Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

• Leading with Story: Captivate, Convince, Inspire with Paul Smith
• Greater than Fact: The Power of Leading with Stories with Paul Smith
• Tales from the Top: How Leaders Use Stories with Dr. Tanvi Gautam

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Ruth Milligan, APR, Executive Speech Coach, has been a communicator her entire life.  After earning a degree in Speech Communication from Miami University, she has spent the last 20 years working in a variety of strategic communications roles.  Her favorite was her first: a speechwriter and coach to various political figures.   Since then, she has been a consultant to a variety of clients in her public relations and marketing practice over the past 11 years.

In 2009, she co-curated the first TEDxColumbus event, reinvigorating her love of speech coaching and presentation training. With ar.tic.u.la.tion, she melds her experience and passion into a speech training approach that helps rising executives uncover their potential for becoming excellent verbal communicators.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] Today our guest is Ruth Milligan. Ruth’s career could be characterized as a communication quilt with many layers, patterns, and expressions of experience and accomplishments. She’s one of the original curators for TEDx events, and chosen over 200 speakers who have taken the TEDx Columbus stage since 2009. 

Thank you so much for being with us. 

Ruth: Thanks, Maureen, for having me. So my background has been in one form of communications or another. I was a speechwriter for many years in politics. 

I’ve been either a public relations or marketing consultant. I narrowed my practice only to doing training and coaching inside what I call executive communication. And that was really informed by my experience doing the very first TEDx event in Columbus, Ohio. 

The TED Conference was founded by a guy who wanted to share ideas with people at a dinner party, but he knew they’d never come. So he invited them to a conference and called it TED, [00:01:00] Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and he put it halfway between Silicon Valley technology and entertainment and design world of Hollywood and LA. 

The conference evolved over time of these short talks of 18 minutes or less without notes or a podium, centered on one idea, fueled by data, research, and experience, really driven by story. It’s quite a, a movement.  

Maureen: And in that movement, you have created within Columbus, being one of the first franchisees, your own movement.  

Ruth: We’re an innovative community. We have a diverse population, from headquarters of pharmaceutical distributors to financial companies to immigrants. People have found that this cross-sharing platform of short ideas driven by story is really quite powerful. 

Companies are looking for different opportunities to share, whether it’s ideas within their companies or to bring in experts on the outside. So they might have an annual meeting, or [00:02:00] a quarterly briefing, and they wanna make it more concise, more story, and more impactful, and this is a really great platform to use for that, as opposed to the typical 20, 30, 40-minute PowerPoint presentation where you may or may not connect with your audience. 

You have to be, in giving a TED-like talk, particularly focused. And when you’re not allowed to use notes, it really forces you to look at it differently, and that’s what companies are really enjoying is the delivery of high impact, highly engaging talks that involve the audience in storytelling ways, that deliver really interesting content, especially when you’ve got a buffet of ideas that you wanna share. 

So companies we, we get calls all the time to sort of translate what we’ve learned from TED into the corporate world.  

Maureen: You were talking about TED-style events within corporations.  

Ruth: Right. So you have the official licensed TEDx events, and just so everyone knows, I don’t speak for TED, I only speak from my own [00:03:00] experiences inside the license, just to make sure. 

And we’ve done a number of TEDx official branded events with corporations. Mm. But parallel of interest, is the TED-like adoption of events inside corporations. So that could mean I have an annual meeting and I wanna carve out an hour and have five or six talks in the TED style. 

Or I turn over an entire conference. Or I create a conference that feels like a TED event, and I’ve done virtually all of those with various corporations in town. And we coached speakers in the TED style of speaking. 

So you weren’t allowed to have notes or a podium. We wanted you to have one really compelling idea supported by fact and story, not just fact. Those have become great training and development opportunities for these executives. Most of them walk away saying they won’t prepare or speak again the same way after going through the process. 

And I think part of it is that no one really gives people the time after they’ve taken Public Speaking 101 to really train them in [00:04:00] what does it take to be concise and engaging and compelling in a short amount of time on a very important, usually large topic. So that’s what the TED platform has informed us on the other side. 

Maureen: The other thing that I found fascinating is in that hour or two hours, you may be presenting people who have conflicting or different points of view, and it’s the job of the listener to then start integrating rather than the leader curating a story that builds to something.  

Ruth: That’s correct. 

So a true TED, TEDx, a TED event, is driven with one really important value, and that’s diversity. So diversity of thinking, of background, of experience, of ideas, of points of view. You got it. And so you are feeling like you’re on this tether. It’s like sort of taffy. You’re being pulled one way and then another and then another. 

Maybe you’re a pinball going from one side of the game to the other. And you, like you just said, get to decide which ones you agree with, which ones you like, and which ones you don’t. By nature, the hosts of these events, of which I’ve played host many times, [00:05:00] do not judge. I don’t say, “Wasn’t that a great talk?” 

I don’t say, “Everyone, wasn’t that the best talk you’ve ever heard?” Or, “Boy, that talk wasn’t so good.” I just say, “Thank you,” because I leave it up to the audience to decide, do you like that talk or idea or not? And typically, in most of the events and talks that we host, I’ll have a few speakers, half of whom the audience loves, and half of whom the audience didn’t like at all. 

So it proves to you that you come with your own set of biases and influences- Mm-hmm … to the room, and you obviously filter through what you’re hearing with those biases, and everyone’s biases are different.  

Maureen: One reason I think that’s so important is as we talk about leaders and leader development, one of the characteristics we believe the most effective leaders have is a broad range of interests. 

So I can draw from what I heard in one of the TED Talks you curated here with someone who was a victim of sexual trafficking.  

Ruth: Mm-hmm.  

Maureen: Very compelling. Mm-hmm. Very hard to [00:06:00] listen to. And then there was an entomology professor, and there was someone on mindfulness. So as a leader, how am I getting exposed to alternate points of view and different perspectives? 

Ruth: So there’s two pieces here. One is the actual live TEDx event where we, as curators, give you this sort of buffet of ideas to which you don’t have a choice. 

If you choose to come to the event and choose to stay the whole time, you don’t get to pick and choose which workshop or breakout, right? 

Maureen: Mm-hmm.  

Ruth: The other thing that you have to, at your fingertips, is the ted.com and the TEDx sites, and the opportunity for you to actually curate your own set of talks on any given day is, you know- There’s playlists that TED has that will curate things inside certain themes, or you can just see what’s on the homepage and pick those five talks. And so you don’t have to wait for live events- Mm … to get that same experience. But I wanna connect one thing you just said. Being a listener, as I’ve had to be, of some of the more compelling, whether you were human trafficked, or a transgender, or gone through a heroin addiction, or run a Fortune 50 [00:07:00] company, or a startup entrepreneur, it doesn’t matter, I’ve probably heard the story. 

You ultimately end up building some of that empathy because that’s what you’re subjecting yourself to, is listening to a variety of very different stories. 

Maureen: It’s painful to hear a young woman talk about being trafficked.  

Ruth: Mm-hmm.  

Maureen: And it wasn’t who I imagined.  

Ruth: Yeah. So we have our own biases that we come into- Mm-hmm … and we think the heroin addict is gonna be someone who is not articulate and can’t put two words together and, you know, is gonna be strung out, when in fact, she was one of our more popular speakers. 

A woman who’s struggled 12 years with heroin, and it was her first time ever in her entire life speaking to any group about it. We’re able to host the diversity, you know, the CEO- Mm … of Cardinal Health right after a heroin addict, and before a street artist with hot pink hair who was incredibly compelling, Stephanie Ronte, who we love, right? 

So you get this mix that you don’t normally get if you show up to work, and you do your job, and you go home, and you watch some bad sitcom.  

Maureen: Well, and what [00:08:00] happens in our brains is different. The neural pathways change when we’re exposing ourselves to these different points of view.  

Ruth: Right.  

Maureen: So let’s move to corporate storytelling. 

Ruth: Sure.  

Maureen: So as leaders, why do I care? Why do I wanna build this skill?  

Ruth: So interestingly enough, I watched Martin Luther King; for those of you across the world, hopefully you know who Martin Luther King is. Uh, 63 years ago, he gave a talk, which we now know as the I Have a Dream speech. And my nine and 11-year-old with their father, my husband, we watched the talk last night, and it reminded me of what he introduced or had carried on in that talk- Mm-hmm still is consistent and relevant to corporate America today, which is listening to the metaphors and the stories he told. Mm-hmm. Inside that talk are what carry us through. The talk was only 13 minutes long.  

Maureen: Really?  

Ruth: So we’re reminded that what sticks with people is story, and the reason it sticks with people is because it’s the bridge [00:09:00] between what I know and care about and what I don’t yet know and care about. 

So I know and care about subject X, but I don’t yet know and care about subject Y. So there’s a story, a metaphor that connects X to Y. I now care about Y. So that’s one of the reasons why storytelling inside a TED Talk is very important, because oftentimes researchers are coming at you with things that you have no relationship with at all, and they want you to understand why the nanoparticles matter. 

So they’re gonna tell a bridge, a metaphor, an analogy that brings you into their story. Mm-hmm. I love to say to my speakers, “Whether you’re corporate or TEDx: make the audience the central character of your story, and the way you do that is by telling story.”  

Maureen: I don’t always attend to my own resilience, and the metaphor was if I had a pipe leaking in my basement- or living in an old house- Right … a bit of a drain backup. When I see that, do I get on the [00:10:00] phone and fix it immediately? Mm-hmm. Or do I go to work and hope it just goes away magically?  

Ruth: Right. 

And then you come home and your basement’s full of water- (Stuff!) … and all of a sudden it’s now that gradually, suddenly moment where the narrative changes dramatically and it becomes a crisis. Versus, I need to take five minutes to do those exercises. I need to take five minutes to call the pipe guy to fix it, right? 

So your resilience story about not paying attention to small cues along the way allowed us to really appreciate what larger resilience story you were trying to share.  

Maureen: With that small story, I think everyone could connect with, “Oh, yeah, I do that.”  

Ruth: I get a lot of leaders that’ll raise their hand in the back of a classroom lecture or, you know, something they’ve done and say, “I don’t have time to tell stories. I have to get the facts out.” 

And I would argue that it’s a pay now or pay later scenario. Do you want your audiences to appreciate and understand and be engaged- Mm-hmm … with you? Then you might need to spend a minute of your five telling a story and realizing how not hard it is-  

Maureen: I- …  

Ruth: versus [00:11:00] only sharing fact and leaving the audience completely clueless as to why they should care. 

Maureen: I was one of those people who was skeptical. Then I went to a presentation by someone I respect very deeply, and I realized about two minutes into the presentation, I was reading email on my phone. She wasn’t compelling. Her message was important, it was something I cared about, but she was dull. 

Had she interwoven story-  

Ruth: Right …  

Maureen: it would have made her message more compelling.  

Ruth: And let’s just remind your listeners what really makes a story work in your brain. It’s because we’re evoking emotion that makes us feel a certain way through the senses. So when I can tell you what it looked like, tasted like, smelled like, felt like, I can say, “Oh, it feels like driving through a hurricane on the Gulf Coast in the middle of spring… You know, that’s what this project feels like: I can’t see three feet ahead of me, that I can hear the heavy rain on my windshield. [00:12:00] My one windshield wiper is broken, so I’m inhibited in what I can see. I am sweating. I’m feeling myself nervous. I’m holding on to my steering wheel, right? And I have a dry mouth because I have nothing to drink. I am nowhere close to an oasis, and I am hungry cause I am spending all this energy, right?” So if I was trying to demonstrate to you how difficult the next project was gonna be, that might be a metaphor to share it, but I took you to probably the closest place you might have been on a freeway near water, near a hurricane, right? 

I took you there for a second.  

Maureen: And physiologically, I can feel that. Now I’m listening differently.  

Ruth: Correct. You’re not looking at your phone. You’re not reading your emails- Mm-hmm … ’cause I’ve got you in a sensory mode of knowing what the story is- Mm-hmm … trying to demonstrate- … which then connects to what I’m really trying to tell you. 

Maureen: With our listeners being mainly leaders- Yeah … what advice would you like them to hear to help them be more [00:13:00] effective as communicators in a standard business setting?  

Ruth: Sure. So switching away from sort of TEDx, but drawing lessons- Mm-hmm … and insight from it. On my way this afternoon, I’ll be working with a senior leader giving a consequential board presentation, often a call I get. 

This person needs to do well in this presentation, didn’t do so well in the last one. 

In this particular company, I have already coached two executives on similar presentations to the board, and both of them have been promoted. Everything was good. 

They were subject matter experts. The typical profile is: I’m a subject matter expert, I’m at the top of my field in terms of what I know. I need to be more influential, though.  

Maureen: Mm-hmm.  

Ruth: I’m not really making it in terms of getting other people to follow me, being concise, and being engaging. Fairly simple, but complicated. 

As someone said to me once, very easy to describe, very complicated to execute. So what happens? They get lost inside their own data. They think that they have to boil the ocean [00:14:00] and not a pot of water. They’re not considering the audience and really the question that they need to answer. 

So once they’ve answered it, they can stop. That kinda notion that Brene Brown has really worked with us on, around knowing what is enough. And being okay with saying, “I don’t know.” So those are some things that we work on inside. On the positive side of what makes the compelling presentation is one really central idea driven by usually a content framing sort of exercise supported by the most important proof that the audience will believe in, not all of the proof that you think they need to know. 

And story that supports the emotional side of our brain. So the left side of our brain wants data and proof because we want that to equal truth. There’s true, that is true, that something’s happening. Mm-hmm,  

and then the right side of our brain, we want it to equal emotion. We wanna feel something. 

How do I feel about that data? Do I feel good about it? Do I not feel good about it? Am I supposed to be excited? Am I supposed to be scared? Am I supposed to be pissed off? Am I supposed to be, you [00:15:00] know, like, “Oh, yes, let’s move to action on this,” or am I supposed- Mm-hmm … to feel sort of lackadaisical like, “Oh, everything’s fine. 

It’s a walk in the park.”  

So if we’re not building those elements into any particular communication, whether it’s three minutes or an hour, the audience is gonna get lost, and that’s what you don’t wanna have happen, for them to actually tune out to what you’re saying. You want them to be listening. 

So as long as you’re tethering between the truth and the story, then you’re good, but that process of sort of sifting through what I say, taking 100 pounds and shoving it into a 10-pound bag, usually into a three-minute talk, maybe a 10-minute talk, maybe a 15- takes a lot of heavy lifting beforehand. My longing for executives is to recognize that it does take time and effort before you go into a situation like that. It takes more time and more effort to recover from a bad communication when you didn’t prepare. I had an executive tell me last week, “How am I supposed to get these five people ready? I can’t hold their hand. There’s too much going on. There’s so much happening at this quarterly [00:16:00] briefing,” And I said, “Well, how can you not hold them accountable through the preparation process? Your job is to make sure they all succeed at the end of the day, and to teach them to do a better pathway.” 

One of the greatest compliments that you can be given as a communicator and as a leader came, at least in my world, through an email, and it- the email said, “Dear Ruth, thanks so much for your executive communication coaching on this big presentation. I was sitting on a conference call with my boss recently. He didn’t know I was on the call, but he repeated my story nearly word for word that I had presented in that communication. To me, it was an indication that not only did my message resonate with him, but it stuck.” So if you can get someone not only to listen to you, but to remember it and repeat it, that’s sort of the gold standard. 

Maureen: One of the things that struck me is how much time people spend preparing for a TED Talk. So I was presenting 15 minutes.  

Ruth: Mm-hmm.  

Maureen: I assumed I would spend an hour in preparation, and that would be fine. [00:17:00] That’s a lot more than 15 minutes. W- and- So- … you had me preparing for days. 

Ruth: I had a metric when I was a speechwriter in the early 1990s. Mm. I wrote for the then First Lady of Ohio. Fabulous woman named Janet Voynovich. And I watched our process. And f- if she was invited to give a 10-minute talk, we collectively, she and I, maybe the scheduler-  

Maureen: Mm-hmm …  

Ruth: would spend 10 hours. 

And I started to come up with this one hour to one minute metric. Mm. So if you’re invited to give a 15-hour, or sorry, a 15-minute talk, whether it’s a TED Talk or not, I would fully expect, especially if it’s new content that hasn’t been organized in that way before, I would fully expect you to spend 15 hours on it, without a doubt. 

And I will tell you that it’s a lot less to spend 15 hours before your talk than 30 hours after redoing it, recalling the meeting, trying to, you know, dig out from what you didn’t achieve- Mm … because people didn’t hear you, they didn’t understand, and you weren’t resonating. 

The big key [00:18:00] around TEDx Talks that’s different than a lot of corporate talks is that they’re recorded and posted and watched over and over. And so the consequence and the weight of that preparation makes a huge difference. Now, we also have some ability to edit bloopers and bleeps afterwards, which is common; one of the four editors for the TED Conference — all his job is to take the raw footage from the seven cameras that they shoot and to make the most compelling visual for the small screen. So there is some art and science inside why the TED Talks feel so well-produced afterwards, which a lot of people don’t factor in, which is why being a TED speaker is a big deal, because there’s a lot of investment that goes in to that production and post-production. It’s an expensive proposition if you’re doing the full, full thing. Yeah. I al- I also tell people, you know, I did a, I did an event where we video recorded eight-year-olds giving talks for one minute on a stage in the basement of a church, and they’re online, and some of them have been very [00:19:00] influential in helping to promote their stories. 

So you don’t have to have the full- Mm-hmm … big- Mm-hmm … Cadillac. I mean, you can get by on a little tiny Yugo if you want.  

Maureen: It was interesting. I did one recently after your class, and I think it ran about 18 minutes, and when I got done really critically looking at it, I think it’s now seven minutes on my website. 

So I cut out more than half of what I said.  

Ruth: Mm-hmm. We repeat ourselves. You don’t really realize it in the moment. You kinda lose track. You go back and, you know, sometimes people say, “I have to say it three times.” That’s not necessarily true. We just cut one of our talks from the fall. It was supposed to be 10 minutes. We told her she could take up to 14. She took 18 on the stage. We cut her back to about 13 and a half. You’d never know it. We had a speaker a few years ago that went 31 minutes. We asked her to edit down to 18. She cut 13 minutes out of her talk. You would’ve never known it when you look at the actual talk itself. 

She just pulled out a few stories that [00:20:00] were what I would call wandering in the woods. They were interesting and compelling to her at the time, and very emotionally connected, but not necessarily needing to support the central theme or hypothesis of her talk.  

Maureen: And I think that’s a critical point. 

You know, again, having been through your kind of strategic communication workshop- central theme, what are the three supporting points, not 12 supporting points. Right.  

Ruth: Grouping and, condensing and killing, as we say, the little darlings, things that can be left on the floor behind. That particular audience only needs enough proof to believe your point. 

They don’t need- Mm-hmm … every piece of proof that exists. It’s a big difference there. We have a conversation in our head. Susan Scott, the Fierce Conversations author- Mm-hmm … one of my favorite quotes is, “Every conversation we have is with ourselves, and on occasion, someone else is involved.”  

Maureen: And what sounded really compelling to me in preparation for this last talk: Once I saw it on screen, not so compelling. 

And some of it just looked dumb. 

Ruth: You’re [00:21:00] not dumb, Maureen. You’re a lot of things, but you’re not dumb.  

Maureen: But some of those comments just … well- That’s not what I wanted to l- Let me- To leave a listener with- Let- Or a viewer …  

Ruth: Let me share my one piece that I haven’t pioneered or authored by any chance, but it is the signature to my coaching. So as an example, ’cause I like to give examples. Mm. I’m coaching a woman who’s giving a major talk to an annual meeting for her company in two weeks. Very significant, consequential talk. And I said to her on our call on Friday, “Okay, now what I want you to do, now that our content structure is finished- Mm 

we know what stories you’re telling.” She said, “Well, I feel like it’s too long. How do we figure this out?” And I said, “Pick up your phone and record yourself, and play it back and send me a copy,” meaning send me the recording of you giving the draft talk. We’ll do a few things together. We’ll know if it’s too long. 

We’ll hear your stories, if they’re compelling. We’ll know if you’re missing some key transitions. And we’ll know most importantly if you’re really taking off and landing like you should, right? Nothing more important in a talk, [00:22:00] bar none, than how you start and how you finish. It’s where people screw up the most. 

It’s kinda like writing a headline. We’ll make sure those are scrubbed at the end, but I wanna hear how you get in and how you get out. Most of the time people spend a lotta time, “So today here I’m gonna talk about something around this, you know, topic that’s really near and dear to my heart, and I hopefully –“ 

Who cares? Tell me what you’re gonna tell me, right? But in a much more concise way than that sort of meandering and wandering. And tell me what you told me at the end. Across the world, getting in and getting out is the hardest, so we rehearse those to like exactly the first words you’re gonna say and exactly the last words you’re gonna say. 

And everything else in the middle is what I call embodied. We sorta just know it because we’ve organized it in our head, we’ve practiced it enough. It becomes second nature. The recording and listening to yourself and redrafting from your recording is one of the most effective ways to get that 18 minutes down to what might only need to be 12.  

Maureen: [00:23:00] Having to edit myself was even more challenging. 

Ruth: Well, that’s, that’s why you need a coach. And Mark Twain had an editor. Every great writer, even you have editors.  

Maureen: Oh, ed- everything that I do is edited.  

Ruth: Everything, so why do we not say, “Hey, send a receiver experience here,” right? Hmm. I’m sending a message to somebody who I need to hear. You know, we send manuscripts of things we want people to read. 

Let’s send a recording to somebody who can give us feedback. That is why you can’t edit yourself, just like, because that’s why you don’t edit your own writing. You shouldn’t edit your own speaking. And it’s not a hard process. It just needs somebody without a bias filter keeping in mind who your audience is, your goal, and their question while I’m listening to it, not necessarily my own personal experience and what I wanna get out of it. 

I’m not your audience. But in the TEDx arena, I am often the audience. That’s why it’s easy for me to coach inside there.  

When I go inside a corporation, I get to know their culture, their language, their messages, and I can be their audience, too.  

Maureen: It’s [00:24:00] interesting. When I first w- was, uh, senior enough in an organization, so coming out of Accenture, our CEO had a speaker coach, and I didn’t know that until I commented on one of his speeches. 

And I was told that he was very carefully scripted and that he practiced a lot, all these things that just seemed natural to me at the time.  

Ruth: Mm-hmm.  

Maureen: And then I started doing it, and I realized that I was terrible when I first started. If you’re not a public speaker, you don’t think about leaders are doing public speaking. 

Ruth: Otherwise, you’re just talking to yourself.  

Maureen: Well, I’m gonna do some of that, too.  

Ruth: Yeah, a little mumbling here and there. It doesn’t hurt. We, you know, we have an audience regardless. We have an audience today, right? What’s the question? I hope. 

What’s the… What’s the question on their mind? And once we’ve answered it, can we stop?  

Maureen: Well, and that’s how I try to curate these conversations is I hope that if it’s really interesting to me, it is also interesting to other executives who are looking at expanding their impact.  

And so people like you that I’ve worked with, I’m kind of opening [00:25:00] myself to say, “I got here because I worked with Ruth.” 

 How many hours of practice of doing interviews before I can speak and not sound like I might not even know my own name. 

Ruth: I’d say you’re doing, you’re doing much better, by the way.  

Maureen: My first conversation, I was so proud of it, and I sent it to my dad, and he said, “You know, you should probably do some Toastmasters or something because the amount of times you said ‘ um’ was…” He said, “I stopped counting at some point.”  

Ruth: Yesterday on the radio, we were listening to a radio interview, and the first person who was interviewed said “um” every four words, and my husband has no tolerance for it now either, and my children were counting. 

We sort of made it like a family game. It was really bad. You know, by growing up on TED, you watch TED Talks every weekend with your parents, you’re gonna be a critic, unfortunately.  

Maureen: So back to the leader bit, that as a leader, what skills do I need to develop to be exceptional? 

Ruth: The willingness to take your big data points and draw a story out of them, whether it’s a simple [00:26:00] one-line analogy or a story that people can relate to. I will ask anyone, “Who are people that you look up to and admire in their communications?” And they’re always, always the storytellers that make me feel like I’m engaged, I’m a part of that story, that I can connect and understand. 

Clearly knowing your data and your information is important. We were just engaged, we’re engaged with Nationwide Children’s Hospital Research Institute after an experience- Mm-hmm … one of their researchers had doing a TED-like talk to come in and start a process of potentially taking I don’t know how many of their researchers through this experience about 15 at a time, because they want those researchers to be able to connect with the laypeople much more concisely and directly, ’cause that’s gonna win their research, win more grants, whatever the consequences are that they’re looking to achieve. 

But right now, if you’re speaking in the clouds and only a select few number of people can understand you, you’re not gonna be influencing anyone. So bring it down and be a little bit more humble is a good place to start.  

Maureen: There’s a [00:27:00] very concrete structure about how to put stories together. 

It’s not just a good story.  

Ruth: So there’s the structure of all of the data and everything that goes into a talk, right? Mm-hmm. Sort of the beginning, the middle, the end, how you’ve grouped your information, how you’ve decided what those groups are, and how you’ve decided what question you’re answering. 

And then there’s the actual discrete story: the context, action, result. My husband will say, “You know what? They’re playing Saturday night and we should go.”  

Maureen: Who?  

Ruth: Well, exactly. And I’ll say, “Who’s playing? And who said we should go?” You know? What… There’s no context in his story- Mm-hmm … right? The Ohio State wrestlers are playing Saturday night. He cares a lot about wrestling. I don’t. I have to sort of extrapolate, but it makes it very difficult to have a conversation when you skip the whole context piece. 

Not dissimilar from the way you and I spent an intentional few minutes explaining what TED was. If we’d just launched into TEDx and not explained any of that backstory, everyone’s gonna be sort of going, “I don’t have any context in which to understand the action that you’re taking- Mm … and the result that we’re explaining [00:28:00] afterwards.” 

Maureen: Yeah, one of my favorite intros, and just to illustrate the lack of context, “What are you doing Saturday?” When someone says that to me, I’m not sure if I should say- Right … like, “Oh, I’m going to help my mother.”  

Ruth: That’s right.  

Maureen: Do you want me to help you move? Right. Or do you have- What, what’s the- … tickets to my favorite  

Ruth: concert? 

That’s right. It’s a loaded question. They’re loaded as opposed to saying, “Hey, I have concert tickets to this concert. Would you like to go with me Saturday?” Right? There’s an end result that they’re looking for. If you think about a funnel, and narrowing your question down- Mm 

How do we improve sales? How do we improve sales in Southeast Asia? How do we improve sales in Southeast Asia in our beauty division? How do we improve sales in Southeast Asia in our beauty division for women, and then maybe for women under 18? That’s a very different question that I’m gonna answer that audience than, how do we increase sales? 

And so the more you can refine the problem or the question, right, the best defined problem often has the answer inside of it. The more we can narrow that down, the more compelling our communications are gonna be to answer that [00:29:00] question. ‘Cause I’m gonna tell the audience, “I’m going to answer a question today, how are we gonna increase sales in Southeast Asia for our beauty care line for women under 18?” 

And they’re gonna be like, “Oh, okay. Great. Well then your answer seems to fit perfectly.” Whereas if I just said, “How are we gonna increase in sales in Southeast Asia?” it’s sorta like your question, what are you doing Saturday? Be right. I don’t know.  

Maureen: Depends on what you’re offering.  

Ruth: So I would say to any leader, make sure that you know the question the audience wants you to answer overlaid with what your goal is, what you want them to do with that information when they leave the room. 

Maureen: Perfect wrap-up. So as leaders, because so much of our conversations are consequential, we don’t always know until later. Understand what good communication is. What’s the message I need to convey? What’s the story? What are the three supporting points, not all supporting points? Right. Is there a metaphor or story for each one? 

And keep it brief. And to your point, what’s the question I’m trying to answer? 

Cause that helps create a meaningful conversation. So Ruth, how would people [00:30:00] reach you? 

Ruth: Uh, so I have a website, articulationinc.com . My email is ruth@articulationinc.com, and they can also view all of our TEDx talks and see some of our work on tedxcolumbus.com. 

Or you can go to the YouTube channel and see them there as well.  

Maureen: Thank you. Again, for executives and for leaders, it’s not just when I’m going to a board meeting, it’s every communication I have, giving just a brief thought, even if it’s while I’m walking down the hall in preparation. 

Being intentional about my communication really sets me apart from many other executives. The amount of time I spend to prepare is likely much less than the amount of time I will spend correcting. 

And often people don’t tell us we did it badly.  

Ruth: No, we don’t know how to coach each other.  

Maureen: And we don’t get the opportunity to recover. We just go on to the next. No one says, “You bollocks it up.”  

And now I have left an impression that is other than I intended and may adversely impact my success. 

Ruth: Thank you, [00:31:00] Maureen.  

Maureen: Thank you.