323 - The Art of Curation in an Age of Overload with Bruno Giussani

What does it take to make workshops work? And how can we facilitate collaboration that sticks and leads to results? My name is Miriam Hadnes, and with the Workshops Work podcast, I'm on the mission to find the magic ingredients that make workshops work. Today with me on the show is Bruno Giosani, and we speak about the cousin of facilitation, that is curation. And I am over the moon to be in conversation with someone who has until last year curated the global TED conferences, and from whom I learn a lot about the art and the craft of curation and the role of facilitation in that. So stay tuned. You won't regret it, this very well-invested time. Thank you for listening. And don't forget to scroll to the show notes to subscribe to the show if you like it and find links to more information. Bruno, welcome to the show.

Hi, nice to be here.

Joining me, I am very excited and curious to speak about facilitator's cousin, maybe the curator.

Yeah, yeah, possibly same family.

Exactly, same family, same, same but still different, a different art. And I always start with the same question: when did you start calling yourself a facilitator? And actually, do you No, I don't.

And I guess that several people probably have given you the same answer, which is I don't call myself a facilitator. I don't consider myself a facilitator. My job is really curation. You're right, there is a lot of contiguity between one and the other. Both deal with people, with ideas, and how we articulate people and ideas, right? And so, but I started calling myself a curator Possibly about 20 years ago, something like that. A curator of ideas. I worked for the TED conferences for about 20 years until last year. I was in the small group around Chris Anderson that started the current wave of TED. You know, TED is a long story, goes back to 1984, etc., but the TED people know really started in the early 2000s and And then was propelled by the whole digital dimension, which didn't exist at the beginning. At the beginning was a conference once a year in California, 1,000 people. You were there, you were not there. And then suddenly the digital dimension gave it a gigantic, gigantic boost. But Chris Anderson has always called himself the TED curator and the people around him helping select the speakers and the topics and creating the programs for the conferences and then all The rest also called themselves curators, and that's when I started.

What a pile to unpack. And I think, yeah, knowing the TED conference and the curation of it, to really curate ideas, as you said, that's for me also the art of facilitation, where it's not only the talk, but what talks to align, whom to invite, and then how to create the environment around it.

Absolutely.

So how do you— because, and I think this was special for TED, that suddenly these were talks in a very specific format so that they could inspire the audience, while for many others it's difficult for us to keep attention for air quotes so long.

Yeah.

What facilitates it?

Listen, first of all, I think we need to say a couple of words about the idea of curation itself, right? Because of course that's a concept and the kind of activity and the kind of thinking that comes from the art sector. For a long time, curators worked for museums and they curated collections and exhibitions, or they worked for art galleries. And then suddenly, somehow there's been an explosion of the types of curators partially driven by the growth of social media. Suddenly you have, uh, you know, curators of everything, really curators of menus and curators of stores and curators of sneaker collections and, uh, you know, all these kind of things. And, and, and of course that's because of the huge overproduction and densification of everything, uh, of ideas and information, but also of products, of events, of technologies, of options, of choices that we have. And, uh, and so here comes into play the role of the curator/facilitator/editor, which is to, in that gigantic quantity of stuff of any kind, it is to filter, to select, to create a frame, to synthesize, to connect things that are maybe seemingly unconnected, to find pathways, right? Or interesting pathways to create a hierarchy the way an editor of a newspaper tries to do when deciding what to put on the front page or what to put on page 20 and what what not to publish, which is also something we should talk about, what not to take into consideration. You know, put a spotlight here rather than there. So that's really a big part of the work, right, is this filtering element. And the second one is the articulation with the audience or the people using this, receiving this, benefiting from this. So there is a sort of meaning-making kind of component to that. And that there is a social community kind of component to it.

Yeah. What is— thank you for unpacking that. And my brain just exploded. I was taking a few notes because there's so much. One thing that I just realized is the— or that's how I understand you— the time component. So before the curation is really the thought process and maybe the art and the craft. So the art of selecting whom to invite, in what order, and then the craft of doing it.

Mm-hmm.

Then during it is the interaction with the audience and taking this into account and all the other dimensions. And then I was thinking, coming back to what you said about the digitization of the content, then there's the post-production is so— because there's something you cannot control as soon as a conference is online, right?

Yeah, there's something you cannot control even as soon as the speaker goes on stage, right? Uh, but, but let's, let's, let's take it maybe one, one step at a time. So, uh, if we look at it from the perspective of what a conference organizer like TED does, but not only that, there are hundreds of other organizations doing similar things, right? Of course, you start by thinking of what of all the options out there you want to bring into your limited framework, which is I have only an evening, I have only one day, I have only 4 days. That's my space, the space I want to use. And that space is not just the physical space, it's also a social space, meaning you need to think also immediately of who you are talking to. You're talking to 600 people who are gonna be in that room. And then beyond that, you're talking to potentially millions of people who are gonna watch that afterwards in a digital format. So you don't control the physical space there. Everybody can be anywhere in their salon, in the car, in the train, in the office. So that's a different kind of aspect. Then you need to start thinking about selection in terms of Topics and themes. And, uh, and there isn't really a recipe. There isn't, you know, a chemical formula. And once you tick all the elements, you have your compound.

Otherwise AI would do it.

Otherwise AI, well, AI probably is gonna be used to do these kind of things anyway. Uh, and then we will see the results. But, uh, it's, it's an editorial kind of process. Literally, it's the same kind of process that the editor of a magazine uses to choose how to push out the magazine every week. So you have 60 pages, you have one front page, not two, one, one cover page. So you need to choose what do you want to use those 60 pages for. And therefore, out of the incredible mass of information that's available, a lot of stuff is not going to make it, is going to be abandoned, left on the table. Then you need to decide what goes on the front page, one story plus 3 sub-stories depending on, etc. Then what deserves a long article, what deserves a short article, what deserves a critical article, what deserves an interview, and so on. And out of all that articulation, which is a bit of an alchemy, right? It's less of a science and more of an alchemy. Comes a magazine or comes a conference program, which is also made the same way. Who speaks first and who speaks last? And what happens in between? How do you articulate the length of a talk? How do you articulate the formats? Interview, speaker all by him or herself, slides, no slides, overwhelming images. So lots of visual impact, Or no images at all, just voice telling a story, and so on. All those elements come into—

A panel or a workshop, a talk.

Yeah, that too, that too.

How to include the audience or not to.

Yes, absolutely. And how to include the audience, right? And so you construct that, and there are different ways, but the simplest way of looking at it is that somehow there is a story that is contained in the talk or in the interview. And then there is a meta story that is made of all the talks and the interviews and how they follow each other. What is the flow? What is the flow, not only in terms of sequence, but also in terms of different rhythms and, and so on. For example, when, when at the very beginning of our activities at TED, people were surprised. People who did other conferences were surprised by the fact that, you know, we would put a musician in the middle of a session. And suddenly you would have 4 talks and then somebody would go on stage and say a few words and sing a song and then say a few more words, sing another song and leave the stage. And then there'll be another couple of talks and it's like, what are you doing? What does music have to do there? And well, it does 2 different things. First of all, it signals that art is also part of the conversation. Uh, it's not some external element. Right. But it also allows for creating a different kind of rhythm in the session so that the way you absorb information is way more articulate than it would be just by having 10 minutes of talk 6 times in a row.

Yeah. And it's 2 things come to my mind. I love that. One is the white bread you eat in a wine tasting. So to basically neutralize your taste buds. And music between talks is like neutralizing your taste buds so that somehow—

Yes. And you can also use short videos for that and things like that.

Or even to prime the audience for a new mood, because with music you can intensify certain emotions or trigger certain emotions and then mentally prepare for a different kind of talk.

Absolutely. And here maybe we can talk a bit about the audience, because that's of course a core element, right? So there is a sort of my principle. I think it's a principle for many people who work at TED, but possibly also for others. But my principle, when I think about how to structure a program of any kind of event, short or long, with many people or a small group, etc., is that when people walk into a room to participate in an event you are curating or organizing or facilitating, they're doing something very particular. They're giving you some of their time and some of their attention. Now, time and attention are the 2 most precious things ever, right?

Yes.

They are non-renewable. Once they're given, they cannot be replenished. So that preciousness needs to mean something to you, needs to mean that you have a huge responsibility to use it in the best possible way. Ultimately, I mean, already the Stoic philosophers 2,000 years ago used to say what you give attention to ultimately is who you become, right? And therefore— There you go.

On my screen.

There you go. And therefore you really need to try to use that time and attention in the best possible way. Don't waste it. Right.

And especially, I think, if you're speaking about the air quotes competition with the digital, because if we can watch all the talks on YouTube, yeah, what is the real value of being there and investing our time and attention at that moment?

It is the fact that, that your heart and your mind be in connection and in sync with those of the people on X.

Exactly. Yeah.

Is experiencing that moment together, that kind of connection with the speaker and with the idea that comes to you together. That's really a big part of the value. Then of course there are all the other aspects that don't happen in the room but happen just outside afterwards, the networking, the possibility to go and talk to the speaker and confront ideas, et cetera. But the commonality of the experience is something that Somehow we are progressively losing because, you know, people don't go to the movies anymore. They sit in front of Netflix and maybe they have a friend somewhere else that watches the same film on Netflix and they text each other about the film. But that's not a commonality of experience in a social way as a group of humans in a way. So that comes all into play, I think, in this kind of I mean, curation means, in Latin, means taking care, right? And so you take care of the ideas and the program and the selection, but you also need to take care of the audience. The audience, yes.

Yeah. And I, it's interesting that you say that. I, I was just, I had this melancholic moment where I remembered going to the movies. I love going to the movies also by myself. And I remember when I was a student, I would go to the movies in France. And there was always a group of other people who would stay a little bit longer, and then we would have a random conversation about the movie with these absolute strangers with whom we shared the experience. So I think the part of the curation, as you explain it, is also to create opportunities for serendipitous encounters.

Totally.

Between people who were attracted to the same event or content theme, And thereby have already one thing in common.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely. And what also came to my mind as you spoke earlier, that we have so much information, and I, I don't remember where I read that, but it really resonated that for the first time in history, the supply of information has surpassed the demand. And hence—

It's certainly possible. I, I'm I don't know whether it's for the first time in history because, uh, because there have been other moments like, like this comparatively in history, right? The invention of, of movable type and the printing press, for example, which inundated Europe of books. And that was a Europe where only few people actually could read and write. And suddenly you have this mass of information coming out of, uh, the first presses, and it was difficult to absorb. It took decades to to reorganize the cultural underpinning of society in order to confront that flood of information, you know, and that meant inventing systems like how to transmit information to the next generation, the school, or how to deal with information about conflicts in society, the judicial system, but also meant very practical things like until the printing press, books themselves Didn't have content pages or page numbers, but then there was too much information. So you needed a faster way to access information. And so you started redesigning the object itself. All this kind of stuff. There are examples in history. And so what I find really interesting today, and I think that this is the real novelty because of AI, of artificial intelligence, generative artificial intelligence in particular, this is the first time in history Where creating a text takes less time than using and consuming it, right? And that's a gigantic cultural reversal. I don't think we really have understood what that may mean yet. We see the premises of what it means, which is a new flood of information coming over us, which we don't really know how to navigate yet in a way. You know, we are moving towards a world from a world where most of the information and information is just a label for many, many different things, right? And formats and so on. Most of the information that existed was created by humans, possibly all, to a world where most, possibly all, will be created by machines. And in the middle, there is this mechanism by which creating text of decent quality today takes less time than reading it, and that's a complete first.

Yes, and thank you. That's such a good and important nuance, and I will dig deeper into the printing press because, yes, I was aware that it had a similar impact, but it would be interesting. Tangent: would I then think that the act or the capacity of curating becomes even more important nowadays because of this overflow of information, and that more and more is created because the cost basically shrinks to zero. But the cost of consuming increases almost exponentially just because of the variety of options we have to use our time and attention that are limited. So what do you think is the art of curation when it comes to select what is relevant, what's irrelevant? So what don't we show, but also how to capture this attention span if people actually— because I think there's also something that the preference also shifted, that more people are interested in creating information than consuming it. Which is very dangerous.

Yes, it's very dangerous.

That's maybe a different topic.

Yeah. And partially it's, there is, there is something really deep in what you are saying because of course it's becoming easier to create any kind of information. I tend to use the word information instead of the word content. Sorry, I am, I'm going out on a, on a tangent here because I really dislike the word content.

Mm-hmm.

I can't stand it. And the reason why I can't stand it is this: we used to have articles and essays and books and editorials and interviews and sport profiles and radio programs and television shows and films and documentaries and movies and songs and concerts and photographs and brochures and infographics— a huge panoply of different things. And now it's all content. It's all generic content. And if it is generic content that we are producing, it means that the way we think is that there is a generic container, and the generic container is the mind of people. So we are looking at the mind of people as this generic container that we just fill with generic content.

Mm-hmm.

And it's— it feels to me like one of these huge wrecking balls into culture. And that's why you really, really have a hard time using the word content. But that's an aside, end of sidebar. But the role of— there is definitely an increasing capacity to produce any kind of information because the tools make it easier and faster and cheaper. And there is this idea that, oh, everybody now is producer of X, right? Of something. Or can be. And at the same time, we have less and less time to pay attention to things. And so you're right. At that level, at that point, the role of filtering, curation of some sort becomes even more relevant. I read an interview with someone. I'm going to, I'm going to tell you a short story again, another sidebar, but I read an interview with the editor of a thing called the Analog C. Review, which is a literary journal, a literary magazine. But it's a very interesting publisher because they only do analog things. Literally, if you want to connect with them, you need to write them a letter. If you want to receive their newsletter, you need to write them a letter or a postcard and say, this is my address. And the newsletter doesn't arrive by email. It arrives as a small printed book that announces their new publications. And so on. I love this whole thing. It's really a celebration of offline culture in a way, of analog culture. But I read once an interview with him and he said there is a way of thinking of the cultural health of a society today through the number of people in that society that have a role similar to that of curator or facilitator or editor, those who help filtering things for others, selecting things for others, making order in things for others, trying to take away a bit this feeling of overwhelm that everybody feels today because we are confronted with so much of everything. And so the more a society has people that play some sort of that role and allows them to play some sort of that role and pays them to play some sort of that role, the healthier culturally that society is. I'm paraphrasing, he didn't say exactly those words, but I think that there is something interesting there.

Yes, and we are speaking of a democratic, liberal, open society. where the people paid, selected, elected for this curation and filtering have the best of attention. When I think of a culture that wants to speed up productivity and efficiency, what is the filter they would apply? Then suddenly no more art, no more novels, an autocratic regime, censorship.

Or maybe still Or maybe it is some art and some culture, but of course the filter you apply is a technological filter, right? I mean, I'm sure a lot of people are thinking, well, yeah, there is an overwhelm of information, but then AI is gonna filter through it for us.

The algorithm of social media.

And actually it's gonna even do it better than you or me because it's gonna be personalized. And I am really very concerned at that because We have had already 15 years of history of AI, of algorithm selecting for us, and the result is not being really good. That's social media, right? Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, etc. Those are algorithms selecting for us theoretically in a personalized way. The result is that everybody ends up in what we call filter bubbles. So a bubble of confirmation of the things you are convinced of, or you believe, et cetera, or everybody gets pushed progressively towards a more polarized kind of set of, of, of, of things. So we have had already a society-scale experiment, real-life experiment with algorithm that has gone for 15 years. And the result is, I would say, toxic.

And maybe to add to that, I think the natural experiment that went along with that was the lockdown.

Yep.

Where suddenly all the extremes of the polarizations were maximized. And my hypothesis is it's because people were not exposed to random information and random opinions when they go to work or when they go to the supermarket, but only got the filter and then went into the conspiracy theories.

You know, it's not like somebody wakes up in the morning working for a social media company and they think, oh, how can I polarize the world more today? Right? Maybe Mark Zuckerberg thinks that. I don't know. I never met him, but I can imagine that he may think something like that. But the reality is it's an indirect effect of the principal aims of these systems. The principal aim of a social media algorithm is to generate higher levels of what companies call engagement, right? Engagement means keeping you on their site so they can display more advertising. Now, when you take an algorithm and say— I'm really simplifying here, right? But for the sake of the argument, when you take an algorithm and give the algorithm an instruction, and the instruction is maximize engagement, what happens is that little by little, the system, which is a machine learning system, so it learns by being confronted with the behavior of the users, realizes that there is more engagement with more extreme things and more polarizing things and more aggressive things. And so it starts delivering and displaying more polarizing things and more extreme things. And that's how you create this situation, right? Not by telling the algorithm polarize society, by telling the algorithm maximize engagement. And that's the way to do it.

And I'm very curious now, when we speak about maximizing engagement online versus at a conference. So you curate a conference, you have the same aim, you want to maximize engagement so that people But the engagement is very different. So how do you create that engagement? How do you facilitate for the engagement?

Well, you need to figure out the best possible way for the kind of specific audience you have, big or small, in a theater or in a different kind of setting or so, to absorb the kind of information you are delivering to them and to do something with it. Even if they do something, it's just to put it somewhere in their mind. So that it is not only retrievable, but it can be used and useful, right? So there are, of course, many different things that many people have already figured out in terms of how you design a space for people to be more— pay more attention and more engaged with the speaker. So I give you an example that has really to do with TED. So for those who have come to the TED conference, annual TED conference in Vancouver for the last 10 years, They have discovered a convention center, which is a classic convention center where you find many different kinds of events during the year. But then you walk in and there is this theater that is all made of wood and is like an arena, right? And it is built every year for a TED conference. And then within the big cube, the empty cube of the Vancouver Convention Center, and then taken down, put in storage, and then rebuilt the next year. And why so? Because there are many theaters already existing, so we could use an existing theater. We did that because when you look at the classic typology of theaters, you by and large have 2 types of theaters. You have the smallish theater with a rather smallish stage, where if you put a person in the middle of the stage telling a story, there is a level of intimacy between the audience and the person because of the size of the theater, but there isn't much visual impact because the small stage doesn't allow for big projections and this kind of things, right? Then you have another kind of theater, which is the opera theater essentially, where the stage is as big as a football field. And because they created this very ambitious and complex stage designs and so on. So you do have an incredible visual impact for the audience. But one thing is when you perform an opera and you have 30 characters on stage, and another is when you put one single person in the middle telling a story, right? It's lost in this big, in this big space. Of course, you can redesign it by adding elements, physical elements and so on, but But there was this frustration. And on one side you have the intimacy, on the other side you have the visual effect. How can you bring them together? And so we designed the theater to do that. It was designed by David Rockwell, the architect. He's the same architect that has designed many of the Oscar ceremony stages. And the idea was to create a space that was— that has an incredible visual impact. And so there is an almost 30 meters wide screen, uh, but then the audience is actually gathered very close to the speaker. So even if there are 1,800 people in the theater and you are the last one up at the top, you feel very close to the speaker. At the same time, you get to this incredible capacity for visual impact. Uh, so you can really play with both elements of intimacy and of visual spaciousness in a way. That was our solution to the problem. Then everybody has a different solution. for their specific problem, how they bring 25 people into a room and create a very dynamic setting and so on, which is not what I do. So I'm less at ease to speak about that. But I do know that there is a real important element determining the experience, co-determining the experience of the audience that has to do with how do you think of the space. There was a time back in 2010, something like that, you know, there was a time where you would go to many technology conferences and there would be a lot of bloggers. At the time, you know, it was pre-social media, it was blogs. And conference organizers loved the fact that they had bloggers because they would write about the conference all the time. And so you would go to some conferences and you would have literally 2 rows of tables as the first 2 rows for the bloggers and then the audience behind. So as a speaker, you would be talking primarily to people who were hunched over their laptops writing and did not look at you, right? It was completely absurd. But that shows how not thinking of the space in terms of the experience, but thinking just of the space in terms of, oh, okay, I want the bloggers to write, so let's put them in a privileged position. is the wrong way of thinking. Another example is how many conferences do you go to which take place in multipurpose venues?

Yeah.

And the thing that makes me always smile is when you walk into a room where the chairs have been— so the chairs are movable, right? So the chairs have been put in rows in front of the stage with a corridor in the middle. Which means that the speaker is in the center of the stage speaking to an empty corridor and the audience is to the right and to the left, rather than, you know, at least do 2 small corridors out at the edges and keep the audience in the middle. They're basic things, right? But you need to think of those things ahead of time.

What I love from what you're saying is putting the speaker in the focus and the audience's impact on the speaker and sense, the speaker's impact on the audience. Because there's been research on how— starts with babies, toddlers— how they react when their mothers are not looking at them. Panic, pure panic. And it's the same with adults. So if I would start— if you're in the middle of sharing your anecdote and I start being bored and looking away, The impact of your words and your story will eventually fade, and the audience who's not present with us right now will sense that. And the same is true when you have a speaker in front of an audience who is not looking at them.

Yeah, and, uh, totally true. And of course, now the big challenge for anyone who gathers an audience in any kind of room is the competition of the cell phone, right? The smartphone. Because I mean, partially including— I include myself in this, but people really are addicted to their devices. And so, you know, you're in a meeting and then you fake that you need to go to the bathroom so you can go and check your cell phone, right? And that's what, for example, students do at school. You talk to any teacher and they say, yeah, yeah, after 30 minutes, several leave and go to the bathroom. And we know they don't need to go to the bathroom. They just want to check their cell phone. and their messages and so on. But when you're in a conference or workshop setting, etc., the big challenge is to avoid people taking out their phone because once they start checking their emails or WhatsApp or social media, then it's very difficult to bring them back. Now, if it's a small setting, if it's 20 people, it's relatively easy because it's sort of self-policing, right? One does it, 19 notice, and that's not good. But if you are in a room of 1,000 people, It's way more complicated than that. And each one who does it does 2 things. One is because you are in a theater, in a sort of darkened room, and you're looking at a speaker on stage or whatever happens on stage, suddenly there's a light coming up in the middle of this dark and it distracts anyone who is within eyesight of that light, which means that allowing people to use devices in this kind of context means allowing them to disrupt the experience of— degrade the experience of everybody else. That's a very good reason for forbidding devices in a conference. At the same time, it's incredibly difficult to police because, you know, unless you have ushers going around and snatching devices from people, which is not exactly ideal either. But the other thing that does is that if one starts and nobody intervenes, it's a sort of automatic permission for somebody else to do the same.

Interesting.

And then it becomes a phenomenon. So we tried an experiment several years ago in London. We were doing an event at the Royal Institution, which has a U-shaped kind of theater. So at the edges, the audience was kind of looking at each other and the speaker was in the middle. And we really asked people actively not to use their devices throughout the event. And it was very consciously planned and very kindly asked at the beginning. And people didn't use them, maybe also because despite the fact that there were several hundred people in the room, those parts of the audiences were looking at each other, so it would be easy to see the other. But it was really thought as an experiment. And the funny thing, and the pressure of devices was less than now, right? It was several years ago. Now it's even worse. And many people came afterwards and said, you know, it's like you gave me permission to pay attention again. And I think that we all have lost a bit that kind of feeling, the feeling of being able to pay attention again because we are constantly distracted. You know, there is this concept of attention fracking. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but, uh, I don't remember who coined it in an article in the New York Times a while back, last year or so. It's analogous, you know, by analogy with fracking for oil and gas, right?

Mm-hmm.

You inject, uh, high-pressure water and chemicals underground to crack the rocks so that the oil and gas can come out. And the idea here is that you push high-pressure quantities of information towards us and you frack our attention. So how can we bring that back is one of the big challenges of anyone who organizes any kind of gathering, conferences, events, workshops, brainstormings, etc.

Yeah, that's very interesting, especially there's the component of addiction, as you said. It's just, okay, we We have this, we need the update. And then I think there's a component of distraction to soothe our discomfort.

Yeah, that too.

So what I realize in workshops, when, as soon as there's a difficult moment where it's about introspection, self-reflection, something about our behavior that feels slightly uncomfortable, People start opening other tabs, grabbing their phone, because it's our way to come back to something that is familiar and that distracts us from the internal discomfort.

But isn't that funny? It feels like if we are in an uncomfortable situation, grabbing our phone kind of brings us back to some sort of something we control. The reality is we don't control anything. What happens on the phone, especially on social media, but also on any messaging platform, is not something we control. It's something that is determined by others or is determined by machines. But we do have that impression that because it's so familiar, because we spend so many hours on it every day, then it's somehow a more comfortable, more controllable kind of space.

Yeah. And somehow sometimes we believe that more information is better than no. And I realized that I really have to force myself not to check my phone before going to bed. Because usually there is at least one message or one piece of information that destroys my sleep.

And yet it could wait until tomorrow morning.

Exactly. Because I won't do anything with it anyway instead of—

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Completely.

So how do you know in this curation process what to leave in and what to leave out? Because especially nowadays, leaving out or both, curation is also a political act.

Those are 2 different questions. Yes, curation is certainly a political act because choice is a political act.

Yes.

I'm always fascinated by this attempt that we see in many different places of somehow dividing politics from the rest, right? Come to work just for work, don't bring your politics to work. Or, you know, you should not politicize things or so, and et cetera.

Cannot speak about politics.

Yeah. But the reality is in today's world, everything is politics, but not politics in the sense of it's party A versus party B or so. Politics in the sense of, of, of the body politic, in the sense of politics as the way we choose to organize ourselves as a society and create ways to both solve conflicts and develop ourselves. Without, you know, by dynamics of discussion and convergence and compromise. And so in that sense, everything is politics in a way. And so choosing is politics, not choosing is also politics. When a newspaper decides to write an article about a community where the school was closed down for budgetary reasons, for example, and merged with another school in a by town rather than writing an article about another community of the same kind where the school was restarted because they found a creative way to restart it. That's a political choice, right? It does seem like, no, but we want to cover the community in crisis while the others are doing well, but actually choosing to put the spotlight on the crisis rather than on the resurrection of the school. is a political choice, which doesn't need to be conscious, but we are constantly confronted with this kind of situations. So definitely curating has a political element, not in the sense of being aligned with one way of thinking or another way of thinking, but in the sense of having to make a choice. So a spotlight somewhere, which means not putting it somewhere else. And there again, as we said at the beginning, there is no real recipe. It's an editorial kind of decision or process, which is based on many different things, is based on a set of practices, of experiences, of intuition, of knowledge, or of goals and so on. And that's also to say that no curation is perfect, right? If you and I have to curate the same program of, you know, 90 minutes for an evening in the same exact venue at the same exact time, Probably with the same exact theme, overall theme, we will probably come up with 2 different programs, and probably both of them will be good because curation is informed by everything we carry as persons, our knowledge, our experience, our intuition, our past successes or failures, and, and so on, our curiosity.

And what we care about.

Yeah.

The creation. curation. And, and I just realized, related to what we spoke earlier about the filter bubble, that especially when you're curating a conference, and as impactful as TED, it is almost this unique opportunity to burst the filter bubble of people.

Yes, hopefully it is. Hopefully it is. So that's, that's one of the things that I think are really important, right? Do not try to do what the audience expects.

Hmm.

Of course, you want the audience to buy a ticket and come to the conference and all the rest, right? But the notion of trying to give people what they expect is certainly great for a different kind of products. If they expect a great cheese, you need to give them a great cheese, but not for cultural products, because culture doesn't grow and doesn't develop and doesn't become more dense and interesting and articulated by more of the same. It becomes all those things by being challenged. And so don't necessarily think in terms of giving the audience what they expect.

Yes. And be conscious or cautious about what you— where you introduce the surprise, because I think keeping the TED stage And the theater the same over the years creates some sort of familiarity.

Mm-hmm.

The time of each talk gives some familiarity so that you create almost this psychological safety to have the boundaries to then disrupt within these boundaries by having content or culture or music that nobody expected. Yeah, but if you would take away the comfort by having a different environment each time, then maybe you would have less of a playing field or degrees of freedom to play around with the content.

Yeah, but somehow the, the— you, you can make the environment familiar even if you change the physicality of it every time. For example, there is a— in TED specifically, there is a big familiarity by the fact that there is a red round carpet and there is a red logo on the background. And there is always a similar way of introducing and presenting a session and so on. So, you know, we did conferences moving— we used to have a conference called TEDGlobal, which traveled to different places every time. And so we did it in Scotland and in Brazil and in Tanzania. And so, but somehow you can recreate a similar feeling of familiarity, even if you are in a beautiful theater. uh, in, in the middle of Edinburgh, or in a purpose-built theater on the beach of, of Copacabana, or so, uh, by these elements, by this visual and physical elements in a way.

Yeah, familiarity. Which brings me to a different related curiosity. So there's TED and there's TEDx.

Yeah.

And there is— how do you maintain quality. So there is the body and there is the brand TED, and then the openness of, okay, let's liberalize it and democratize, and everyone can have their TEDx. And then there's always a cost and a benefit, right? There's a trade-off. How much do you open it? And what can you do to actually ensure that the quality is maintained? And I stop there. I see you smiling. You have lots to say about that.

No, no, it's interesting. So when we launched TEDx in 2009, there were things that we had really been thinking through quite a bit. First of all, everybody thought that we were crazy. You know, we were taking a brand that was already pretty valuable, pretty credible, pretty well known around the world, TED, and we were putting it in the hands of people that we barely knew and who were not working for us. So this was not a model of franchising the way you think of McDonald's, for example, right? Which is very top-down, which comes with very specific rules, which looks similar everywhere. And, and so, uh, this was a, a community-driven model. Essentially, the idea was— the idea was born by the fact that after we started putting TED Talks online, we got a lot of feedback from people. And some of it was, oh, that's great, etc. But some of it was, oh my God, that's so good, and we need something like that in our city. Why don't you come to our city and do a TED conference here? And for a long time, for several months, we didn't have really an answer to that. We were this small group of people, and we couldn't go around the world doing conferences everywhere. And so our answer was Sorry, we can't do it. But it's not a very satisfactory answer, especially if the demand keeps coming, right? And then finally we hit on a different answer. And the different answer was, well, we can't come to Amsterdam and do a conference there, but you can do it under the TED brand just by taking a license. And the license is free, but it is a contract. So you need to respect certain rules about How you want to do the event, and those are all rules that somehow pushed towards an event that would look like and feel like and be like the event we would do if we went there. Then you need to add an X to the brand, and then you need to add the name of your city or of your neighborhood, so you localize it, right? And under those conditions, you can do it, and that's how TEDx was. born. Now, a lot of people reached out and said they want to do one. Some of them were agreed, others not. And the choice was mostly based on discussions and interviews that tried to ascertain their motivation.

Mm-hmm.

Is this some— somebody who wants to genuinely bring TED to their city with the right kind of motivation, spreading ideas and so on? Or is this someone who has a different kind of motivation? For example, create an event and then put the clients of their agency on stage or something like that. I'm simplifying, but roughly it was this kind of filtering. And then events started happening and some of them were better and others were okay, but the model was designed on purpose. And this goes back to your point at the beginning about controlling quality. The model was designed on purpose To be global from the onset, which means that if you want to allow someone to do an event in Amsterdam is a different thing than allowing somebody to do an event in poor neighborhood in Nairobi, for example. Why? Because in Amsterdam you have fantastic theaters and great production companies, and it's easy to raise money via sponsors and this kind of things. It's not the same thing in Nairobi. It's not the same thing if a group of students in a university wants to do it who don't have experience in organizing events or anything like that. So we would give everybody support in terms of toolkits and training and so on, but then they were on their own organizing these events. And so you need to allow for this kind of discontinuity where suddenly you have an event somewhere that looks very much like we would do it and another one somewhere else that was you know, very amateurishly organized, but with the same kind of intention, with the same ethos, right? And that was the important thing. It was really about opening up the possibility for ideas to emerge from anywhere.

Mm-hmm.

And for people who wanted to highlight those ideas anywhere to do it, which means that you can control only up to a certain So there was never a mechanism by which, you know, organizers had to submit a list of speakers to TED and so on. And by the way, with 3,000 events around the world every year, it would be impossible. You would need to have a gigantic team to do that. But then a couple of things happened which we had not planned for. The first was the number of events. So many, literally 10 a week around the world, that somehow everywhere there was a TEDx event, there was another one just a few kilometers away, which means that people looked at each other, right? And so it's the same phenomenon as we discussed before for the cell phones, right? There was a sort of self-policing in the community by which if somebody did something that was evidently patently wrong or in not keeping with the rules of the license, somebody would actually— else would actually see it and let us know, right? So we could intervene punctually. But that was kind of the least important one. The second one, which I think was the most fascinating one, was a question of setting a level of ambition. So at a certain point, we decided that we would actually pick the best talks coming from a TEDx event and post them on the main TED website. So if you're an organizer that is investing a lot of his or her time and resources and networks and connections into organizing an event in a city, and you have the possibility that maybe one of your talks with TEDxAmsterdam on the background ends up on the main TED website and gets global distribution, you want to try to achieve that. And so that somehow automatically pushes up the level of ambition and therefore the level of quality and the fact that people stick to the rules of the license more closely.

That is so smart. It's basically becoming—

We didn't actually plan for it. It just happened. We didn't—

And it can still be smart. Maybe street smart. It's this self-enforcing contract basically where you— it's like how microcredits would work. Through the community peer control and the right incentives. In the— I'm, I'm writing a book that I call Unprofessionalism.

Okay.

Where I'm curious about to what extent the notion of being professional is actually in the way of being human, being community-driven, being creative, emergent, and all of that. And, um, I just want to hijack this conversation because I'm so curious and because I can. You used the word amateur, and I would be very curious of your distinction between what makes it amateur and what makes it— could make it unprofessional in the way how we generally use the term. And what is the significance of professionalism for TED?

I'm not sure I have an answer to the last point, but in terms of the question of the amateur, I'm not using the word amateur in a diminishing sense, right?

I got that. Yeah, exactly.

It's just a different position from which to start. Somebody organizes an event for a living, and therefore they have practices and they have experience and they have tools and they have, and so on. And others don't, but try somehow to pick up and become as well informed and as well prepared as possible, while that not being their main preoccupation nor what brings bread to the table. And so both of them, in my eyes, have similar value in terms of the way you articulate all we have discussed so far about ideas and audiences and dynamics between the two and, uh, And so on. I think that we definitely need to find a way to rediscover some level of amateurism in what we do, because we've gone overboard in the other direction. And, uh, what pays there, what gets lost there is the capacity to be genuine.

Hmm.

To really put ourselves out there. as humans with all our flaws and limitations, etc., we try to be absolutely perfect. You know, in, in, in, in one of our conversations per email, you asked me, give a piece of advice that people can actually take away, right?

Mm-hmm.

And from the perspective of the curator of events, my piece of advice is if you are a speaker in any kind of circumstances, including the person who stands up takes the microphone in the Q&A moment and asks a question. But even furthermore, if you are the speaker or the panelist or the interviewee, never ever read from a screen, independent of whether it is your cell phone, your tablet, or a comfort monitor, or a teleprompter, right? Why? Because think of the teleprompter. The teleprompter in a conference to me is the most absurd thing. Because you are faking it, and everybody knows you are faking it because they see the teleprompter. And yet what you want to give is the impression that you are not faking it, right? So you talk without notes, and you talk very coherently, and you don't stumble, and you don't have all these interjections, uh, and so on. So you want to project an image that you are the best speaker ever. And yet you're faking it and everybody sees that you're faking it. And so why are you doing it, right? And if you don't feel like being able to go through 12 minutes without notes, then rather than having a teleprompter or a screen that you try to read without people having the impression you're reading, but they know exactly that you're reading because you keep looking at the screen and not at the audience, pick up a piece of paper, keep a note in your hands. Which is the most natural thing ever. And everybody understands what you're doing. And especially you are not giving the impression that you're faking it, right? You look down at your notes and then you look up at the audience and tell the story to the audience. And then you look down again and you look up again. But this idea that, no, we need to be as polished as possible, as professional as possible, as perfect as possible. And therefore we fake it in the eyes of everybody. It's completely surreal to me.

It's absurd. Yeah, and I think, thank you so much. I'm glad that I asked the question because I think the equivalent of that being on stage pretending we're professional speakers, although we are faking it and everyone knows it, the equivalent of that exists everywhere where we look around where people fake it to be so professional, although they have no clue.

Oh no, that's, that's a, in today's world is possibly one of the dominant cultural traits, right? Anything from Instagram filters to heavy editing of videos and so on.

Yeah.

To look different than they actually are and project a different kind of image.

And I think this is then the other thing of the curation, how to bring this authenticity back. Because I think there is, especially in this polished world where it's so easy to be polished, suddenly there is a real value in seeing the unpolished, the raw, the human, the authentic. The insecure why, and I think that's the difference between amateur and unprofessional. The amateur and the professional, they both subscribe to the same moral standards. The amateur sportsman would not use drugs as the professional, but the unprofessional does. So the amateur speaker maybe also has notes.

There's another trap there, right? When I discuss authenticity with some speakers. Some of them understand it as not preparing, right? I insist a lot and I work a lot with speakers on preparing their talk. Literally draft your talk, write it, let's discuss about it, let's figure out, you know, whether it covers every angle we need to cover, whether there is stuff in there that we can leave out, whether there are sufficient examples, whether there is sufficient evidence in what you say, this kind of things, whether the flow is right. And then once we get to a point where we're both happy with it, let's rehearse. That's the standard TED process, not only my process, standard TED process we've designed over, over the years, right? And you may think that potentially that goes in the direction of being perfect. And so some speakers at the same time hear us talk about being authentic and they say, well, I want to be authentic, but you're asking me to prepare. And, and here is really a trap. Being authentic doesn't mean being unprepared, right? Being authentic means being prepared to the point where you don't need to think of your script anymore. You just need to think about how would you connect to The audience. Talk is there, just connect to the audience. And it goes back to the first point about making sure that the time and attention the audience gives you is used in the best possible, best possible way, right?

Yeah. And I think because one thing came to my mind are there's some personalities, and I had that also with podcast hosts when I was on the podcast, they're so polished and everything looks perfect and the the background. And yes, they're very well prepared, and still something is missing. And I wonder— for the authenticity.

Mm-hmm.

And I wonder whether it's that you're so well prepared that the content is so clear that you have space then to be yourself, so that personality can come out, and maybe the spontaneous joke that wasn't scripted.

Yeah.

But if you are not 150% prepared, you don't have capacity for—

There is no space for the spontaneous joke. There is— the crack is not possible because you are so busy being prepared, right?

Yeah.

If in your mind you're busy being perfect, then there is no way for being spontaneous, and there is little bandwidth to create the connection with who is listening to you.

And this, um— we're running out of time.

Not yet.

So many topics. Because it reminds me of the other thing that we discussed in our exploration call are panel discussions. So if you're the moderator of a panel discussion, this is the— you have to be very prepared and you don't— if you're a professional and very well prepared, you can come up with the spontaneous questions. That are not scripted. And this is also a sort of facilitation of the conversation.

Oh no, completely. So the panel discussions that lose people immediately are the ones that have more than 3 people on stage. Suddenly, you know, you have 8 people lined up and the session is supposed to last 35 minutes, so nobody has ever time to say anything aside from one sentence about who they are. But they're also the ones where a question gets asked and then everybody's asked to answer the same question. Then we go back to a second question, everybody is asked to answer the same question. And so the panels that have a better reason to succeed and better reason to exist are the ones where there is a dynamic of discussion that happens not only with the moderator, but literally within the panel itself, between the 2 or 3 people. So the job of the moderator of a panel, I think, is double. On one side, you do need to prompt the conversation with the right kind of questions, the right kind of objections, including stopping the conversation at some point and redirecting it or nudging it in different directions. But you also need to create a sort of immediately a sort of environment where the panelists don't all depend on you. It's not like every panelist is connected to the moderator, but they're also connected between them. And so they react to each other and, and somehow They almost interview each other by that reaction. So a panel needs to be more of a network than a sort of hub and spoke where everybody just relates to the moderator.

And what are— it's similar, it's the art and the craft where you have— there's a curation part, whom to invite, what questions to prepare, and then there's the facilitation bit in the moment. So how do you create the space As a moderator, what is the art and the craft behind it so that you create the space where this happens and they don't only talk to you and wait for the same? Because you have to create permission.

And part of it you created before sitting on stage, right? The biggest mistake you can do as, as an organizer of a panel is that the people in the panel meet only when they walk on stage. All right, you definitely want them to meet before and to have a conversation before, possibly with you, maybe even just between them. And so, but if somebody just gets there, walks on stage, is parachuted in and say, oh, hi, hi, and literally shakes hands for the first time with the other panelists on stage, which we have seen happening, is definitely not a very conducive way to— a very appropriate way to generate that kind of dynamics on a panel, right? Another element is not to be afraid of silence. There is a— we all have a tendency of being afraid of silence. So if you have a conversation, even just with another person, and the other person doesn't say anything, you tend to start saying things just to fill the silence. That's a— that's an old trick, for example, that good journalists use when they go and interview someone. Right? The person answers and then the person expects a second question and the journalist is just there and says, hmm. And within 3 seconds, it's very likely the other person starts talking again. And maybe that's the moment when they say stuff that is a bit unguarded, that is more original. And so because they feel the need to fill the silence, right? So you should not be afraid of silence as a moderator and not Feel immediately silenced, but let the panelists come into the conversation rather than always installing yourself at the center of the conversation. That's actually another key point, which goes back also to the curation role. So not only for panels, which is, of course, your role is to take care of the ideas, but it's also to take care of the persons carrying those ideas, right? You want to be of service to the idea and to the person. You want to help that idea grow wings, and therefore you need to be somehow modest in a way, right? Don't put yourself in competition with the idea or in competition with the speaker or the panelists. It's their idea and it's them, it's not you. At TED, for example, that manifests in the fact that when you watch a TED Talk online, Aside from the moment when it is an interview, and so there is, you know, Bruno interviewing somebody, otherwise the person who has curated the talk is never mentioned. It's only the speaker, right? Because that's them and their idea, and what you are there to do is to be of help and support. So you need to stand back.

Yeah, and it's fascinating because there are so many elements of The skill of facilitation coming up. So leaving the ego at the door, enabling the others, facilitating their job by not taking the stage. And even when you spoke of the panel discussion and the panel speakers to meet beforehand, it reminds me of the need to create psychological safety.

Mm-hmm.

So they have to feel the permission, feel invited also to interrupt. If they met each other, they know each other a little bit, they feel safe, they create a little bit of respect towards each other, and then you get the dynamic that you're actually looking for.

Totally. And as a moderator or facilitator or host, that's also partially your role, right? Many years ago, somebody asked me in an interview, how do you think of your role as a host of a TEDCon? So going up on stage and telling people, well, here is what's happening and here is the next speaker and this kind of things. And it got me thinking because I never really conceptualized that. It was just kind of this dynamic of somebody needs to introduce the speaker. But then I realized that actually the real role of a host and why a host is important. Some people think, oh, we can do a conference without host. You know, a speaker goes up and then ends the talk and there's an applause and then another speaker goes up. And I'm like, no, if you do that, you are abandoning the speaker and you're abandoning the audience because the real role of a host who goes up and says, welcome, here is what we're gonna do, here's what's gonna happen, and the next speaker is Miriam, is to give the audience and the speakers the impression that at least one person knows what's going to happen. Mm-hmm. So they don't need to worry about that. They just need to lean back and listen or to lean forward and talk, right? And not worry about what's going to happen because that guy there with the red paperclip who just read the introduction knows what's going to happen, which also means that he or she knows what to do if something wrong happens. If Suddenly the theater goes black because of blackout, right? And so on. Don't worry about that. He or she knows. That's the role of the host, the main role of the host. Put both the audience and the speaker at ease.

Yeah, yeah. Creating the container also is how do we, how do we interact with each other? What are the rules of the game, the rules? Um, and to keep that together. Yeah, fascinating. Thank you. What remains your Facilitation, curation, moderation. So facilitation in the broadest sense. Challenge?

Maybe it's measuring success, because the outcomes of what you do in this kind of roles are generally difficult to quantify. They play out with different scales of time, right? It's not an immediate thing that— I mean, of course, you can always have the 3 takeaways that you can go back to the office on Monday and apply and this kind of things. But the real outcomes of anything like a TED conference or a workshop or whatever somehow play out over a different scale of time. And so they're difficult to measure. And yet clients and partners and sponsors, they all want measurable results right now. And so the big challenge is try not to twist your format and your approach, etc., in order to make it immediately measurable, because that defies a bit the purpose of what you're doing. And so I don't think anyone has really figured out yet, including me, how to measure success immediately. You need to accept the fact that you are sending out ideas into the world, into the minds of people. Everybody's gonna react differently to the same idea and the same experience. And things, if you have done the right things to prepare and get there, then things may happen because of what you do. But you need to accept that idea that not everything can be squeezed into an Excel spreadsheet.

Yes, I love that. I could rant for hours about KPIs on knowledge work and especially on cultural or inspiring or training work, the Net Promoter Score.

All that.

Yes. And, and what came to my mind was, um, Brené Brown's TED Talk on vulnerability that suddenly, until today, made vulnerability something that even men would talk about. Without being embarrassed.

Absolutely.

And that's an impact that could say it was because of the TED Talk, but then do we know 100%? And is it relevant?

It's not relevant. It's nice that the talk had the life it has had. And by the way, to go back to the point about TEDx, that was a TEDx talk. It was one of those talks that was plucked from the TEDx network and put into the TED.com website and disseminated and got tens of millions of views out of there. So that mechanism definitely worked there. But you're right, is it relevant if that descends from the TED Talk or not? No, it doesn't. It's not relevant. What's relevant is that that talk exists, and so there is the possibility of that.

Which then reminds me— this could be an entire different conversation, but I, um, still have to say it— the impact of Values. So ideas worth spreading is the idea. So the metrics to measure is, is it an idea that was worth spreading and did it spread? Well, yeah. And then so boiling it down to the values that a brand attaches to a product instead of some random measures of KPI that are maybe—

You know, the The spread you can measure just by the number of views, right? And it's not a perfect measure because they don't capture everything, but somehow we can put a number to that. But the worth is an editorial commitment, is a commitment to choosing and filtering. And that's really the core of the, of the job, right?

Curation. Yeah. Bruno, I could continue this conversation for tomorrow, and I want to be mindful of your time. I'm very grateful.

And the time of listening. Yes.

Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing.

And, um, yeah, thank you for having me.

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