of each country is the same.

I did that, but I went even further. I used those five years for the next 20 years with the same speed, just as an experiment what might actually happen. Let’s move into the future. In 2020, it’s 57 percent in the rest. In 2025, 63 percent. 2030, 68.

And in 2035, the West is outnumbered in the rich consumer market. These are just projections of GDP per capita into the future. Seventy-three percent of the rich consumers are going to live outside North America and Europe. So yes, I think it’s a good idea for a company to use this certificate to make sure to make fact-based decisions in the future.

It gets a bit heavy with the rapid fire numbers towards the end, and while I come away with the impression that, once again, my assumptions were wrong, I’m not sure that I come away with the feeling that the certificate is a good idea. That’s largely due to the fact that the certificate itself was not fully explained.

One of the challenges that you’ll deal with in presenting an idea with impact is getting the audience to understand both the problem and solution in a short period of time. In this case, my view is that accomplishing that task would need twice the amount of time.

This is where rehearsing in front of other people becomes extremely valuable. Without telling your audience what your talk is about, just present it, then ask them what they thought the talk was about and ask for their opinion as to whether your talk shifted their perception. If people are unclear at the end, another editing cycle is called for.

18:39
Thank you very much.

[Note: all comments inserted into this transcript are my opinions, not those of the speaker, the TED organization, nor anyone else on the planet. In my view, each story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these analytical posts is to inspire a storyteller to become a storylistener, and in doing so, make their stories more impactful.]

Learn more about the coaching process or
contact me to discuss your storytelling goals!

â—†

Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates!

Copyright Storytelling with Impact – All rights reserved

Mark Lovett

James Green: 3 moons and a planet that could have alien life @ TED Talks Live

/in , , , /by

TED Talks Live were held at The Town Hall Theater in NYC, in November of 2015. I had the pleasure of attending all six nights to hear speakers present impactful Ideas Worth Spreading. This post is an analysis of a talk by James Green about a planet and three moons within our solar system that may be home to lifeforms of some sort.

Watch James’ TED Talk. Most science talks are based on research performed in a laboratory. Hypotheses are codified, tests performed, and the results published. But once we leave the earth, the concept is a bit different. While any scientific discovery involves speculation, this factor becomes more prevalent off planet.

If your story involves science, and you’re thinking that science can’t be fun or it won’t seem exciting, this is a talk that will convince you otherwise. It’s a brilliant example of how technical information can be brought to life.

Transcript

(my notes in red)

Is there life beyond Earth in our solar system?

Asking a rhetorical question can serve as a powerful opening. As a reminder, rhetorical questions are asked in order to make a point and/or stimulate the thought process of a listener. It’s not meant to solicit an answer. In this case, James asks a question that’s been asked for thousands of years, and it’s one that most of us would love to have an answer to.

This question provides a physical frame of reference – not on earth, but still within our own solar system. Rhetorical questions can take us back in time, or into the future. Phrases such as ‘Imagine you are…’, or ‘What if…’ signals the audience that you want them to change their perspective away from the here and now. In doing so, it sparks their imagination.

Note: In general, I’m not a fan of speakers asking literal questions as a way to engage their audience. It makes sense in very specific situations but the majority of the time it’s a feeble attempt to connect with the audience, and indicates a weakness in the speaker’s story.

Wow, what a powerful question. You know, as a scientist — planetary scientist — we really didn’t take that very seriously until recently. Carl Sagan always said, “It takes extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims.” And the claims of having life beyond Earth need to be definitive, they need to be loud and they need to be everywhere for us to be able to believe it.

James takes a moment to frame how he will answer the question in his talk – from a scientific point of view – one that is based on evidence.

So how do we make this journey? What we decided to do is first look for those ingredients for life. The ingredients of life are: liquid water — we have to have a solvent, can’t be ice, has to be liquid. We also have to have energy. We also have to have organic material — things that make us up, but also things that we need to consume. So we have to have these elements in environments for long periods of time for us to be able to be confident that life, in that moment when it starts, can spark and then grow and evolve.

James provides another aspect of the framing, so that there is clarity regarding the process. When your story is intended for a public audience, don’t assume they will know each of the parameters that you’re working within. In most situations you will need to be explicit. Otherwise, confusion will crop up later in your narrative.

Well, I have to tell you that early in my career, when we looked at those three elements, I didn’t believe that they were beyond Earth in any length of time and for any real quantity. Why? We look at the inner planets. Venus is way too hot — it’s got no water. Mars — dry and arid. It’s got no water. And beyond Mars, the water in the solar system is all frozen.

In this brief historical story block, James looks back to describe what scientists previously thought about the question at hand. This is a common technique, used to contrast how things were in the past versus how things are today.

But recent observations have changed all that. It’s now turning our attention to the right places for us to take a deeper look and really start to answer our life question. So when we look out into the solar system, where are the possibilities? We’re concentrating our attention on four locations. The planet Mars and then three moons of the outer planets: Titan, Europa and small Enceladus.

The use of this visual image is impactful as the planet and moons he’s referring to become more that just his words. We can see the relative sizes and differences in color. We are not given any details, yet our imaginations continue to engage.

So what about Mars? Let’s go through the evidence. Well, Mars we thought was initially moon-like: full of craters, arid and a dead world. And so about 15 years ago, we started a series of missions to go to Mars and see if water existed on Mars in its past that changed its geology. We ought to be able to notice that. And indeed we started to be surprised right away. Our higher resolution images show deltas and river valleys and gulleys that were there in the past.

And in fact, Curiosity — which has been roving on the surface now for about three years — has really shown us that it’s sitting in an ancient river bed, where water flowed rapidly. And not for a little while, perhaps hundreds of millions of years. And if everything was there, including organics, perhaps life had started. Curiosity has also drilled in that red soil and brought up other material. And we were really excited when we saw that. Because it wasn’t red Mars, it was gray material, it’s gray Mars. We brought it into the rover, we tasted it, and guess what? We tasted organics — carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur — they were all there.

You can hear the excitement in his voice, the sense of surprise at what the rover had found. As you listen to your rehearsal recordings, always pay attention to whether the emotion on the page is reflected in your voice. Happy, sad, angry and perplexed have unique tones.

So Mars in its past, with a lot of water, perhaps plenty of time, could have had life, could have had that spark, could have grown. And is that life still there? We don’t know that. But a few years ago we started to look at a number of craters. During the summer, dark lines would appear down the sides of these craters. The more we looked, the more craters we saw, the more of these features. We now know more than a dozen of them.

A few months ago the fairy tale came true. We announced to the world that we know what these streaks are. It’s liquid water. These craters are weeping during the summer. Liquid water is flowing down these craters. So what are we going to do now — now that we see the water? Well, it tells us that Mars has all the ingredients necessary for life. In its past it had perhaps two-thirds of its northern hemisphere — there was an ocean. It has weeping water right now. Liquid water on its surface. It has organics. It has all the right conditions. So what are we going to do next? We’re going to launch a series of missions to begin that search for life on Mars. And now it’s more appealing than ever before.

Science becomes real when it’s described in language that the average person understands. We understand the search for water, the discovery of a river bed, a robotic rover identifying elements, and craters weeping water. Without being there we can visualize what James is describing.

He doesn’t just say, ‘we went to Mars and discovered water and chemicals’, he takes the time – in this instance around 3 minutes – to paint a vivid picture with words, but he also includes images that say so much more. Think about how you can use a combination of sentences and images to give your audience a richer experience.

05:23
As we move out into the solar system, here’s the tiny moon Enceladus. This is not in what we call the traditional habitable zone, this area around the sun. This is much further out. This object should be ice over a silicate core.

But what did we find? Cassini was there since 2006, and after a couple years looked back after it flew by Enceladus and surprised us all. Enceladus is blasting sheets of water out into the solar system and sloshing back down onto the moon. What a fabulous environment. Cassini just a few months ago also flew through the plume, and it measured silicate particles. Where does the silica come from? It must come from the ocean floor. The tidal energy is generated by Saturn, pulling and squeezing this moon — is melting that ice, creating an ocean. But it’s also doing that to the core.

Now, the only thing that we can think of that does that here on Earth as an analogy … are hydrothermal vents. Hydrothermal vents deep in our ocean were discovered in 1977. Oceanographers were completely surprised. And now there are thousands of these below the ocean.

What do we find? The oceanographers, when they go and look at these hydrothermal vents, they’re teeming with life, regardless of whether the water is acidic or alkaline — doesn’t matter. So hydrothermal vents are a fabulous abode for life here on Earth. So what about Enceladus? Well, we believe because it has water and has had it for a significant period of time, and we believe it has hydrothermal vents, with perhaps the right organic material, it is a place where life could exist. And not just microbial — maybe more complex because it’s had time to evolve.

In this story about the moon Enceladus, James uses an analogy to compare something we’re unsure of, to something here on Earth that we do have knowledge of. This is a big ‘what if’ as the answer to what’s happening on Enceladus isn’t known so he uses the phrase ‘we believe’. When you’re presenting scientific information, it’s important to differentiate between what is ‘believed’ versus ‘what has been proven’. The phrase ‘it now seems’ is rather different from saying ‘we now know’.

Another moon, very similar, is Europa. Galileo visited Jupiter’s system in 1996 and made fabulous observations of Europa. Europa, we also know, has an under-the-ice crust ocean. Galileo mission told us that, but we never saw any plumes. But we didn’t look for them. Hubble, just a couple years ago, observing Europa, saw plumes of water spraying from the cracks in the southern hemisphere, just exactly like Enceladus.

These moons, which are not in what we call a traditional habitable zone, that are out in the solar system, have liquid water. And if there are organics there, there may be life. This is a fabulous set of discoveries because these moons have been in this environment like that for billions of years. Life started here on Earth, we believe, after about the first 500 million, and look where we are. These moons are fabulous moons.

Another moon that we’re looking at is Titan. Titan is a huge moon of Saturn. It perhaps is much larger than the planet Mercury. It has an extensive atmosphere. It’s so extensive — and it’s mostly nitrogen with a little methane and ethane — that you have to peer through it with radar. And on the surface, Cassini has found liquid. We see lakes … actually almost the size of our Black Sea in some places. And this area is not liquid water; it’s methane. If there’s any place in the solar system where life is not like us, where the substitute of water is another solvent — and it could be methane — it could be Titan.

Early on James states that one of the requirements for life is a liquid solvent, which I assumed would be water. But in describing Titan he speaks about another solvent – methane – that could also work. That had me wondering how life could exist in a liquid solvent other than water. I would have appreciated the addition of one minute to this talk for an explanation.

But my desire serves to highlight the potential problem of a story’s length. If James was only given ten minutes for this talk, that extra minute wasn’t in the cards, unless the story was cut elsewhere, and I couldn’t find any aspect of this story that could be cut and not lose meaning. You may very well come up against a similar constraint and have to chose what to include or cut. Stories don’t go on forever.

Well, is there life beyond Earth in the solar system? We don’t know yet, but we’re hot on the pursuit. The data that we’re receiving is really exciting and telling us — forcing us to think about this in new and exciting ways. I believe we’re on the right track. That in the next 10 years, we will answer that question. And if we answer it, and it’s positive, then life is everywhere in the solar system. Just think about that. We may not be alone.

James concludes where he started by admitting that we don’t know if life exists beyond the boundaries of earth, but he offers his personal view that we’ll have an answer in the next decade. And his final words, ‘We may not be alone.’ are a perfect mirror to the words that he opened with, ‘Is there life beyond Earth in our solar system?’

Thank you.

[Note: all comments inserted into this transcript are my opinions, not those of the speaker, the TED organization, nor anyone else on the planet. In my view, each story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these analytical posts is to inspire a storyteller to become a storylistener, and in doing so, make their stories more impactful.]

Learn more about the coaching process or
contact me to discuss your storytelling goals!

â—†

Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates!

Copyright Storytelling with Impact – All rights reserved

Mark Lovett

Sal Khan: Let’s teach for mastery, not test scores @ TED Talks Live

/in , , , , /by

TED Talks Live were held at The Town Hall Theater in NYC, in November of 2015. I had the pleasure of attending all six nights to hear speakers present impactful Ideas Worth Spreading. This post is an analysis of a talk by Sal Khan about how mastery and mindset can improve learning.

It’s a classic problem/solution story. One that describes a process that is being used on a global scale – in this case the process of learning – but often delivers less than ideal results. In such situations the stakes are high and new ways of thinking are required in order to address rapid changes in society.

Watch Sal’s TED Talk. He demonstrates that the status quo is not serving most students as it should, and offers an alternative that is based on his experience running the Khan Academy. In his view, it’s imperative that we change the way we learn. And if we do, the benefits to society are significant.

Transcript

(my notes in red)

I’m here today to talk about the two ideas that, at least based on my observations at Khan Academy, are kind of the core, or the key leverage points for learning. And it’s the idea of mastery and the idea of mindset.

When a speaker is well known, as is the case with Sal Khan who founded Khan Academy, a phrase such as ‘my observations at Khan Academy’ speaks volumes. He doesn’t need to explain his role or the history of the academy, but if you don’t have such notoriety, adding another sentence of explanation will keep the audience from being confused about who you are and the work you’re doing. In fact, at no point in his talk does Sal speak about his credentials. Few of us would be so fortunate.

I saw this in the early days working with my cousins. A lot of them were having trouble with math at first, because they had all of these gaps accumulated in their learning. And because of that, at some point they got to an algebra class and they might have been a little bit shaky on some of the pre-algebra, and because of that, they thought they didn’t have the math gene. Or they’d get to a calculus class, and they’d be a little bit shaky on the algebra. I saw it in the early days when I was uploading some of those videos on YouTube, and I realized that people who were not my cousins were watching.

Having introduced ‘the idea of mastery and the idea of mindset’, Sal provides an example that is also personal – ‘my cousins’ and by mentioning that it happened ‘in the early days’, he takes us back in time to the beginning of his journey. When you’re taking an audience on a journey of discovery, of developing a new view of the world, people want to know where it all started. What’s your origin story?

And at first, those comments were just simple thank yous. I thought that was a pretty big deal. I don’t know how much time you all spend on YouTube. Most of the comments are not “Thank you.” They’re a little edgier than that.

But then the comments got a little more intense, student after student saying that they had grown up not liking math. It was getting difficult as they got into more advanced math topics. By the time they got to algebra, they had so many gaps in their knowledge they couldn’t engage with it. They thought they didn’t have the math gene. But when they were a bit older, they took a little agency and decided to engage. They found resources like Khan Academy and they were able to fill in those gaps and master those concepts, and that reinforced their mindset that it wasn’t fixed; that they actually were capable of learning mathematics.

He then shifts the narrative from his cousins to the general public who have been watching his math videos on YouTube. In doing so Sal offers evidence that people who struggled with math could master the concepts that had been troublesome. In your idea-driven story, can you offer examples of how your idea is having an impact? That signifies that your idea has been, to some extent, validated.

And in a lot of ways, this is how you would master a lot of things in life. It’s the way you would learn a martial art. In a martial art, you would practice the white belt skills as long as necessary, and only when you’ve mastered it you would move on to become a yellow belt. It’s the way you learn a musical instrument: you practice the basic piece over and over again, and only when you’ve mastered it, you go on to the more advanced one.

Sal uses the examples of martial arts and music to support the idea of mastery that he began with. In this way we understand that the principle at hand is not confined to his one subject, but instead is common in many aspects of life. Most social problems have parallels elsewhere in society.

But what we point out — this is not the way a traditional academic model is structured, the type of academic model that most of us grew up in. In a traditional academic model, we group students together, usually by age, and around middle school, by age and perceived ability, and we shepherd them all together at the same pace. And what typically happens, let’s say we’re in a middle school pre-algebra class, and the current unit is on exponents, the teacher will give a lecture on exponents, then we’ll go home, do some homework. The next morning, we’ll review the homework, then another lecture, homework, lecture, homework. That will continue for about two or three weeks, and then we get a test. On that test, maybe I get a 75 percent, maybe you get a 90 percent, maybe you get a 95 percent. And even though the test identified gaps in our knowledge, I didn’t know 25 percent of the material. Even the A student, what was the five percent they didn’t know?

Even though we’ve identified the gaps, the whole class will then move on to the next subject, probably a more advanced subject that’s going to build on those gaps. It might be logarithms or negative exponents. And that process continues, and you immediately start to realize how strange this is. I didn’t know 25 percent of the more foundational thing, and now I’m being pushed to the more advanced thing. And this will continue for months, years, all the way until at some point, I might be in an algebra class or trigonometry class and I hit a wall. And it’s not because algebra is fundamentally difficult or because the student isn’t bright. It’s because I’m seeing an equation and they’re dealing with exponents and that 30 percent that I didn’t know is showing up. And then I start to disengage.

In this story block, Sal describes how a traditional education system works and identifies a fundamental flaw in the learning process – the fact that students are expected to learn new concepts using a foundation that contains knowledge gaps. This description not only resonates with the highly educated audience at the event, but will also be familiar with students around the world. In doing so, he builds a connection to the local, as well as the remote, audience.

To appreciate how absurd that is, imagine if we did other things in our life that way. Say, home-building. So we bring in the contractor and say, “We were told we have two weeks to build a foundation. Do what you can.” So they do what they can. Maybe it rains. Maybe some of the supplies don’t show up. And two weeks later, the inspector comes, looks around, says, “OK, the concrete is still wet right over there, that part’s not quite up to code … I’ll give it an 80 percent.” You say, “Great! That’s a C. Let’s build the first floor.”

Same thing. We have two weeks, do what you can, inspector shows up, it’s a 75 percent. Great, that’s a D-plus. Second floor, third floor, and all of a sudden, while you’re building the third floor, the whole structure collapses. And if your reaction is the reaction you typically have in education, or that a lot of folks have, you might say, maybe we had a bad contractor, or maybe we needed better inspection or more frequent inspection. But what was really broken was the process. We were artificially constraining how long we had to something, pretty much ensuring a variable outcome, and we took the trouble of inspecting and identifying those gaps, but then we built right on top of it.

As he did previously, Sal uses an analogy – this time building a house – to illustrate the result of creating a flawed foundation. Analogies can be an impactful part of your narrative, as they provide your audience with another way of seeing the problem that you’re addressing. When Sal says ‘Let’s build the first floor.’ what goes through your mind is, ‘This is not going to end well.’ Which is the point he’s making about the education system. You would never consider building a house with a flawed foundation.

So the idea of mastery learning is to do the exact opposite. Instead of artificially constraining, fixing when and how long you work on something, pretty much ensuring that variable outcome, the A, B, C, D, F — do it the other way around. What’s variable is when and how long a student actually has to work on something, and what’s fixed is that they actually master the material.

Every story that is concerned with a problem, must naturally shift to the solution, which in this story is ‘… to do the exact opposite.’ The change is from focusing on the time constraint to focusing on ‘mastery learning’. Where this pivot occurs is different in every story. In this talk, it’s about the half way point, which is pretty common. What’s important is that the pivot is clear the audience.

And it’s important to realize that not only will this make the student learn their exponents better, but it’ll reinforce the right mindset muscles. It makes them realize that if you got 20 percent wrong on something, it doesn’t mean that you have a C branded in your DNA somehow. It means that you should just keep working on it. You should have grit; you should have perseverance; you should take agency over your learning.

As he continues with the benefits of his approach to learning, Sal touches upon the second idea that he mentioned at the beginning of his talk – mindset. Rather than feeling that a low score is the final word, he encourages students to take control of their situation, to have grit, perseverance and agency. Solutions to problems that require individual action should include the inspiration to take those actions.

Now, a lot of skeptics might say, well, hey, this is all great, philosophically, this whole idea of mastery-based learning and its connection to mindset, students taking agency over their learning. It makes a lot of sense, but it seems impractical. To actually do it, every student would be on their own track. It would have to be personalized, you’d have to have private tutors and worksheets for every student. And these aren’t new ideas — there were experiments in Winnetka, Illinois, 100 years ago, where they did mastery-based learning and saw great results, but they said it wouldn’t scale because it was logistically difficult. The teacher had to give different worksheets to every student, give on-demand assessments.

If there are audience members who doubt the veracity of your idea, including an opposite viewpoint story block allows the speaker to address concerns that might be present. In this case he includes the example of a previous experiment, the challenges they encountered, then follows on with his view that such issues are no longer a problem today. The general approach is ‘you may see the situation this way, but I have a different view that I want to share with you’.

But now today, it’s no longer impractical. We have the tools to do it. Students see an explanation at their own time and pace? There’s on-demand video for that. They need practice? They need feedback? There’s adaptive exercises readily available for students.

In a longer talk there would be time to provide examples of how ‘on-demand video’ and ‘adaptive exercises’ would work for students. I was left with a concept, but not much in the way of understanding. Hearing one story about an individual would have made the idea much more impactful.

And when that happens, all sorts of neat things happen. One, the students can actually master the concepts, but they’re also building their growth mindset, they’re building grit, perseverance, they’re taking agency over their learning. And all sorts of beautiful things can start to happen in the actual classroom. Instead of it being focused on the lecture, students can interact with each other. They can get deeper mastery over the material. They can go into simulations, Socratic dialogue.

Sal reiterates some of the key point previously mentioned in his talk – mastering the concepts, building a growth mindset, building grit and perseverance and taking agency. This is a way to remind the audience of those factors which are important to your solution. Once again, however, I wanted to hear a story. An example of how a more dynamic classroom would operate. Take me inside the room. Let me feel the experience.

To appreciate what we’re talking about and the tragedy of lost potential here, I’d like to give a little bit of a thought experiment. If we were to go 400 years into the past to Western Europe, which even then, was one of the more literate parts of the planet, you would see that about 15 percent of the population knew how to read. And I suspect that if you asked someone who did know how to read, say a member of the clergy, “What percentage of the population do you think is even capable of reading?” They might say, “Well, with a great education system, maybe 20 or 30 percent.”

But if you fast forward to today, we know that that prediction would have been wildly pessimistic, that pretty close to 100 percent of the population is capable of reading. But if I were to ask you a similar question: “What percentage of the population do you think is capable of truly mastering calculus, or understanding organic chemistry, or being able to contribute to cancer research?” A lot of you might say, “Well, with a great education system, maybe 20, 30 percent.”

But what if that estimate is just based on your own experience in a non-mastery framework, your own experience with yourself or observing your peers, where you’re being pushed at this set pace through classes, accumulating all these gaps? Even when you got the A, that 95 percent, what was that five percent you missed? And it keeps accumulating — you get to an advanced class, all of a sudden you hit a wall and say, “I’m not meant to be a cancer researcher; I’m not meant to be a physicist; I’m not meant to be a mathematician.”

And I suspect that that actually is the case, but if you were allowed to be operating in a mastery framework, if you were allowed to really take agency over your learning, and when you get something wrong, embrace it — view that failure as a moment of learning — that number, the percent that could really master calculus or understand organic chemistry, is actually a lot closer to 100 percent.

The use of a ‘what if’ type of hypothetical question allows the audience to envision what could be better if the process was improved. In a problem/solution, idea-driven storyline, that’s a way of asking, ‘What if my solution were implemented? What would the result be?’ There are no guarantees that a proposed solution will work, but if you explain it clearly and give examples, the audience can imagine what the future might look like.

And this isn’t even just a “nice to have.” I think it’s a social imperative. We’re exiting what you could call the industrial age and we’re going into this, whatever, information revolution. And it’s clear that some things are happening. In the industrial age, society was a pyramid. And at the base of the pyramid, you needed human labor. In the middle of the pyramid, you had an information processing, a bureaucracy class, and at the top of the pyramid, you had your owners of capital and your entrepreneurs and your creative class. But we know what’s happening already, as we go into this information revolution. The bottom of that pyramid, automation, is going to take over. Even that middle tier, information processing, that’s what computers are good at.

Sal brings up an important point, that society is changing rapidly due to a revolution in information processing, which in his mind, means that it’s imperative to adopt a new way of learning. This is common for social issues that are not static. Which is to say, your solution is not just about solving a current problem, but is also needed going forward to prevent even greater harm. Think about how the future will look without your ideas being implemented. Is there a similar imperative within your story that the audience needs to understand?

So as a society, we have a question: All this new productivity is happening because of this technology, but who participates in it? Is it just going to be that very top of the pyramid, in which case, what does everyone else do? How do they operate? Or do we do something that’s more aspirational? Do we actually attempt to invert the pyramid, where you have a large creative class, where almost everyone can participate as an entrepreneur, an artist, as a researcher?

And I don’t think that this is utopian. I really think that this is all based on the idea that if we let people tap into their potential by mastering concepts, by being able to exercise agency over their learning, that they can get there. And when you think of it as just a citizen of the world, it’s pretty exciting. I mean, think about the type of equity we can we have, and the rate at which civilization could even progress. And so, I’m pretty optimistic about it. I think it’s going to be a pretty exciting time to be alive.

Thank you.

The visual of ‘inverting the pyramid’ is powerful, it’s a classic, ‘turn the problem on its head’ sort of narrative, but I’m not sure it works here. It may make sense to you, but it had me scratching my head. I was thinking that Sal’s approach to learning, whereby students learn at their own pace, master each level before moving on, and take control of their future, feels more like ‘leveling the playing field’.

But that’s a relatively small complaint, as the crux of his talk is about how our education system is fundamentally flawed, but doesn’t need to be. That we can change how the system operates, and in doing so, give students the opportunity to thrive instead of struggle.

[Note: all comments inserted into this transcript are my opinions, not those of the speaker, the TED organization, nor anyone else on the planet. In my view, each story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these analytical posts is to inspire a storyteller to become a storylistener, and in doing so, make their stories more impactful.]

Learn more about the coaching process or
contact me to discuss your storytelling goals!

â—†

Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates!

Copyright Storytelling with Impact – All rights reserved

Mark Lovett

The Story of Your Identity in the Digital Age

/in , , , /by

The concept of identity has always been difficult to define, and while the digital age has, to some extent, simplified the issue with its ability to capture, store, and transmit our personal information, it has also introduced an additional level of complexity by forcing us into neat digital boxes, including the box that says, “prefer not to answer.” 

I recently watched Zara Rahman‘s presentation on stage at The Conference in August 2019. Titled The Unintended Impact of Technology, Zara raises several concerns about how technology is being used to define who we are, which I feel is very important, as who we are (or think ourselves to be) shapes the content and style of the personal stories that we share.

Zara is a researcher, writer, speaker, linguist, and the Deputy Director at The Engine Room, an international non-profit organisation supporting civil society to use tech and data more effectively and strategically.

Instead of diving right into the latest technologies or the politics of identity, Zara begins with a personal story that reveals the complex nature of defining her identity, with family roots from Bangladesh, yet being raised in the UK and holding a British passport – culture vs documents – not an uncommon situation considering modern migration patterns.

“The ability to self-identify is what makes us human. The fluidity of changing identities is a core part of how we grow and change as human beings, no matter what our passports may say.”

She explains how the issue is much larger than just a passport by introducing the concept of “identification technologies” that include any type registration system, as well as the use of national identity cards. The notion of our identity being fluid is not new, as humans have been migrating for over 50,000 years, but most of that time was undocumented and no one was tracking where we came from or where we might go. But that’s all changed.

From a travel standpoint, the requirement of identification has been on the rise for decades, and after 9-11 that increase has been most pronounced when traveling by air. On my last international journey various authorities checked my passport five times. I feel fortunate that my ability to travel is largely unrestricted, but other people are not so lucky with travel bans in place based on religion or ethnicity.

Referring to the establishment of nation states, and the subsequent use of the passports, Zara talks about the positive aspects of establishing shared citizenship, and a shared identity. You can see yourself as having a common bond. But once you’re labeled, governments and corporations can use this data to make decisions based on where we were born, within the borders of lines drawn on a map. How many of you chose the country you were born in? Yet you will always carry that with you, even if you become a citizen of another country.

“…a passport is not a document that tells us who we are, but a document that shows what other people think of us.” – Orhan Pamuk

And in some cases, this rigid view of your ethnicity can be fatal, as Zara recounts the events surrounding the Rwandan genocide in 1994, a tragedy amplified by the use of identity cards which accelerated the slaughtering of Tutsis. The Rohingya people are being persecuted by the government of Myanmar (more commonly described as ethnic cleansing) to the point where tens of thousands have been forced to leave the country and are now stateless, with no national identity.

On another front, the field of genomics holds great promise in its ability to peer inside human history and evolution as a way to uncover the nature of diseases, and in doing so, potentially provide cures and treatments for those diseases. But there’s also a troubling downside to the collection of genetic information when it is used to ‘define’ ethnicity, or quantify the ethnic diversity of our genome. I wonder how this will evolve – might this become another way to place people into categories based on their DNA, and could that lead to more discrimination?

As we’re all aware (or should be) once data is captured, it’s there forever. And if that data is shared, which is the norm for non-governmental databases, then it becomes permanent in multiple places. And should that data be in error and need correcting, or should you want to withdraw from a database altogether, there’s no guarantee it’s possible to do so.

How do you identify yourself when telling your story, and how does the world see you after hearing your story? Is your identity a benefit, or is there a downside that you must deal with?

Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates!

Copyright Storytelling with Impact – All rights reserved

Mark Lovett

Why Drones Need Our Better Angels

/in , , , /by

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick PhD is an associate professor of political sociology. He teaches at the Kroc School of Peace Studies on the University of San Diego campus, and while his interests are varied, he’s most passionate when it comes to the study of social movements and social change, with an added emphasis on the role that technology plays in society.

Of particular interest is how the advent of small, commercially available drones will play out in our everyday lives. Austin opens his talk at the Kroc School’s Peace Innovators Conference by talking about how he and a grad student measured the size of a crowd during a protest in Budapest, Hungary. He’s a big believer in empowered people and accountable authorities.

This was a protest against the government’s plan to initiate a tax on internet usage. And while previous protests in Budapest had been relatively small, this one was predicted to be much bigger, and by using a drone to capture the event Austin was able to verify the size of the crowd, which was far greater than the government claimed. In the end, the government was forced to drop their plan. So in this case, drone technology served the public quite well.

Drones can help us see the world from a new perspective, and drones can hold the powerful to account. – Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick

But Austin goes on to talk about what may lie ahead with the expanded use of drones, as they can be used, just like any other technology, for good or for evil. He reminds us that the internet has evolved from the information superhighway, to the dark web, in the span of just three decades. Despite best intentions, over time the technology has enabled criminals.

Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress. – Paul Virilio

Online banking provides great benefit, yet it also exposes us to having our account hacked. Mapping software can guide us to our destination, while at the same time tracking our every move and location. Social media sites can connect us to friends, but can also become a platform for hijacked political debates. A classic case of unintended consequences.

And drones are undergoing a similar evolution. Watch Austin’s talk to gain insight as to how our future may be affected, for better or worse, by the increased implementation of drone technology. Which of the scenarios presented will come to pass? Do you seen this technology serving society, or becoming a tool for the self-serving? Are you excited, frightened, cautious?

Aerial Drone Over Lake

Photo by Skitterphoto from Pexels

In short, technology has become a character in our personal story, and can shift the narrative in many ways. As you think about the trajectory of your story, and the wisdom you wish to share with others, think about how technology has affected, or could affect, your storyline.

Peace Innovators is a program from the Kroc School of Peace Studies, University of San Diego in which select faculty members prepare presentations that are focused on the human issues they address within their professional studies as well as class curriculum. I had the pleasure of working with each of these speakers as they prepared their talks.

Learn more about the coaching process or
contact me to discuss your storytelling goals!

â—†

Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates!

Copyright Storytelling with Impact – All rights reserved