Dateline - Nashville, TN. Climate Presenter Training day 2
April 10, 2007, evening
We had our first full day of training today. We went through the show, pretty much slide by slide, with Al Gore giving color commentary, background, genesis, and presentation style for each. Let me tell you, that’s a lot of information. The slide show that Mr. Gore carries around is about 500 slides long, with about 350 active slides. It takes 1.5 to 2 hours to present straight through. Understanding the architecture of the show, how it’s built in terms of progression of the topic is interesting. This is not a bunch of slides thrown together randomly!
We learned about budgeting today, time, complexity, and hope budgets. Time is obvious; people will only give you so much time, although good photos and humor will buy you more. Complexity is, well, more complex. You can only push so much info out in a PowerPoint presentation. And since we’re usually presenting to people with much less understanding than we, as presenter have, we need to respect that this is complex stuff, and not confuse and lose people. I’ve never worked with a presentation that has a ‘hope’ budget before. But that is a large piece of what we’re dealing with here. Most simply put, we need to first convince people that there is a really serious, civilization threatening problem (yup), and as we do this we need to keep giving them hope for a solution. Otherwise, as Al Gore says, we’ll simply move from denial to despair. Is the hope real? Yup. Again as Al Gore says, “We can solve this problem, of course we can! We have no choice!” And it’s true. We can solve this problem, and we have no choice.
Gore is a very good presenter, at least on this topic. But he knows it as well as any presenter can know their subject. I spoke to him briefly today. I asked him how he personally deals with the potential despair of the situation every day. (I’ve had my share of continuously pushing a rock up hill in the solar business, and know how tiring it can be.) Our conversation concluded with him agreeing that a combination of humor and fun in the presentation helps to manage it. He says that part of the reason he continually changes the slideshow is to keep it interesting and engaging for himself.
For fun, we went to BB Kings tonight for dinner and more. We had some good live music with songwriters, and then later into a blues band. And what better than the blues to take my mind off the day. “>So tomorrow we learn presentation skills. Gore says that if he’d learned these skills from Andy Goodman before the 2000 election, he’d be well into his second term as President now. Really.
Among the trainees today, I met a sustainable building consultant, a cattle rancher / home developer, an advertising executive trying to figure out how to do “sustainable advertising” whatever that is, a radical PR blogger who’s blogging about the climate change skeptics and taking them on well, a person who was working for “Efficiency New Brunswick” (like Efficiency Vermont, but in NB Canada) but who is taking a year off to do nothing but present the slideshow. (He’s got a 6 year old child you see, and frankly he does not see anything more important in the world right now than raising consciousness of the problem so we can solve it, for his child.) Met a Cornell student (yea Cornell), and folks from several non-profits as well. An interesting and diverse group, will I’m sure give the presentation in many different ways.
Hopefully I’ll get another post in tomorrow night.