Good morning, your summer read continues!

“People are underestimating the force of angry kids.”

— Greta Thunberg

This little book took a turn for the personal one night.

We were with the grandkids in the country and the weekend turned into a “double the horse feed” blizzard and we did so. It was also an evening of going over the four speeches that my brilliant grandchildren were to give the next day at the annual 4-H speech contest.

It was fascinating to me at the time, to actually observe how all the chapters of this book had been played out in their heads for days now. What is this speech about, how do I begin, should I use the mic, how do I finish it and why am I so scared?

Their topics reflected their current passions. How the human body works, three-day horse eventing, dirt bikes and the evolution of the horse’s feet. The fears came and went thanks to a natural coaching mother whose whole life has been about getting up on the horse and then getting back on the horse after things are about to go wreck.

Frankly, they were all awesome.

They were also lucky. They were lucky to be living in a rural setting which still gives them the opportunity to join a youth club that since 1913 has inspired young people to learn to do by doing.

That got me thinking about whether there were still other possibilities in this country for youth to explore the world of speaking in the front of a room. Perhaps my research skills are not as thorough as they could be, but I did not find a lot of opportunity for youth out there.

I discovered that the Ontario Legion still has a Youth Public Speaking contest. While I was happy to find this youth-based program, I was a little gobsmacked by its rules and regulation. Yes, they still call them rules and regulations and I could feel the fear factor cranking up a notch already. Here are a few rules:

· Visual aids, props, notes, cue cards, lecterns, etc., may be used to support the speech, notwithstanding the fact that judges may add or subtract marks according to the manner in which they are used.

· A penalty of 5% of the total marks received from each judge shall be imposed to a speech that is either short or in excess of the time limit for that level, before the total scores are compiled. This penalty will be imposed by the Timekeeper and applied by the Scrutineer.

· Speakers will not be allowed to use “Power Point” as a method of presentation or as a tool during presentation. I like this one!!

· A microphone may only be used by a “special needs” student. This student will require a certificate from a medical practitioner. The Chairman must be informed of the need before the competition begins.

· Speakers may not identify themselves, except by first name, during the contest.

· Speakers who are late for registration without “just cause” will be disqualified from the contest.

· All wall clocks will be covered or removed during the contest.

· Any violation of the above rules and regulations will result in a penalty being imposed by the Chairman and may include disqualification from this or any future competitions.

My own innate public speaking fears are resurfacing just reading these rules and regulations, and I have more experience than the poor kids who have to read and OBEY them.

I recall, as a kid back in the fifties, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had elocution contests. Essay writing, public speaking, and the solemn promise that “lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine,” was the vision, and it kind of terrified me. Maybe that why I still don’t have much taste for the drink.

I checked in with our local school board to see if there were any public speaking learning opportunities in the standard curriculum. I was advised that public speaking skills were more “built in” to the language arts curriculum, in that students often have to be at the front of a room and teachers would, I guess serendipitously, help them get prepared. So, these days public speaking for youth is kind of in the “appendix” category of the youth skill set. Like the vestigial appendix in our body, we know it is there but it’s a little scary and we don’t really know what to do with it.

There may be other opportunities out there for youth that give them a chance to learn public speaking skills, but I have not found them, and I would welcome the chance to hear about them.

So, it seems that in my little journey, the only organization, still fully committed to the notion of giving young people the opportunity to learn how to speak in front of people, is the 4-H. If you would like your child to learn these skills before they grow up, you may want to buy them a calf.

To continue in that metaphor, public speaking is still stuck in the early 20^th century model. What little is left is still in competition mode. We still see public speaking for youth as best learned in contests where that vestigial fear can be jacked up even more by having you work your heart out and not even move that old fart keeping score at the back of the room.

Imagine if young folks were given the opportunities to actually learn how to speak in front of people in a room where laughter, brilliance and emotion were all welcomed with big arms of cooperative support instead of competitive anxiety.

No ribbons needed public speaking if you will.

There are at least two voices in the world that represent the power and importance of the voice of youth. Two young women, Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg, both found their public speaking voices as teens, and both were brilliantly articulate without working their way through competitions. Malala has opened the door for thousands of girls’ education, and Greta is holding powerful men and women to account for their lack of progress on the climate change front.

The old teacher in me can’t help but wonder what the results would be if the number one goal of schooling would be to help every child find their voice.

Something else today. Many of you may have received these Substack stories on an organizational email. You may have left that organization or you may leave in the future. if you enjoy the stories, it may be a good thing to take out a free subscription on you home address.

Again thank you so much for your support!

“Failure is a better teacher than most MBAs. We just built the classroom.”

— F**kup Nights Mumbai

There are some classic stories out there about innovators who set out with a big goal in mind and discover they have not solved the original problem. But to their surprise, they find they have solved something else.

My favorite story is the Post-it Notes legend. A 3M scientist was working on the creation of a super strong glue. It did not work, and he ended up with what appeared to be a failed product with very little holding ability. It went into a file.

Several years later, one of his colleagues had a church problem. He wanted to stick some notes on a few pages in the church hymnal. He remembered the failed weak glue and thought it might work. It did, and that file came out of the closet and became the world-famous Post-it Notes. I have some on my desk right now as do millions of other folks.

In 1984, Richard Wurman, an architect and designer, wanted to put on a conference that was noticeably different from every other conference he had to attend. His view on conferences was that they were too often panels full of men in suits, long boring self-centred speeches, and usually held near the escape hatch of one of those golf courses.

He created the first TED (technology, entertainment, design) Conference. He lost money and a few years of forward motion, but the idea came back. Today, forty years later, TED Talks have over a billion views. If you have attended any sort of conference lately, you will have probably noticed that the status quo framework is still much like 1984. I don’t believe Wurman’s big idea has had an impact on how we do most conferences these days, but one could argue that his idea and the resulting TED phenomenon has had a big impact on public speaking.

Ted Talks, the counterpart

In 2012, five guys in Mexico City were having a tequila fired conversation about TED Talks. I believe one of them said, I am a little tired of all the success stories. I would love to hear a talk from the guy that ran the cruise ship into the rocks while checking out bikinis on the shore. There has got to be some really good lessons there! So, the concept of a talk about some gritty blunder instead of the feel good was born and christened F**kup Night. Will try to keep this book F-bomb free. So now, in three hundred cities in ninety countries, F**kup Night brings mistakes, failures and flops out of the closet and into the conversation.

Millions of attendees celebrate and recognize in themselves the truth of the role of failures in our lifelong learning. Acknowledging such on a stage, maybe in a bar and then giving your first talk full of banana peels is now a world-wide sensation.

Like the TED portent, F**kup Night started out as a new type of forum challenging our predictable conference, workshop, and seminar models. But once again, the really big impact was on the evolving evolution of contemporary oratory.

So, with the kickstart of both the TED Talks and the F**kup Night, let’s look at the full impact both have made on oratory today:

· Today’s speakers have learned to become much more crafted, more focused, and more simple but powerful.

· Today’s speakers need to bring freshness and something new to the podium. The old saw needs a little sharpening.

· The lecturer is being replaced by the storyteller.

· Today’s speaker is now subjected to a discipline of eighteen or even seven minutes and it comes with a hook.

· Humour has become more crafted rather than the simplistic telling of jokes, especially self-deprecating wit.

· If you must have a screen, a few pictures are fine, but the bullet points are still deadly. (Please forgive me.)

· Authenticity, not success or failure, is now seen as the orator’s superpower.

· A talk without learning is like a song without a hook line.

· A guide on the side beats a sage on the stage.

· Speakers are starting to understand that they need to create a relationship with the audience, not a delivery. This requires courage.

I have a limited experience with the TED and the F**kup Night phenomenon, but I attended a local TED Talk evening a number of years ago. I can’t remember the content of the talks, but I was impressed with the poise and enthusiasm of both the presenters and the audience. It was after the speech that I became agitated. There was no attempt to be at all creative in engaging the audience. The old conference shibboleths like table talks and Q&As were dragged out and we had people on mics trying to get their own eighteen minutes in.

I rather enjoyed my first and only F**kup Night in Victoria twenty years ago as well. I was in a pub, so the audience engagement level was cruising on drafts and laughs. But again, the Q&A effort left me as cold as the beer. Hey, that was all twenty years ago, so today things on the audience engagement side may have improved.

As a child I always knew a little about Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. I imagined having one in the Memorial Park in my hometown and the wonder of seeing some of those old yappy coffee row guys and spitfire women on my street giving a speech. I imagined me giving a speech about the illogical teaching of algebra. So, if there was an early version of Ted and F**kup Night it had to be Speaker’s Corner, established in 1872, to give anyone in London, the right to make a speech. George Orwell called it one of the minor wonders of the world. Karl Marx, Marcus Garvey, and Kwame Nkrumah were examples of serious oratory in a place of everyday ordinary.

I lived a block away from the City TV station on Queen Street in Toronto, and they experimented with a digital Speaker’s Corner. I recall it was supposed to be monitored but a fellow calling out his wife on the platform, accidently went live. I believe the marriage didn’t last much longer than his speech.

I will leave with a story that I have already put out there in an essay, but it maybe is a good way to close this chapter.

A number of us federal public servants were in a bar after a day at a conventional convention. Actually, it was probably more of a fancy lounge in Halifax and there was indeed a very special guest in the group. Madame Bourgon was our really big boss, the Clerk of the Privy Council, who generally sat with the Prime Minister, not so much with the likes of us. How I was invited into table, I have no idea. It was a lively discussion, and she was a conversational delight. In fact, I felt welcomed enough, to such an extent, that I felt emboldened to make a pitch.

The evening ended and I found myself sharing the walk to the hotel elevator with her. By this time, in my own work, I was tired of how much cash we were spending at these conferences on keynote speakers who had just climbed a mountain or won a Grey Cup. I wanted to hear more public service stories from working public servants.

So, I pitched this to her, but I added a little crazy. I suggested that in my work I had come to really believe that mistakes were more often learning opportunities rather than just seen as risk management. As we waited for the elevator, I proposed that we hold a federal conference, once a year and the only speakers and workshop presenters invited would be public servants who had really screwed something up that year.

The learning from those mistakes would be through the roof, I shyly suggested.

She could have responded from her accumulated wisdom and authority with a kindly but knowledgeable smile, but instead she was very positive and made me feel like my voice was not a bad thing for her to finish the day on.

Ironically, I was predating the F**kup Night by a few years.

The TED and the F**kup Night have been the perfect shot in the arm for modern oratory. I will make an argument later that we still are not doing much on the innovative side for audience engagement after the speech. A TED talk, with a nod to mistakes and a sweet new audience engagement tool might just pull it all together.

Wait for it in the last chapter!

Is there a difference between being motivated and being enlightened?

“Motivational speakers and motivational books are like Viagra. The effect doesn’t last long.”

— Akash Gautam

Your first motivational speaker is often much like your first candy floss at the local midway.

I remember the great look of the thing on a stick, it’s a beauty.

I tasted it, all pure sugar sweet, oh my god.

I felt my life is now going to be so different from today on. I can’t believe I have been on this earth eight whole years without the soul stirring knowledge and experience of colored sugar spun on a stick.

Actually, I would suggest that this a pretty good definition of your basic motivational speaker right there, spun sugar on a shtick.

Oh, they are good. They can make you laugh. They can make you cry. They can make you leave home and find a guru. I am just being provocative, but there was this woman who, in 1978, after listening to a Zen-inspired Olympic coach, dropped everything and is still high on a mountain.

I kid.

Anyway, we have all been there, teary eyed as the mountain climber said goodbye to his little son and headed up death mountain. There was the hockey coach whose cancer survival inspired the team to unexpected greatness, and the newly minted millionaire who just had to learn to get up every morning with “an attitude of gratitude.”

I guess I am a little tired of these “Slick Willies” who in my mind, are the top priced and the bottom feeders in the organizational development business. The cost/value ratio is really the only thing that is absolutely inspirational.

We will, without much hesitation, pay a professional motivational speaker up to fifteen thousand dollars for an hour of work. I could see some value if we were to get at least five thousand dollars’ worth of Monday morning practical tools at the end of the hour. In reality, we more often get maybe five hundred dollars’ worth of re-packaged quotes, old stories, clichés, jokes, flop sweat and book pitches.

The sad part is that in my world of public service, audiences eat this stuff up like free hamburgers on public service week.

So many times I have heard, oh my god, did you hear our speaker this morning? I have never been so moved in my life.

Wait a few more hours honey, and you will just be hungry again.

I grew up with this spiel.

I am a recovering Pentecostal boy, and I can smell a sermon drifting into a room like a six-year old’s fart at the kitchen table.

The great old preachers were not teaching, they were firing you up. They didn’t call it hellfire and brimstone for naught. The whole idea was to move you, not enlighten you. The strategy was to make you laugh, make you cry, make you scared and in essence convince you that you need this message more than anything else right now.

Of course, the collection plate was no fifteen thousand dollars. Oh, wait a minute . . . I remember being taken to an Oral Roberts revival crusade in 1957. He was well named Oral for he had the gift of the gab. He was an orator indeed. The sweat poured from his brow, the tears were flowing, and the goodwill offering needed Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets on hockey sticks to hold all the cash.

Maybe I should calm down a little here.

There is an old school approach to hiring what we call a keynote speaker. The really great keynote speaker is often one of us. Their keynote address, at best, is a lovely view on an issue at hand from someone who has firsthand experience, information, stories and perspectives on the current issue or theme.

Let me try to paint an example of the difference between a keynote speaker and a motivational speaker.

Imagine a national conference of over one thousand public service managers around the theme of leadership and courage. I was there in a front row seat.

On the one hand, we had the groomed, well-spoken adventurer who climbed this really big mountain, encountering big cold, little oxygen, ugly clothing, and a snippy roommate in that little tent on the ledge of nowhere.

He works very hard up on that stage to make this all relevant to us back in our cubicle, but other than an entertaining heartwarming story, there was not much to take home in the free tote sack. He was well thanked, and, I was told, well paid.

Same conference, different year.

A round balding little cubicle puncher who was a medical officer with the Coast Guard finds himself out on the ocean in the middle of the night, pulling body parts from the Atlantic after one of our horrible air disasters.

His stories of compassion, fear and craft held us spellbound for the duration of his authentic talk. He was one of us. He was well suited and full of credibility.

He was not so well paid.

But our tote sacks were full.

I once sat miserably through a motivational speech by a young woman who, a little teary, let us know that she had wanted to be a motivational speaker ever since she was a little girl.

What???

I thought you did things, learned some important ways of doing things, and then, maybe then, you were invited to share your wisdom and your experience with others.

When did a speaking career become a life goal?

The present-day version of this nonsense is in the influencer culture. Polls tell us, up to one third of pre-teens say they want to be an influencer when they grow up. They want to skip the hard grind of doing good work and go straight to the money and glamour of success.

We have a whole industry of people who want to become motivational speakers. We can craft this quite easily. It is all about celebrity now. Do something that will make you a public figure: make a lot of money, win something, get addicted to something, or maybe just get caught in something, just get on the front pages.

Little story.

I was speaking at a conference and the sports-based motivational speaker must have heard me talk. He took me for coffee and suggested that I should think about getting into the motivational side of the business. The investment in the training would be well worth it, he suggested.

I was flattered, but later as I listened to his speech, I was struck by how he was able to craft a whole speech around three words. He kept on and on about how we need to wake up in the morning, spend the day on the job, shop for groceries, and all we had to do to change our life was to do these things with an “attitude of gratitude.”

An “attitude of gratitude” is worth twelve grand?

It is sketchy how close the motivational speaking culture is to the self-help culture. Like peanut butter and jam, the combination of a room full of people with self-esteem issues and a charismatic speaker with a mouthful of hope and promise, you have the perfect Wonder Bread sandwich. The self-help industry is worth over ten billion dollars, an amazing lucrative market finding innovative and tantalizing ways to fix your brokenness.

Witch doctors did it, snake oil salesmen did it, television preachers do it, and motivational speakers like Tony Robbins make all of those pikers look like chumps at the game.

In much the same way we can take a little hillbilly girl singer and make her a television star, we can send a minor celebrity down to New York for a couple of weeks of special training. There we will teach them how to dress, how to tell a story, how to move across a stage and how to work up a fee schedule.

A pox on them, I say.

What I have learned!

It is such an ego thing, this motivational speaking.

To be asked to speak to a large audience is to be given the opportunity to start drinking your own bathwater. I believe I must have something important to say, I am pretty good at this, and hey, I seem to be a funny guy.

I have learned that it is not the audience you should imagine without clothes, it’s yourself.

It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it, when you say it and to whom it is being said.

I grew up in an era of the “talk”. Public speaking or oratory as we called it, was an art.

Old guys and amazing women, wisdom flowed from their minds and hearts. Sitting on stools or standing in the light, they told stories, played with ideas, and cracked wise.

It did not matter how scared you were of public speaking. This was the way it was done, and leaders rose to the occasion.

So, what indeed makes a motivational speech? The best motivational speakers have great stories. The best stories are the truest stories. The truest stories come from the heart not the training room.

You will get your shot at speaking, some of you a little and some of you a lot. I have been fascinated over the years to ponder the difference between the amateur and the professional in the arts world. I have heard amateur musicians who blew me away and amateurs that perhaps should wait a bit longer. I have heard professionals who blew me away and others that I can’t believe good money was spent. What we know however, is that the game changes when you turn professional.

When art becomes a commodity, something changes.

I believe public speaking should be more of an art than a commodity.

Should you get really good at this, we all wish you every success, even the money. However, it will always be about relevance, practicality, and authenticity.

Some tips for emerging motivational speakers:

· Have a good, true, and relevant story. Don’t try to make your good story fit the theme, just pick the gigs where your story makes good sense.

· Leave the audience with more than inspiration. Perhaps you could give them a tool, a practice or just anything that will help a truck driver or a file clerk on a Monday morning.

· Be cautious of your own ambition. If you love speaking, telling your story, and making sense for people, go for it.

· If you were blessed with a life and career that most of us might envy, like a news anchor, a hockey star, or a television actor, please consider your speaking side gig or motivational retirement plan as something to give back, rather than exploit further. Be a philanthropist with your words instead of a hopeful oligarch.

Good morning. Well some of you are halfway through this summer read and many others of you are wondering what I am talking about. Enjoy either option!!

“Whatever your grade or position, if you know how and when to speak–and when to remain silent–your chances of real success are proportionately increased.”

— Ralph Smedley, founder of Toastmasters International

One hundred and fifteen years ago a young man named Ralph Smedley started a career with the YMCA and quickly came up with a brilliant idea designed to build confidence in the young men in his charge. He started a club for the boys to join where they would learn and practice public speaking skills. Oratory was still held in high regard at the turn of the twentieth century and it seemed a sure thing for a young man’s toolkit.

The club was called Toastmasters.

It started well, then stalled.

Like the hook story of any great motivational speech, Ralph Smedley succeeded and failed a number of times. It took nearly two decades of failures before the idea finally took deep root in Santa Ana in 1924. Smedley’s Number One Toastmasters Club still meets there every first and third Tuesday.

Smedley had turned fear into opportunity and in the Roaring Twenties turned a single club into a global force. Toastmasters International has clubs in Speedy Creek, Saskatchewan, and Kathmandu. With over a half million members, Toastmasters is often the first place the businessperson, the academic, politician, rock star or college student heads, to try and get a leg up in a world where you would like your voice and story to be told.

So, using Ian Chisholm’s Feedback Tool (Went Well, Tricky, Do Different) let’s have a little gut check of this well-respected organization and imagine how its story could help us approach the “Good Talk” in a more skilled and comfortable way.

So, with Toastmasters, what’s going well?

· It’s available. There is a pretty good chance that you will find a Toastmasters close to you.

· It’s affordable. It costs less than one hundred dollars each year.

· You get to speak.

· You learn to listen and give feedback.

· You make friends, contacts and establish a network.

· Many will suggest that you might also become a better communicator, leader, and team player. Results may vary. Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.

Some “trickies”:

· Some critics feel the Toastmaster focus is a bit too much on delivery and perhaps not enough on content. One story I found was a fellow who was in a Toastmaster contest. He did not do as well as he thought. He felt it was a brilliant speech and chased down one of the judges for some insight. The judge told him he had his hand in his pocket too much. Enough said.

· The focus on speaking as a competitive sport may be seen by some as a tricky.

· Your tics. Apparently, part of the feedback is to have someone in the audience count your tics (the number of times you say “ah”, for example). Barack Obama, the king of the “ahs”, might not go over well as a Toastmaster speaker.

· Same with grammar mistakes.

· Often the teachable (hand gestures, movements, and such) leads to the possibility of style over substance.

· Some also feel the club mentality, with a preaching to the converted culture, rewards the ones who learned the curriculum, more than the brave, innovative and creative.

The “do different”:

· We can learn from the Toastmaster world that it may be a fine learning bubble for you while in the club, but know it is a bubble. It is critical that as a developing speaker you move quickly outside that bubble and get your legs into fresh territory. We should be encouraged perhaps to offer a talk to a Grade Four class about your interest in calligraphy.

· We might learn that it is important to focus on your personal remembering and then writing your own stories. Get back in touch with your passions, stories and reporting first, and let issues around style and delivery follow the content.

· We can learn from Toastmasters that we need to concentrate on public speaking more as an informal conversation with audiences, rather than as the old-style rigid, formal presentations.

· We have learned from the Ted Talk prototype that even struggling and amateur speakers can have a powerful message so don’t get too messed up about training and competition.

The Toastmasters story is a great story and there is no doubt that it had a big impact on the world of public speaking. I would imagine that if we surveyed the millions who were once or now part of that organization, there would be very few who did not appreciate the impact it made in their lives.

However, just as with so many successful organizations, they may have become a bit complacent or worse a bit bureaucratic and may not have grown with the times.

I have always advocated that every organization should take one day every year and have every employee write a one-page talk on what we could do better.

So, if I was president of Toastmasters, an organization dedicated to public speaking, I would challenge every member to take one day each year and write a three-minute speech on how we and Toastmasters could do better as an organization. Content indeed.

Good morning, here is Chapter 8, a reflection on the long history of gathering people together. It is a hothouse for public speaking and may be ready for some innovation.

“No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

I have some mixed feelings about the many conferences I attended over forty-eight years of public service. As a young man I found them quite exciting but as I got a little older, I started to find them a little more déjà vu than whoop de do.

I remember the first time I was invited as a guest presenter at a conference of over four hundred people.

I was not really a speaker.

I was invited to put the four hundred delegates into a full room, system-based conversation and I chose the now popular Harrison Owen tool called Open Space.

The conference itself was an eye opener for a front liner like me. It seemed every speech and every workshop had a “sage on the stage” approach with the ubiquitous PowerPoint and the notoriously uncomfortable Q’s and A’s. My cheeky moment came as I debriefed the popular Open Space event and asked the four hundred professionals in the room, “How many of you have 20 years or more of high-end experience in this business?” A huge majority of hands went up and I did a quick approximation. I did some quick math and suggested that by the show of hands it indicated that there was a lot more than 8,000 years of corporate knowledge in the room. Then I suggested that this was the only time in the three days that we actually tried to tap into that fine body of real time wisdom.

Instead of one keynote person’s forty years of knowledge we had an opportunity to hear from 8,000 years of knowledge.

I was never asked back.

If the theatre stage is the ultimate goal of an actor, then we should also recognize that the conference stage is the top goal of the aspiring professional speaker. Ironically both acting and speaking involve stages, staging, lighting, sound, and fear. Some might also argue, me included, that they are both entertainment packages.

It’s your call, but I would ruminatively suggest that your basic conference model has become a rodeo of speakers. You may have hosts, dignitaries, workshop and service presenters, but the marquee draw has always been and continues to be, the keynote speaker. So, let’s take a look at the keynote even though your talk may not have that level of standing.

The keynote speech is called that because usually it is the speech that carries the opening message and focus of the conference that the organizers shelled out thousands of dollars to make happen. It may not be a good idea for a keynote speaker to show up at a conference on “Breaking the Glass Ceiling” with an inspiring hour on my father, the man who inspired me to climb mountains and become the man I am today.

Should you get the opportunity to become a keynote speaker you need to practice a couple of important moves. You must establish as best a relationship as you can with the conference organizer. You need to listen, listen, and listen to what they want and need from you to help them achieve the goals they spent this money on. Be careful here, try to connect with the person who called this conference, signed the checks perhaps, and not so much with the event organizer who is concerned more with seating configurations. Your conversation should be less on how wonderful you and your amazing story are, and more on how I can help make your conference a big success. Find the true focus of the conference and build your talk around that.

The next human beings you need to know about are the audience. Who will be in that room? What do they do? What do they care about these days? What will be some of their expectations of these conference?

One word about honesty. Let’s say, for example, that you are generally known as a speaker on leadership. It’s what you know and what you are good at. Somehow this organization got your name because you are hilarious, but it turns out the theme of this conference is maximizing social media for increased profits. You may be tempted, by ego and fee structure, to believe that you could easily tailor your stuff to this, but you might also want to say, considering the six hundred delegates in hard bottomed chairs, thanks but no thanks, there may be someone better.

So, moving on, the gig is booked, and you are a speaker. A couple of things:

· Always be early. If you can introduce yourself to as many audience folks as you can as well as to staff and volunteers.

· Always have backup stuff. Perhaps an extra set of speaking notes, a little kit with lozenges, band aids and headache pills. I often keep a clean white t-shirt in my bag in case coffee or mustard hits my white shirt.

· Get thee to the sound technician as soon as possible and follow their advice, they are your best friend.

· As a low-tech analog guy, I prefer speaking notes to a speaking script. Perhaps you should not be in the keynote world if you are still needing to read your speech whether on paper on the podium or pixels on a screen.

· Don’t steal valuable time! If you go over your time limit by even five minutes you did not steal that time from the conference, you stole it from the next fellow speaker! If the previous speaker stole from you suck it up princess and make your own talk more succinct. Don’t keep the thievery going.

· Speaking of previous speakers, it’s not a great idea to listen to them. Perhaps go find a quiet place, sit silently with your brilliance, and come out on stage clean, not intimidated by the last speaker’s brilliance.

· It’s a good practice to learn to move around on a stage and helps to engage an audience but please don’t be silly or reckless and never turn your back!

· Keep a good pace, not too slow or too fast.

· Watch for jargon, watch for tics, repetitive things like using the word “eh”, sniffing, groaning or involuntary touching a body part.

· Stay focused, don’t drift into the weeds.

· Stay as positive as possible, a keynote is an opportunity for good not a pulpit to harm.

· Speaking of exploitation, this is not the time to turn into a salesperson. Don’t be selling your book, your product or even yourself on this stage. If you make a great talk, engage the folks, and stop on time you have just done all the selling you need.

And finally thank everybody, the organizers, the audience, and the little pony-tailed wonder kid over there on the soundboard.

As I worked for many years encouraging workers to find their own leadership practice, the one practice that could be considered so important was not well established. The practice is meeting and conference design. Big organizations use the conference model to launch strategic plans, initiate new programs, and try to motivate their people. There are many other reasons to hold a conference, but my point is that you can design a conference to fit the subject matter rather than just having one old school template for a conference design.

The unconference is a popular idea whereby the design tries to be more participant driven than expert or outsider driven. This is where design and innovation become important factors and you have to match the purpose of the event with the needs of both the leaders and the participants.

The conference is a big-ticket expense. It needs understanding of the organization, unique skills, and thoughtful practitioners.

It used to be a joke that in planning for a conference the designers booked them near a golf course. I have nothing against golf, but if there is more interest outside of the conference halls than inside, we are surely wasting somebody’s time and money.

Good morning. Here is Chapter Seven of The Accidental Speaker. I hope you are have a fine summer and some great reads.

“The world is analog and digital is always a representation.”

— David Sax

I have been called a Luddite. Thank you, my futurist colleagues! The Luddites, I believe, had a good point. Here is how Wikipedia describes the Luddites:

The Luddites were a secret oath-based organization of English textile workers in the 19th century, a radical faction which destroyed textile machinery as a form of protest. The group was protesting against the use of machinery in a “fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labour practices. Luddites feared that the time spent learning the skills of their craft would go to waste, as machines would replace their role in the industry. Over time, the term has come to mean one opposed to industrialisation, automation, computerisation, or new technologies in general. The Luddite movement began in Nottingham in England and culminated in a region-wide rebellion that lasted from 1811 to 1816. Mill and factory owners took to consideration the protesters and eventually the movement was suppressed with legal and military force.

So, in the 19^th Century, the Industrial Revolution was about to roll over the humble craftsman. The machine would replace the hand and there was a sense of doom. They were afraid, angry, and frankly beaten before they started.

However, today if you so desire, you can still buy a handmade car, a handmade guitar, or a handmade home. The machine brought an industrial paint-by-numbers consumer culture to the masses, but it was not successful in completely wiping out craftmanship.

The art of the craft just went counterculture. The market chose industrial, but the human spirit continued to choose the handmade. The TV dinner did not completely erase the home cooked meal, although the fast-food market continues to hammer the home chef.

For me, it was not the Industrial Revolution but the digital revolution that kicked off my little ripple of dissent. I had an attitude about the digital economy right from the start and even today, I won’t pay for my groceries at a robot station, and I would dearly love to inflict some harm on the nasty bits of social media wreaking havoc on this world.

Still, cards on the table, I am not turning in my iPhone, and Siri gets me to my appointments on time. So, I realize that I have to live in a digital world and be grateful for the good it does. However, as I poke around in my neighbourhood, I see the digital victory is not total.

I am writing this piece with a pen on yellow lined paper and then it will be transcribed onto the digital machine for editing and final drafts.

Then I will take a walk through my neighbourhood into my little urban village of Inglewood which I would argue is a true home of an emerging analog business model.

I love going into Recordland where thousands of vinyl records are being sold to folks with ten thousand songs on their phone. Still, they prefer to listen to one great album on a turntable which you can also buy just down the street in That Old Retro Store.

Across from that shop, another little store will sell you a beautiful fountain pen and like the early writers you can also buy an old school Moleskin notebook to write down your golden thoughts.

I met a young man in the new public library the other day with a couple of old-style film canisters around his neck. Tired of the ten thousand digitized photos on his machine he told me he was looking for that one good photo to play with in a darkroom and maybe hang on a wall instead of archived in a digital folder.

Hang around the backstage of the Ironwood music venue and you will hear guitar players extoll the virtues of the vintage tube amplifier.

Stash is a knitting store in the heart of the village that sells wool and tools to make stuff with that wool. An old school bookstore, The Next Page, has a basement full of books and old movies on the wall. A long-time used bookstore, Fair’s Fair, make me wonder where the revolutionary Kindles are. It just goes on and on.

Crowds line up to buy greenery at Plant, hand carved knives at Knifeware, hand ground spices at the Silk Road, the iconic, original handcrafted Smithbuilt cowboy hats, vintage clothing, art galleries, craft breweries and organic food in the funky cafes.

So, what is going on?

In a word, analog.

Toronto writer, David Sax, wrote a fine book on this subject called The Revenge of Analog. He describes analog as the opposite of digital. Digital is the language of computers, binary code which in endless combinations allow digitization to become the assembly line of the new age. Analog, he says, is the yin to the digital yang, the day to its night. Analog does not require a computer to function and most often analog exists in the physical world not the virtual.

He describes how, what we were beginning to believe were desolate and obsolete technologies, began to be sought out by those who still feel deep attraction to and appreciation for the touch of the hand, rather than the touch of the screen. I wonder if the metaphor might even be extended to those who are starting to see the new world through an old lens.

Take a look around these days . . .

Restaurants (in my neighbourhood) are buying direct from farmers.

Craft breweries in my province went from 13 in 2013 to 170 today, making handcrafted beer a challenge to corporate beer.

Bike lanes are filling up.

Over 100 people across the street from me bang away on handmade drums every Friday night and actively connect with each other in a way that seems a little more real than a friend on Facebook.

Granted, all this is perhaps going a little deeper than the basic definition of analog, but I am beginning to think that there may be a spirit of analog that has some vital cultural implications, helping to break what seems to be a monolithic vision of a technology driven world.

So, what has this to do with public speaking?

I am beginning to see conversation and dialogue as analog outliers in a world obsessed with digital communication devices. I recall a mother who in the early computer days, was so excited that her darling son was up at all hours of the evening communicating with people all over the world on his new device. Years later, the young man still struggles to hold a face-to-face conversation in a coffee shop with others.

Millions of people communicate online in sound bites, but the quality of conversation seems to have truly gone south. Speaking of south, our neighbours to the south have watched the history of presidential speechmaking go from Roosevelt fireside chats to the Trump “I have the best words” embarrassment.

As a former teacher, I went offside when the profession was so excited that every kid would have a computer. It felt like the teachers were tired of speaking and were anxious for the screen to do the talking. Now finally Australia is leading the world in removing screens from classrooms and even working to protect young children from the addiction of social media and screens.

The analog world of grass, dirt and fresh air beckons.

Today’s private sector, public sector and civic sector leaders are faced with a modern choice: analog or digital or both with caution. The digital choice feels hip, fast and cost effective. The digital reality is glib, short, and often angry. Has the digital reality made an impact on how we talk to a room of people? Do we even want to talk to a room of people anymore? Public speechmaking feels a lot safer over a Zoom line than in a room full of people.

The analog world is going to cost a little more, scare us a little more and be a bit messier, but I have always believed that, like a potter, you need to get your hands dirty if you want to make something more authentic.

If you want to learn and deliver authentic, handcrafted speaking in your leadership and engagement practice, you might consider the analog speech as part of the future of public speaking.

Here you go with Chapter Six where I address my long time nemesis, PowerPoint. Enjoy!

“Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

— Edward Tufte

It started off simple and safe.

The overhead projector was a simple light in a box that you pointed at a wall, and it put your words and images up there real big. It felt good. It started off with teachers who were tired of chalk dust in their suits, and it allowed twenty-eight little, distracted imps to be forced to gaze in wonder at the same thing. Then the university grabbed it, then the church and then the workplace.

No problem, it seemed quite marvelous actually.

Well, actually there was a problem looming.

Soon a few folks suffering with FLOPS (Fear Literally of Public Speaking) started to realize that this could be the magic button that they were looking for. They realized that all they had to do was transfer those pesky handwritten speaking notes onto a series of overhead slides, project them on the wall and presto, I can give my lesson, talk, or speech to a roomful of people who will not be looking at me.

Don’t look at me, nothing to see here.

Perfect!

I just have to read the screen, it’s all right up there, not right here.

Wildfire.

It was the biggest thing to hit the business world since the cubicle. In short order every speaker wanted an overhead and a set of slides. Soon that set of slides had its own name, the deck.

It was really popular with the lethargic speakers who hated speaking. Instead of recognizing the time-honored craft of giving a talk, they looked with relief to the technological fix. Their only skill set now was reduced to reading off a wall. The deck preparation was handed over to the elves in one’s employ. It sent a false signal to the workplace culture that this person was well prepared when in fact, he or she probably did little of the actual preparation. In my own work world, where the centre of the universe was Ottawa, the deck was de riguer.

I found out how deep this culture was embedded the hard way.

Before PowerPoint, there was the early culture of the overhead projector and the acetates that were projected on the screen. The acetates were soon called a deck, and the goal I believe was to get as close to fifty-two as you could.

I was just beginning my new work in leadership and engagement and feeling quite confident with my growing ideas. I was quite comfortable in my speaking style in front of a room. I knew about overheads but felt they were more akin to training wheels than the actual skills of public speaking.

So, when I got my first invitation to go to Ottawa to speak to our new Deputy Minister and senior management team about my work, I was thrilled but somewhat taken aback when the organizer phoned me and asked me if my “deck” was prepared.

It’s beautiful, I replied, we just stained it again this summer.

Not funny.

We need to have a deck she insisted. I pleaded ignorance. I don’t even know how to prepare one, I begged.

No problem, she insisted from the centre of the elf world, we will make it for you.

Fine.

So, I get to my first big shot Ottawa meeting in a splendid space (now the building where the Senate meets) and I was duly impressed. My new manager introduced himself, handed me the deck his staff had prepared and insisted that he would flip them for me.

It was a full brick.

In those days, every presenter had a deck and if five slides were good, then twelve slides must be obviously better, and twenty slides must mean you are working your butt off till midnight every day! The speakers in the meetings were never timed, they just kept plowing through. You did not necessarily finish on time, you finished at the last slide. As a result, I was on the agenda for 11:00 am but was still holding my deck of twenty-three slides in my increasingly agitated lap. I could see the problem and like a freelance carpenter, the problem was not in the design but the concept of the deck itself.

My solution was clear, just tuck the deck under my chair and get up there and talk straight to these folks about the mission.

Back and forth went the deck and my courage. On my lap, under the chair, on my lap again, under the chair. Finally, they call me. I happened to be caught in courage mode and the deck was under the chair. My new manager is red in the face as he bleats, where is the deck, where is the deck?

I smile grimly and take my place at the head of the parking lot sized table. The big oak table is now quite animated as these very curious executives watch one of their own trying to take down this obviously insubordinate greenhorn. I knew I had to address the deck issue. I took a deep breath and started in.

Good afternoon I say, my name is Bob, and I am a recovering overhead abuser.

No one laughed, then the Deputy giggled, and the room broke open in relief and in that moment my whole career went to a different place than I had expected. To this day I believe I may have been the first to open up the long standing and still ongoing debate about PowerPoint in my territory. I did not win the debate or even place, but I still feel it was a great hill to die on.

Today I rest from the battle, and I am not sure how it is going out there, but I believe the beast has yet to be truly slain and slow death by PowerPoint may still be occurring.

My arguments against the PowerPoint culture are simple:

· You have to be in the dark for it to be effective, and where I was raised there were only two things that are done better in a dark room. One of them is private and the other one of them is sleeping. Extra-long PowerPoints are great nap inducers.

· Your audience is really only reading your speaking notes, not listening to you. You are just a soundtrack now.

· Dilbert cartoons are getting tired and so is PowerPoint humour in general.

· Don’t even get me started on trying to combine real storytelling and PowerPoint presentations.

· The speaker ends up in a better relationship with the presentation than with the audience. Their commitment is usually much more to the screen than the audience.

· The best speakers have always been those who write their own speeches. That is when the power of the person and their passion can sneak in. Today many workplace speakers farm out the PowerPoint work to staff and the disconnect is obvious.

· By the way, what if we were to track the hours people spend building PowerPoint presentations instead of doing real work?

· Have you noticed that the click bait ads on the internet are all point based? Have you noticed I used bullet points here?

· There is an argument that photos are critical for PowerPoint presentations, and I understand the power of one good photo. However, show me a photo of your beautiful granddaughter or tell me a story about how she set up a lemonade stand in support of a Syrian family, and I will take the story before the photo any day.

· What the hell, generally, PowerPoint is just boring.

Another story with that same wonderful deputy, Scott Serson.

That original deck story led to a lot of subsequent conversations with that team about the incessant use of decks and PowerPoint presentations in their meetings.

Apparently, Scott had been thinking a lot about it.

We found ourselves in Cornwall holding his first big all management session with a full house of maybe 200 managers. Scott took a big risk and allowed me to hold an open space session instead of a linear gaggle of presentations and we were in a good mood after it went so well.

That evening in Cornwall, after the “open space,” Scott was scheduled to give his first major speech to the whole management group. For weeks, his elves had been preparing the classic PowerPoint presentation. We had pages and pages of data and material on all the necessary, important, arcane issues of the day. The keynote presentation was planned for after dinner, and late afternoon found Scott, a number of assistant deputy ministers and, strangely, me going over the body of his speech. As he pored over the pages and pages and pages, he softly murmured.

“I’m just not sure this is what they need to hear from me right now.” “Yes sir, it is,” was the quick reply from his advisors. “It’s all here, sir: speaking points, strategic objectives, and key messages. Stick to the script, sir, and you will be fine.”

He didn’t seem convinced. So, I used this window of opportunity to suggest that maybe he was right; the PowerPoint could be given out later, but maybe he should just talk to them tonight.

What do you mean, talk to them? he muttered.

Well sir, just tell them your story.

What do you mean, my story?

Well, perhaps talk to them about the first time you visited a First Nations reserve. What did you see? How did you feel? Who was the first person you knew personally who was eliminated through the job losses of Program Review? Those sorts of stories.

Later, we noticed him in a small back room with a pen, the back of an envelope, and a worried look on his face. We still didn’t know what he was going to do.

That evening after the dinner, Scott walked up to the podium, called off the person who was going to run the PowerPoint presentation and, with a death grip on the podium, started telling us a story. I can’t remember any of the stories, but I do remember that within 20 minutes I could see the odd tear in the eyes of some of those hard-bitten managers.

He had them.

And he had them for his whole term. I knew that I had seen a true leadership moment, and that they would follow him anywhere from that night on. He had, through fear and trembling, swapped out a bureaucratic PowerPoint for some authentic hand-crafted stories.

In conclusion I rest my case on the church. Of all the cultures, you would think the last place we need a digitized screen is a house of spiritual worship. People used to go to church to commune together, to sing together. The song leader used his hands, his eyes, and his smile to speed you up, slow you down, sing softer or louder, and you felt the spirt and movement of those around you as you sang those old gospel songs as a congregation, together.

I purposefully went to a church in New Orleans looking for that musical gift in the city of soul.

Instead, I found two hundred people watching a PowerPoint on the wall, basically just singing words off a wall.

I rest my case.

Its Monday morning, summer days are here and this is Chapter Five of The Accidental Speaker, one of your summer reads.

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

— Leonard Cohen

What could an ancient Japanese core value possibly have anything to do with how you are going to give that talk tomorrow to one hundred and twenty staff on the new Strategic Plan?

Wabi-sabi embodies a distinctly Japanese way of looking at the world through a lens that sees value and beauty in imperfection.

I love spending time in the pottery studio, and I particularly love to throw my very modest versions of the Japanese tea bowl or chawan. The venerable and still vital Japanese tea ceremony was a place where wabi-sabi and kintsugi became embedded in the Japanese culture and way of life.

So, an amateur North American potter or artisan like me is just trying hard to make something as beautiful as we can. I am trying not to use the word perfection here, but it can creep into our minds and efforts. North Americans have been bombarded for generations with the vision of perfection. The perfect mother, the perfect body, the perfect dress, the perfect car, and so on. As we amp up the marketing age with the toxic hits of social media, we see the pursuit of perfection as a modern cocktail for anxiety, hyperactivity, and depression.

So, I would find myself trying to throw these perfect little Japanese tea bowls at the potter’s wheel. Pretty soon they are starting to look quite presentable. Should a fingernail accidentally rip into the side of one of the bowls, I would fix it, try to get it back into some semblance of perfect.

Then I started to try to learn more about the Japanese mindset as well as the clay.

Wabi-sabi is all about the “pause.” Take another look. Does that fingernail mark take away from the evolving beauty or perhaps does it add a grace note of character to this piece that will, in essence, make this bowl, with its unique character and difference, into an object of distinctive beauty?

Let’s just be clear right now. Wabi-sabi is not an excuse for poor craftsmanship or work. Rather it is an ancient but simple way to find the magic bit of beauty in the marks of imperfection.

Let’s say you have a dining room table that was made by your grandfather years ago. It’s pretty banged up, some kid’s initials carved deep, tea stains, and wood cracks in three places.

Your western mind suggests that it may be time for a trip to IKEA.

Your wabi-sabi mind rebels. You want to eat right here, off this piece of authentic beauty, for the rest of your life. When we see the crack in the teacup as one more part of its beauty and charm and not something broken or flawed, we are now embarking on a different sort of journey. More simply put, you cannot buy your way into wabi-sabi; you cannot get specialized training in wabi-sabi; and you don’t have to adopt a new belief system to have a wabi-sabi spirit.

Really all we need to do is slow down and shift from doing to being. We could try to appreciate what is, rather than what should be. Zen philosophy suggests there are seven aesthetic principles in achieving wabi-sabi:

· kanso — simplicity

· fukinsei — asymmetry or irregularity

· shibumi — beauty in the understated

· shizen — natural without pretense

· yugen — subtle grace

· datsuzoku — freeness

· seijaku — tranquility

So, let’s imagine if we were to let some of these Zen elements into our preparation for that little talk we have to give tomorrow, on the state of our fourth quarter budget:

· simple message, no clutter

· balance without symmetry, two sides of the coin in truth

· minimalist message without brag or demurring

· no faking

· no thunder

· open, not contrived

· be calm

Imagine a keynote infused with some of these basics.

So many of us have been raised in a culture of striving for perfection, trained in programs that demand perfection, and evaluated in a milieu that rewards perfection. It has become our mental model (or skating rink if you read the last book!).

So, there may be a tough bit of unlearning needed here.

This chapter has one simple goal: we need to learn to embrace the imperfections in our life rather than see them through the lens of fear, shame, and failure.

The imperfections of . . .

· our parents

· our teachers

· our friends

· our spouses

· our kids

· our managers

· our leaders

· our . . . selves

Imagine yourself holding a rubber chicken as you give that talk, or maybe not.

Or wait just a minute, what if you held up the chicken and suggested that this chicken was a metaphor for the new Strategic Plan? Why? Well unlike the KFC chicken which all tastes the same, this chicken is unique. Our strategic plans for years have all looked and felt the same, and nobody really reads or enjoys them much anymore. This little guy is inimitable and so is our new plan.

So, one more Japanese thing if I may: kintsugi.

In a moment of pure joy your beloved grandson knocks over your great grandmother’s precious English porcelain vase. After the tears and the broom, what is next? In Calgary, nine times out of ten the pieces will take that last journey to a landfill. After all, we are a materialistic society and material often dies and goes away, but there is always new material showing up in the contrails of the VISA card.

In Osaka they will, more than likely, lovingly gather the pieces and then like a beautiful jig jaw puzzle put them back together with ribbons of silver or gold lacquer and glue. Grandmother’s vase now has a fresh one-of-a-kind beauty that is in no way in competition with its old beauty.

I am still trying to get my own head around this. I know it suggests that no matter how broken something is, a career, a heart, or a life, the broken can with love and care be put back together.

How this gift of kintsugi could apply to your upcoming talk on the new Strategic Plan I have no idea, but if I am in your audience, I would appreciate the humble and the authentic, even with the stumbles.

“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.”

— Maya Angelou

Let’s take a break from the basics of public speaking and go off into the weeds for a while.

Ponder the telephone for a minute.

Let us consider the humble one hundred and forty-four-year-old instrument of voice amplification and rich conversations, the telephone.

Thanks in great part to Alexander Graham Bell, the 19^th century great Canadian inventor, we have had, for many years, the ability to carry out in real time, accurate human voice conversations over great distances.

The voice is an interesting and powerful feature of your humanness.

For a start, let’s remember that the primary agent of human communication is still the voice. Its digital competitor, email, is a communication device that is still a youthful fifty years old. The agent of communication for the email is of course, print. Now print itself is pretty old but not as old as the human voice.

Some of us in this contemporary world have noticed that the use of print as a primary communication device is sneaking up slowly on the voice. Email, texts and even more hip, AI digital platforms, are completely overtaking the world of daily conversation.

I recall an old story that imagines a world where Alexander Graham Bell had invented texting in 1876 and Bill Gates invented the telephone in 1972. So, for close to one hundred years, we communicated over distance, by email. Picture the excitement in 1972 as folks were so thrilled that, now you can actually talk long distance to the other person.

When I was even more deeply embedded into organizational culture, I recall my early veneration for the new digital wonders. However, it was not long before I began to think that perhaps the new emperor might be shy a few garments. I loved email at first and appreciated the heads up, the invite and the hey look at this. However, it soon started to get weird. The peculiar part started when a simple one-on-one email started to morph into longer digital conversations.

It would start innocuously: an email sent to five people, perhaps colleagues, working on a project together. It would start with, “Hey what do you think we should do with this?”

The reply all button was hit.

One reply would then trigger three more and that would trigger four more and the math kicks in and we are in some sort of digital lock room. Two days later and we are still barely off the starting line. I remember thinking that if that initial request, “Hey what do you think we should do with?” had been followed by, “Let’s meet in the coffee shop for a quick conversation,” we would have come quickly to the point and maybe even to some conclusion. And that in fifteen minutes instead of two days of email pot stirring.

Another option would be a quick conference call with the five connecting by voice and getting to the crux a lot quicker than two days of intermittent email checking.

So that was insight number one.

Insight number two was even a bit more ominous. I began to suspect that there were certain folks who found live talking to other folks a wee bit stressful, perhaps even a little frightening. In retrospect today, I am beginning to wonder if the old-time fear of public speaking might be mutating into a new fear of just plain speaking. Could it be possible that we see the email, the text, and Instagram as a much safer and more comfortable way of communicating than the conversation, the human voice, and the art of dialogue?

There are some great tips out there for helping us make our phone conversations better:

· Start well, have a warm practiced greeting, and imagine yourself shaking the person’s hand.

· Start personal. How is your boy doing with hockey this year? Or, I heard you were in Costa Rica?

· Take time up front to establish what the conversation will be about, does the other person have the time right now, and how much time should we give this call (Ted Talk rigor).

· Be in a quiet comfortable spot, have a pad and pencil to keep yourself focused and to note important things you hear.

· Use your speaking skills, use a good pace, enunciate and don’t be afraid to express emotion and passion.

· Use your listening skills and make sure the person feels they are being heard.

· Smile and move your body as you would in a face-to-face conversation, be positive.

· The speakerphone may be an advantage to you, but it diminishes the quality and intimacy of the call for the other person.

· Don’t use bad language.

· End it well, summarize the important highlights, thank them for their time and the conversation and say goodbye.

If you want to be a better speaker on the stage, it is no different from anything else, you need practice. The phone is a great opportunity to practice all those skills that you will need on the platform, and you get to practice those skills multiple times each day. So be aware of what you are doing on the phone, and don’t get sloppy just because it is only a five-minute phone call. A phone call is really just a small bit of public speaking.

Consider it your practice time for the next time you have to talk in a bigger public space.

Yeah, go ahead and phone it in instead of texting, or get crazy and go for that coffee and talk it out. Let’s give the voice back its important role in communication.

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

— Martin Luther King

There is consensus out there that oratory can be used effectively for both good and evil.

The spiritual word has both, the business world has both, and the political world most definitely has both.

In the spiritual realm, we have the good of preacher Tommy Douglas bringing our world universal Medicare, versus the bad of Creflo Dollar, the aptly named prosperity gospel huckster begging for cash on television to buy himself another personal jet.

In the business world, we have the CEO of Johnson and Johnson taking accountability for the Tylenol tragedy, and we have the smooth-talking sports stars, like Gretzky, extolling to youth the wonders of online gambling.

In the political realm, we have the good of President Obama passing the DACA program protecting immigrant children, versus the bad of a political administration putting immigrant children in camps.

The power of a charismatic speaker can bring about both the good and the bad.

I could listen to my grandfather preach and he just felt like a good man trying to bring some good into the world. I listened to Romeo Dallaire speak and he just felt like a good man trying to convince the world that we could be better. Neither of these two men made me feel I had to join a Bible School or enroll in military college in order to do something good in the world.

Some speak out of a sense of purpose, and some speak to get you to join.

In my hippy days I am glad I never went to Los Angeles and heard L. Ron Hubbard speak. I am grateful I did not grow up in Berlin and hear Hitler speak.

I guess the dark side of oratory is the side that is recruiting you. Recruiting you for a spiritual belief like Jim Jones, recruiting you for a political belief like Mao, or just recruiting you for the money like Bernie Madoff.

There are three top basic attributes of a persuasive speaker:

· Charisma. This is the attractive part of the speaker. It may be natural or learned but it is a powerful gift. The charismatic speaker is focused, warm, attractive, and passionate with a heightened sense of competence and authority.

· Communication. The great communicators have the stories, the language skills and the voice that give them the edge and ability to hold an audience.

· Connection. The impressive speakers know that the listener needs to feel personally connected to the narrative, the character, and the personality of the speaker. He is one of us.

Just imagine someone gifted with these attributes who has a more malevolent intention.

It can turn the spiritual guru/speaker into a cult leader whose charisma can turn a follower into a slave. The skilled television huckster can use top communication skills to sell you something you have absolutely no need for. The cult-of-personality politician turns the political theatre into a place about them, not about ideas.

It can all go a little cult-like if the skills and the iniquity are there and the voice is strong. The dark side with a bright light of skilled oratory, has many binary features:

· us/other

· love/hate

· ally/enemy

· science/belief

· facts/opinions

· true/false

We live in a binary world and there are plenty of opportunities for skilled oration to take advantage of those binaries.

In the dual world of science and belief, with the power of skilled oratory, there is enough clout to start wars. The binary of facts and opinions, fueled by the megaphone of social media, has the power to confuse truth and lies and to destroy great journalism.

The power of the speaker on a stage is only tempered by the acumen of the listener in the audience. There is a dark side, but one knows that there is more light than dark out there. We used to flick a Zippo in the audience when we wanted to respond to the big light on stage. We need to keep doing that and to walk out, turn off and speak up, when there is nothing but dark in the room.

“Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force in the world.”

— Cicero

As I made my own accidental way stumbling down the stony path of public speaking, I became more aware of those ordinary folks trying to learn how to give a better talk at the next staff meeting, the Girl Guide annual meeting, or that toast at their granddaughter’s wedding. We all will, of course, have the ghosts of great speechmaking whisper in our ear that we are surely going to suck.

So, we google and surf for great speeches and opportunities to learn and crib. I am not necessarily recommending this, it might slow you down, but then again, it might be the inspiration you need.

If you go there, you will soon find the favorites. You will find Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, and Mahatma Gandhi to name a few. Let’s take a look at some of those well-crafted talks. An even longer trip back will reacquaint us with the likes of Socrates who gave amazing speeches like his Apologia, where he addressed the jurors in his trial. Spoiler, he did not win. The part of that speech that still resonates is when he says,

Someone will say, “And are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a course of life which is likely to bring you to an untimely end?” To him I may fairly answer, there you are mistaken. A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong.

His attributed quotes such as, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing”, and “The unexamined life is not worth living”, would make any contemporary audiences sit up and take huge notice.

Going back a scant 2,000 years ago we could take a little look at that radical speechmaker, Jesus. Whether or not you believe he existed, you have to admit his Sermon on the Mount was a bit of a barnburner. He starts off pretty strong with:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

I suppose many would label it fake news today.

Still, this was a speech that has influenced both believers and non-believers for centuries and once again demonstrates the power of simply stated core values and the power of the human voice in unison.

“Speaking truth to power” is one of my favorite descriptions of a simple, handcrafted, and truthful talk. Fredrick Douglass, an American slave, and abolitionist became a popular speaker who much like today’s activists, never made much money at it, but we are taking in his words today with much respect. A white abolitionist group invited him to be a guest speaker at a Fourth of July celebration in Rochester, New York. Perhaps they felt he would be pleased and grateful for the invite. Here is what he said on July 5, 1852:

I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

Truth to power, they gave him a standing ovation.

Women’s voices may not have been invited to many podiums, but they were invited to a few and thankfully some went on the record.

In 1851, Sojourner Truth, an escaped slave and abolitionist, gave a speech at the Ohio Women’s Rights convention. It was titled “Ain’t I a Woman”.

She spoke, “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, then women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.”

As for Canada, we had some pretty good barnburners as well. As Canada took its first steps into nationhood, we know there were a few pretty fine speeches given up in the cause. Imagine a Canadian giving these lines that are as inspiring as anything south of our border:

To welcome every talent, to hail every invention, to cherish every gem of art, to foster every gleam of authorship, to honour every acquirement and every natural gift, to lift ourselves to the level of our destinies, to rise above all low limitations and narrow circumscriptions, to cultivate that true catholicity of spirit which embraces all creeds, all classes, and all races, in order to make of our boundless province, so rich in known and unknown resources, a great new northern nation.

This speech was pre-confederation and given by Thomas Darcy McGee. He became an MP in 1867 but tragically he was assassinated the next year on Parliament Hill.

The connection between great speakers and assassinations is a bit creepy, but truth is more often than not, a target.

Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech has to be near the top of the list when it comes to great oratory. We are still moved by the line,

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see, I am sure it bends towards justice.

Some of the greatest speeches have fused wit and humour as a power source to make a serious point. Nellie McClung was an early Canadian suffrage activist. When she was refused an audience with Manitoba premier Rodmond Roblin in 1924, the next evening she crafted a speech in which she role played the character of the premier as a woman responding to a group of men demanding the right to vote. In her speech she insists:

Oh, no, man is made for something higher and better than voting, the trouble is that if men start to vote, they will vote too much. Politics unsettle men and unsettled men means unsettled bills, broken furniture, broken vows, and divorce. Men’s place is on the farm. If men were to get the vote, who knows what would happen? It’s hard enough to keep them home now!

Some of the best speeches were made by men and women of humble origin and craft. One of the greatest speeches ever made by an athlete, was by ball player Lou Gehrig. Gehrig broke all sorts of records including durability (2,130 consecutive games). He was taken out by a neuromuscular disease now named after him. He took himself out of the game on May 2, 1939. With a short but heroic speech in Yankee Stadium on July 4 of that same year, he famously told his adoring fans, “Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.”

I never met Chief Dan George, but I sat in a small circle with his son, Chief Len George as he told us stories of his father. Chief Dan George was an actor and a leader of his people. He did not see himself as an orator, but he did answer the call to speak in 1967 on the celebration of Canada’s centennial. He did not look forward to the speech, but he did not hesitate either:

Like the thunderbird of old I shall rise again out of the sea; I shall grab the instruments of the white man’s success – his education, his skills, and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society. Before I follow the great chiefs, who have gone before us, Oh Canada, I shall see these things come to pass. I shall see our young braves and our chiefs sitting in the houses of law and government, ruling and being ruled by the knowledge and freedoms of our great land. So shall we shatter the barriers of our isolation. So shall the next hundred years be the greatest in the proud history of our tribes and nations.

What about today? Is oratory still here, or on life support in a social media universe demanding twits and bits?

In my generation when young girls turned sixteen years old the highlight would be a “sweet sixteen” party. Today, sixteen-year-old girls are perhaps the face and future of world changing leadership. Malala Yousafzai, at 16, made a speech to the United Nations that started with:

Dear Friends, on the 9th of October 2012, the Taliban shot me on the left side of my forehead. They shot my friends too. They thought that the bullets would silence us. But they failed. And then, out of that silence came, thousands of voices. The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions, but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power, and courage was born. I am the same Malala. My ambitions are the same. My hopes are the same. My dreams are the same.

Greta Thunberg at sixteen also addressed the United Nations and it was not a “sweet sixteen” moment:

My message is that we’ll be watching you. This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

Sojourner, Nellie, Greta, the beat goes on. The voices are getting younger and getting stronger. The speech is perhaps not yet dead. Twitter, I hope, may die the earlier death, as we watch inarticulate world leaders leave the speech behind and vex us with the midnight tweet.

I love watching the young look back and embrace old blues music, and fall in love with classic literature, and imagine throwing a beautiful vessel on a potter’s wheel. Perhaps they will rediscover great oratory, and struggle to bring that ancient practice back into a world that sorely misses it.

Chapters will come every Monday and please feel free to pass them on to your colleagues, friends and family. Thank you for reading and I always appreciate feedback.

“I know that I am intelligent because I know that I know nothing.”

— Socrates

There they were, sitting around the fire in the cave or in the lodge, happy to have the orator of the tribe begin to speak. The expectations were high. The old man or old woman starts to weave a story about a scary hunt, an exceptional child, or a spectacular feast. Those old orators were the Netflix of the ancients. We can only speculate as to what they may have said or how their oratory was received because there were no formal records or any real understanding until around two thousand years ago.

In classical Greece and Rome, speaking in the agora, the public square was not just for the professionals, but the stage was available to every citizen. The word citizen itself was revered and every citizen knew that success in life was affected by their learning the basics of public speaking.

The Greek master orators, if you will, were the Sophists. They were paid to teach citizens the basic techniques. The essential core of this learning was the study of rhetoric. Loosely defined as the art of persuasion, based on logic, rhetoric has outlived all the other artisanal specialties and even today, there are those who still study the canon.

Aristotle was the granddaddy of some of the early thinking on this subject. He saw rhetoric as the art of persuasion, and he viewed it through three basic elements of the art: logos, pathos, and ethos. Logos was of course, the logic behind the argument, pathos the emotional “hook” of the argument and ethos was the character behind the argument. These were the, what we would now call, core values of free speech. I like to think that this is perhaps where free speech, still under fire today, was conceived and developed.

It was not just happening in Greece. The Jewish culture, the Chinese (Confucius) and the Egyptians all held eloquent speaking in high esteem.

The study of public speaking and rhetoric continued through the Middle Ages into the 17^th century (Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbs). The American and French revolutions brought another fresh breath of air into the study and practice of oratory and rhetoric. This all led to the three basic components of a classical liberal arts education: rhetoric, logic, and grammar.

One of the great public speech breakthroughs of the 18^th and 19^th centuries was the emerging emancipation of women and the rising up of women’s voices. Religion, culture, and politics all conspired to keep women’s voice subservient. The one exception in America was the Quaker Church which has a 400-year history of giving women an equal voice in the meeting place.

Quaker women led the fight for slave emancipation. Two African American sisters, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, were early women pioneers in creating a women’s platform for public lecture in their work with the American Anti-Slavery Society. Attacked by the church, they argued for slave freedom and women’s freedom through impassioned public speaking.

The oratory (ornate, formal) style of speaking lasted till the 20th century when it was replaced by the more relaxed (personal, conversational) style, toning down the classical stylistic elements.

Still, great style led to grand moments in history with the likes of speeches from Lincoln (Gettysburg Address), Sojourner Truth in the American South, and Mahatma Gandhi in India. Those old-time speakers had a big influence on modern speakers like Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, and Tommy Douglas. These basic elements of liberal arts education (rhetoric, logic, and grammar) continue to be respected in the modern era especially in the halls of higher learning like UBC, Harvard, and Oxford.

One of our greatest thinkers and writers on the subject was Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) In his seminal work Understanding Media, he helped us understand the power behind speech. He argued that speech is more powerful than the written word because it engages all the senses and is capable of more interesting variance. That is, it invokes emotion and a more engaged audience reaction, whereas the written word, not so much, in a big room.

So, still important today, the five canons of rhetoric as given to us by the Old Guys, continue to resonate with every public speaker.

They include:

· invention — developing the argument,

· arrangement — organizing the argument,

· style — presenting the argument,

· memory — learning the talk, and

· delivery — body language, timing, and pace.

The oratorical elders gave us a gift that keeps on giving, even today as we lament good oratory being replaced by Twitter rants and folks demanding bite sized nuggets of any topic, no matter how important.

If you enjoy this, please feel free to share it widely, and feedback is always appreciated.

“According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”

— Jerry Seinfeld

Everyone has a moment that becomes a little speech. It could be a thank you on your retirement day, a toast at your daughter’s wedding, or a financial report for the Girl Guide troop. We all have occasion to speak to more than one person. Folks, you are all public speakers.

Every successful speech starts with the best opening line you can come up with. That was mine. Now let’s get into this thing.

This simple book, much like its author, has no ambitions. If you are about to read it, I thank you for your time and curiosity. You will be reading it as a gift, as I would not be so bold as to suggest that it is a piece of goods that one must dig into your pocket for, in order to test drive its worth to you.

Let me set the table.

I called it The Accidental Speaker for some obvious reasons. Growing up I had two major views of public speaking. The first is the Seinfeld terror. I could not even imagine standing in front of a crowd, or even a half dozen people with the expectation that they might actually listen to me. I could also not imagine this quite ordinary brain of mine having anything of any significance to say about anything.

The second view is, I suppose, the now popular territory called self-worth. I figured if someone was on a stage or in front of a room, they had to be a sage, a person of some importance. They must also be quite brilliant, to boot.

I was not and am not brilliant, so I was not seeking nor expecting this sort of thing to be a part of my upcoming life. It went well.

Nothing in high school or hamburger joint.

Nothing in the sawmill or plumbing shop.

Oh oh. I decided to take up teaching, and there I was, accidentally on purpose, speaking to twenty-four humans in the front of a room. Just kids though, not all that scary. Today may be quite different.

The really accidental part started when I got a bit more skilled at what I was doing for a living. As a school principal and a superintendent in the indigenous system, I had to speak up in school meetings, community sessions, and system conferences. There was no ambition here just trying to do a good job.

And on it went.

I ended up accidentally doing seminars, workshops and even some keynotes. At no time do I recall thinking, this is really what I want to do in life. I was just backing into it. I had no ambition to be a public speaker. Of course, as some readers may know, I never was really that successful in that august neighbourhood and pay grade.

As I reflect back now, I realize I could have learned more, practiced more, and challenged myself more in the wide-open field of oratory.

When I think back on my youth growing up in Saskatchewan, I saw and recognized oratory. Tommy Douglas was on the radio and in the Legion Hall with his visionary eloquence. As a young man I sat in the presence of indigenous elders like Ernest Tootoosis. My early years in the Pentecostal church gave me a lifetime of asking hard questions and speaking in tongues, but it also gave me a front row seat to some interesting speaking flair. In mid-century Canada, oratorical brilliance and well-crafted public speaking was still a very respected and honoured practice in our culture.

Still, I did not recognize any slot for the likes of myself in that territory. It was not until the mid-life crisis points and a decision to return to grad school, that I started to see public speaking as an interesting and perhaps important part of my work life. I started to pay attention.

I discovered and studied the emerging field of learning organization theory. Essentially it asks us to consider learning not so much as an event or series of learning events, but more to consider than individuals and organizations need to be in a state of continuous learning in order to succeed in a knowledge economy. I became more familiar with the theory/practice continuum and the learner in me loved the theory, but the plumber still in me wanted the practice, the tools.

So, I went out and found some tools, invented a couple, and learned how to use them properly. I found out people wanted to hear about them, learn how to do it, and bring some new practices into their workplace culture. I fell a little deeper into public speaking world.

There are three things that inspired me to write this little book.

I was a big fan of Gump Worsley, a Canadian Hockey Hall of Famer who played goal for the Stanley Cup-winning Montreal Canadiens. He faced thousands of wicked slap shots without a mask. I loved the story of an interviewer going after a bravery story, and he asked Gump where he got his courage.

What are you talking about? says the Gumper, I throw up before every game!

Something rich in there about fear, and perhaps even the fears of public speaking. Fear does not have the right to stop us. Recognize it, go hurl in the toilet, and get on with it.

In the last half of the last century, oratory was slipping a bit. Politicians were introduced to the strategy of talking points, and even the preachers were using the ubiquitous Power Point. Then the Web hooked us on the Twitterization of words, and the demand to use less and less of them. Oratory took a stumble, I believe.

Lately though, no matter your politics, religion, or background, you might agree that Davos moment brought the speech back into the Canadian realm. Speaking of realms, the King’s speech in the American Congress was classic oratory. Then you have the kids, Malala and Greta, kicking our public speaking butts.

I am encouraged to write about public speaking now as I sense a bit of this comeback in the air.

This book has three parts:

PAST, the first Section, Chapters 1-5 takes a look at the history and story of oratory.

PRESENT, the second Section Chapters 6-12, looks at oratory and public speaking in the modern context.

FUTURE, the third Section Chapters 13-18 take us forward with some thoughts and suggestions around best practices in public speaking.

We finish with Chapter 19 with a nod to my own modest toolkit and a new tool specifically geared to the new speaker.

If you think this book is not for you, ok.

However, it seems to me that many of us fall accidentally into public speaking. It may become a work requirement. It may be in your volunteer life. It may be on the day you take your kid to work. It may be at a community meeting. It may be at your kid’s wedding.

It will be accidental, but like Frankie Byers taught us in judo, it’s good to learn how to fall.

Over the last few years, I have written a book on public speaking as a leadership and engagement practice. The book is finished and I have decided to give it as a gift to my Substack readers. My next Substack piece will come in June and will be one of twenty chapters. The chapters will arrive in your inbox every Monday morning. Consider it your summer read.

Now on with the second part of my tribute to people who have influenced me over the years.

Bill Alexander

I was not at all academically qualified to be accepted into the hallowed post-graduate halls of the University of Toronto. Bill Alexander was a former street based social activist from Chicago who somehow got past the U of T gatekeepers as a professor. He felt I should be there as well, and we weaseled me in. Bill taught me the great social history of adult education and the teaching of literacy to railway workers in boxcar classrooms. He made me realize that great learning was continuous not episodic. He helped me get past the notion that learning had to be packaged or canned and I still have an allergic reaction to curriculums and training manuals. He is the one who suggested that universities and schools were not learning organizations. They are teaching organizations, he said. If they were true learning organizations, we would not reward the student with the right answer, but the one with the hardest question.

I still love telling the story of Robert Frost who had a young visitor. He asked the young man what he did. “Like yourself, I am a poet,” said the young man. “I am sorry,” replied Mr. Frost, “that is a gift word, you cannot call yourself a poet. You can call yourself a writer, but it is for others to read your writing and they will decide to bestow the gift word of poet on you, or not.”

Good story, Bill.

Bill fell terminally ill.

We visited. In the first visit, he packed a lunch, and we headed out to Mount Pleasant Cemetery where we proceeded to his soon to be future long-term home. We spread a blanket, sat and speculated on the personalities of those buried nearby.

At a later date, I was sitting with him. He could barely talk but he chose to whisper the fine old story about the doctor who in midst of a prostate exam, had a patient ask if the doc would mind using two fingers. He explained his request as always wanting to get a second opinion.

I think Bill was coaching me on how to deal with loss.

Bill left us the next week. I believe even to the end he could not stop teaching. I don’t think Bill would call himself a mentor. So, I choose to give him the gift word, he was my mentor and such an influence.

(The only photo I have of Bill is etched on my heart.)

Mayor Naheed Nenshi

What an influence this guy had on all of us here in Calgary.

My favorite story was a moment I had in Toronto in 2011. I was speaking to a room full of Torontonians and I was feeling a bit cheeky. The subject was storytelling, and I was making a point that not only humans could change their stories, but inanimate entities such as cities could also change their stories. A year earlier both Toronto and Calgary elected new mayors, Mayor Ford, and Mayor Nenshi. I asked the audience for a word or phrase that described their city story. From the hometown Toronto audience, I heard words like cultural, liberal, diverse, world class, environmental, innovative, artistic, and so on. I mentioned I was from Calgary and asked for some story descriptors. I got back redneck, conservative, non-renewable, wealthy and boring.

“Then give us back our rightful mayor!” I shouted, as they had just elected a redneck, crack-smoking white business guy and we had just elected the first savvy, non-white, Muslim, knowledge worker.

The crowd went nuts. Stories had indeed changed.

He became venerated as the best mayor in the world and when Meg Van Rosendaal and I received one of the Mayor’s Arts Champions Award from him in 2020, I was humbled. I knew the recognition for the Music Mile came directly from our being influenced by his innovative challenge called Three Volunteer Things for Calgary.

One could be grateful for a leader like this, for his leadership efforts on poverty reduction, crisis management, mental health, reconciliation, and the arts economy. His biggest influence on my own leadership thoughts, though, is grounded in his introducing us to the word seva.

Seva, he taught us, is a Sanskrit word meaning service. In his first year, he asked us to do three things of service: service to your family, your community, and your city. It could be as simple as shoveling a neighbour’s walk or joining a not-for-profit board. These days he is re-launching seva and many of us would like to see it start to work deeper in cities, countries, organizations and in the world.

Influencer, I believe so.

Larry Marshall

I spent a day recently with my great long-time friend Larry Marshall. Larry grew up on a successful family farm in Saskatchewan. A core value of that farm family was rooted in the co-op tradition where farming was less corporate, more cooperative and collaborative. His father was a vice president of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool and so Larry was raised in the traditions of family farming as a way of life. I was used to farm families in my world being very conservative in their approach to farming. My uncle stayed in his lane. He was a grain farmer who seeded, tended, harvested, and sold grain. I smile trying to imagine any of my former farm employers reading a book about agriculture, attending an organic seminar, or even attending a farm product show. Not an ounce of curiosity in those rigid old men.

Larry on the other hand, not only stepped out of his lane, he took his work boots down more lanes than I can list here. He was one of the first graduates of the B. Allan Mackie School of Log Building and today there are many lovely log homes on the prairie built by Larry. He was the first farmer I knew to make the whole of his land organic and that is not an easy process. He was constantly visiting the folks at the university to fill his head with what was new. He formed a reggae band with some of his farm neighbours that became well known around the province. He planted a forest in one of his sections. He tried all kinds of new crops including rhubarb (not so much) and hemp (big time now). He worked with organic farmers in China, Africa, Costa Rica and Cuba, learning and teaching all the time.

There is so much more to Larry but know this, he was a continuous learner. He had a job, but he also lived for so many other unique practices off the corner of his farm desk. Most important, he led from sideways. He could have been a big shot in the local community, a force in provincial politics or a board member of any farming organization, but he chose to help develop young farmers and leaders all over the world.

He chose to practice his leadership from where he stood and to be a local figure of influence not power. I learned so much from this guy.

An influencer indeed.

Ian Chisholm

Chiz, another farm boy.

I was not that deep into my leadership and engagement practice at the time, but I was starting to soak up anything I could find on learning organizations. So, I took advantage of a learning organization seminar in Toronto, where to my delight, the seminar leader led from a grand piano bench. To this day, I envy that ability to combine your leadership practice with an artistic practice. The really big moment for me however, was during the introductions, when Ian Chisholm met Bob Chartier. Been looking for you for some time, says Ian.

He grew up in Maidstone, Sask. on a family farm that was a scant forty-five minutes from where I grew up in Battleford. It was an instant Saskatchewan bonding. He had just come home to Canada, settling in Victoria, having just completed a stint as CEO of a leadership centre on the Isle of Skye. Not a lot of twenty-six-year-olds get chosen to head up a large leadership organization.

Not a lot of twenty-six-year-olds should.

They made a good choice. He did a fine job and now has the credibility to share the practice he learned from leading in a tough situation. His Roy Group practice, named after his grandfather, has a well-deserved reputation.

Ian had a big influence on my own emerging practice.

For example, he had a disciplined approach to even the small details, such as how to lay out articles on a table. My slacker approach took notice. He treated clients as guests and made learning into a special time. I knew nothing of this.

His biggest gift to so many of us was his Feedback Tool. This little triad of “Went Well, Trickies, and Do Differents” became a daily working tool for anyone in Ian’s orbit.

Ian has built a thriving coaching practice in both the public sector and the entrepreneurial side of the private sector. I especially enjoyed how he applied some artistic flavour to his practice by taking his seminars over to a tennis court. There he would build the learning into the swing of a racket. Anne Marie, his life and business partner, brought the same artistic flair into her practice of conflict resolution.

She would use puppets and masks! Again, art in practice.

Ian has now taken his practice up a notch. His book, Quiet Champions, has us all taking a better look at the world and practice of mentoring. I love that he has gone with the old school word mentor instead of the more modern jargon of influencer. I suppose when I look at the folks in this essay who were a big influence on me, I am struck by how much younger many of them are compared to myself. I grew up thinking that mentors were just those older and wiser. Thanks to Ian and so many of the young practitioners I got to work with, I found that a good mentor is not bound by age, but indeed they are in your life with some wisdom and counsel.

Karen Bonner

Lucky me. I got to do a ton of real engagement work with an influencer as a workplace partner.

Karen was a federal government manager who could see the value in practice-based leadership very early in the game. She became both an engagement practitioner and a coaching practitioner and truly was the one who put wheels on the car in this work. She taught me how to build a practice through due diligence, great process design and relationship rather than action driven work.

Karen brought so much to the handiwork, but her Relationship/Possibility/Action model was the biggest for me. I was an action, get-it-done guy until she sat me down and taught me that action without relationship has no commitment and action without possibility has no innovation and creativity.

She also taught me and so many young practitioners how to deal with negative people, and her Red Tomato model is priceless. You cannot turn a tomato ripe; she would say, it has to get there on its own. So, if you encounter a frustrated green tomato at work, stop trying to change them, go around the green ones and look for a red one and start to gather them into your own community of practice.

Karen’s big gift was her commitment to good process design. She gave every session the gift of artful design rather than plodding agendas.

Karen also taught me to better appreciate the art and practice of coaching. She brought coaching into the frontline corner-of-desk world when it had more resided at the top-of-ladder world. There are a lot of valuable coaching practitioners out there thanks to Karen.

Moving Sideways, through the years

As a young worker I often heard others say that their jobs were so onerous that they had to do a certain piece of work “off the corner of their desk.” Usually that turn of phrase came out rather negative. However, I began hearing the phrase a little differently as I studied Learning Organization Theory, tool-based practice and handcrafted engagement.

I knew that my work would always have all the restrictions and rules that come with a job. You have to learn to live with job descriptions, compliance, hierarchy, credentialism, performance measurement, bureaucracy and the hard-cold covering of the crust of reason (kids in college, mortgage). We all are or should be grateful for a job, especially now. I have no real truck with those who say we can change the nature of jobs; jobs are owned by the organization, not us. Some jobs are wonderful, some ordinary and some just suck, but we are grateful for work.

The job, of course, is the gateway to the ladder leadership model. Do well on the job and you get to know and climb the rungs.

I also noticed something else thirty years ago. There were a lot of topics needing attention in my organization that did not fit into any job description. Things like:

· Charitable activities

· Engagement tools

· Coaching

· Conflict resolution

· Ethics

· Emergency preparation

· Social media skills

· Public speaking

· Work life balance

· Mental illness

· Strategic planning

· Diversity

· Fitness

· Writing

· Service standards

· Team building

· Facilitation

And on and on and on.

There was a lot of stuff going on here and pretty cool stuff at that. There were actually some things that I wouldn’t mind doing, truth be told. So, who was doing it? Well, there was the inside piece and the outside piece.

Inside, we had the ubiquitous committee approach. Committee work was voluntary without a lot of carrots. In fact, the phrase voluntold implied more stick than carrot. I don’t remember a lot of folks holding their breath waiting for a spot to open up on a committee. This was inside stuff.

Outside, much of these cool efforts went, of course, to outsiders. I recall a lot of contractors coming through the doors to facilitate us, coach us, workshop us, strategic plan us, conflict resolve us, time manage us, diversify us, team build us and ethics us. There was more but…

I saw my opening.

I learned some engagement tools, hung out my little entrepreneurial shingle on the corner of my desk and waited. I pitched my skills to my boss, but he was in love with a contractor, so it took a while and another manager with no budget, to finally see some opportunity in me. The first time I left my real job on a Thursday morning to facilitate a Team Charter session with a finance team in the afternoon, I knew that “the corner of the desk” could have a much more interesting meaning for me.

Engagement, my practice

We have come a long way on our journey to this word engagement. I was hired as a young man, in the 70’s, to put together, with some really bright folks, a program of public participation, for the first major environmental study in this country, the Churchill River Study. We had no idea what we were doing. We wrote, we spoke, we listened, but the tools were old, and I am not sure the public felt participated at all.

In later decades, we buried deep into the word consult, and we dutifully trotted the PowerPoint presentations into all sorts of large and small communities who wondered when we might stop talking and consulting and start listening. It was only with some personal engagement tools like the Feedback Model (thanks Ian Chisholm), the 12 Minute Interview, and the Spider Accountability Tool (thanks Karen Bonner), that we started to realize engagement was different from public participation and consultation. Then we found team engagement tools like the Charter, the Stand-up and the Preventive Maintenance tool that strive to bring teambuilding out of the workshops and into daily practice. The whole systems engagement tools like the OpenSpace, the World Café and the Press Conference finally really broke our mental models and took us into the world of conversations across silos and into the big conversations that organizations need in a modern knowledge-based world. We knew that the real intelligence in organizations was in the big rooms, not necessarily the boardrooms.

The really big idea finally dropped when we finally realized that consultation was an event-based process and engagement was a continuous, everyday process.

So, today…

The work continues. Thousands of public servants and other workers are exploring or are in full flight with their corner-of-desk practices. There are thriving communities of practices across the country. There are professional consultants who see their main challenge to help organizations and create deep sustainability, and they choose not to do the work themselves but to train and develop front line workers to be that fully sustainable force for leadership, engagement and change in their own organizations.

Finally, the core of Sideways Leadership is not based on a few reaching the top of a leadership ladder but thousands of front-line leaders moving practice-based practical leadership across and through our organizations every hour of every day.

And yes, it’s true, a leader’s true job is to create more leaders. We do this by challenging everyone to find their entrepreneurial practice and subsequently their unique and important voice.

There are many more sources of good practice thinking, but these particular folks above and so many others, were big influences in my evolving engagement practice. At the same time, I had jobs. In order for the world of practice to flourish you need great managers and leaders of organizations who give you their sanction and some good work to do. Thank you, Doug Konkin, Shelley Sullivan, Jocelyne Bourgon, Garry and Wayne Wouters, Peter Harrison, Richard Rochefort, Scott Serson, John Watson, Geoff Munroe, Jamie Jeffreys, Rachael Pollard, Ian Chisholm, Graham Dixon and my old Royal Roads team, Alison Bond, Rebecca O’Brien, Earl Ermine, Mike Nurse, Dave Francis, Bonnie Johnstone, Gian-Carlo Carra, Paul Brandt, Kelly Lendsey, Laurie Pushor and there were so many others as well, but my memory is Swiss Cheese. Tasty but with holes.

Thank you all, you know who you are.

In conclusion, Doug Konkin was a Deputy Minister of Forestry who saw the potential in Sideways Leadership and when I asked him why, his reply was simple but profound. He said he imagined how amazing it would be to be the deputy of an organization where 3500 people had a job and the same 3500 people had a leadership practice at the corner of their desk.

Indeed.

Thanks Doug and thank you every manager, every practitioner and every colleague, who invited me into the room knowing full well that it indeed might go sideways, and often it did.

A final thought...

Polls are showing that one in three preteens, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, say they want to be an influencer. This makes no flippin sense! The people I have acknowledged in this piece were a big influence on me and thousands of others. They did not set off in life to be influencers. They set off in life to do some good work. The work they did was so good that they influenced people. You can’t do this stuff backwards!

The kids may need a little straight talk on the word influence. As Robert Frost and many of us have said, it is a gift word. You must be gifted it from someone who sees it in you, not just your own naked ambition looking back at you from your steamed-up bathroom mirror.

Do some good work and the world will let you know if they were influenced by you.

Today’s youth call these people ‘influencers’, and so I will appropriate that term in these two essays. There were more influencers than I thought, so I had to put them into two essays. Apologies to any that I may have missed, but know that you are in my heart. This is my chance to say thank you to so many people, who worked with me and influenced me.

Backstory

Over fifty years ago, I began a lifelong career in public service. A close friend and colleague of mine started at the same time. He finished his fine career as a Deputy Minister. I did not. In fact, I never really moved much higher up the ladder than the first few steps. I did my work on the ground.

One day he asked me what I felt went wrong with my career as he believed we both started with much the same leadership skill sets. I suggested that perhaps it was the ladders. I was just scared of heights or perhaps I was searching for a different way to express my leadership inclinations without the treacherous climbing of those ladders.

I indicated to him that in my 50 years, I actually got to know thousands of public servants, maybe influenced hundreds and perhaps even became a mentor to tens. These folks ranged from file clerks to Deputy Ministers. I respectfully suggested to my friend that although I never got to sit around the maple boardroom table, I was often in those rooms mildly influencing the conversations.

These days I am interested in opening up some conversations around balancing the old school Ladder Model (moving and leading from up and down) and what I now call the Sideways Model (moving and leading across and through.)

Ladder leadership is based on some critical principles. For example, you need a powerful grip on your ascent of a ladder and power is the operating word here. Also, there is also only room for one human at the top of a ladder. Unfortunately, you can also fall (or be pushed) off a ladder. There are perks of course. Fame, wealth, power, minions and corner offices are, for some, well worth the climb.

Upward mobility did not really interest me in 1969 when I started out, but the reality was, it was the only leadership route offered. There were no books, workshops, speakers or orientation manuals that suggested you could ever lead from anywhere but up there.

I had to figure something out on my own to scratch the leadership itch. Frankly, I am still imagining what a Sideways Model of leadership could be and once again I am reminded that the joy comes from the journey not the destination.

The people on your journey, of course, are the real deal. As the kids say today, the influencers.

I would like to take a moment to honour my journey Sideways and the art and practice of workplace and civic engagement by acknowledging those who were clearly:

The Influencers

Father Don

No not a priest, but a wise man indeed. My father, Don Chartier, was a plumber. He was a hero to a lot of widows whose heat went out at four in the morning, and he answered their call. He taught me many things, but the biggest influence he had on my work was the respect he taught me around tools. He taught me to find the right tools, to take care of my tools and to look for the improved and better tool. It took me a while to realize that it’s not just blue-collar work that uses tools, but all workplaces. I found myself in public sector workplaces where the most common tools were meetings, committees, and workshops and most of these common tools were not very sharp anymore. I became the tool guy. So far, I have found, been taught, and invented over three dozen new and improved workplace tools. These tools can be found in my book Handcrafted Leadership: The Art and Craft of Building Engaged Workplaces and Communities.

I love the story my dad told about the night he was faced with a frozen water line hidden behind a finished gyproc basement ceiling. At first blush, an ordinary plumber might have started to take large chunks out of that ceiling to rightfully get his torch into the area that was frozen. Instead, he thought for a while and then asked the woman, “May I borrow your vacuum cleaner?” He then cut a small hole in the ceiling, put the vacuum on blow and in fifteen minutes the pipes were thawed.

The woman was thrilled, but her husband came home and refused to pay the bill. He suggested that my father’s only real work was to cut a small hole and he even used the family vacuum instead of his own tools. My dad’s telling of the woman’s response to her husband cannot be repeated here, but she knew the value of innovation, knowledge, and tools when she saw it. She paid him immediately with big gratitude.

Fathers, big influence.

Elder Ernest Tootoosis

He was sort of a priest, but not really. In my decades of working with indigenous peoples, I learned very quickly that a great source of knowledge and soul was out on the gravel road, in a small house, where a cup of tea and an elder waited to see if you would show up. I often did show up and the learning was sweet. I learned the daily importance of ritual, the critical weight of storytelling and the value and worth of humour and oratory.

So maybe a little story, why not?

It was probably around the fall of 1972, and we had just finished the final round in a sweat lodge hand-built by some elders on the shores of Lake Diefenbaker. I felt privileged to have been invited to participate and it turned out to be the moving and thought-provoking experience I had hoped for.

Ernest, a grandson of Chief Poundmaker, a great Cree leader in the times of the 1885 Rebellion, led the sweat. I had met him before, but I was looking forward to learning some rich wisdom from this well respected elder. He was everything a young idealistic white guy would want. He had the braids, the cane, the beads, the turquoise, the voice, and the gravitas that made you want to sit still and learn something.

So, we were sitting. We watched the sun complete the rising and as is common in the fall on the prairies, the geese were also rising. As the flocks passed by overhead, Ernest turned to me and in a deep soulful voice said, “Bob, isn’t it wonderful how those geese fly in that V formation?” I respectfully agreed.

Have you ever noticed Bob, that in every V, there is always one line longer than the other line?

Yes sir, I have noticed that.

Do you know why one line is always longer than the other line? he said softly.

I am just thrilled and ready to receive some ancient Cree tribal knowledge from this amazing old man.

No, I said, I don’t know why one line is always longer than the other.

More geese in that line! he laughs.

Elders, big influencers.

Etienne Wenger

The corner of the desk metaphor came to me in a lovely dinner with this man and my colleague Karen Bonner. Wenger was a Swiss professor at the University of California who worked with anthropologist Jean Lave studying apprenticeship culture in Africa. The big breakthrough was their findings that apprentice learning was less from the master and more from the community of apprentices (peers). Wenger applied this concept to his emerging thoughts around “communities of practice.” He said, “Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for things they do every day to improve their work-place culture and they learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. They are practice volunteers in their own workplace.”

He gave us the context.

The Domain. Basically, this is the practice you have chosen, like coaching, workplace wellness, health and safety, facilitation and so on.

The Community. This is simply the people who share a passion for this practice domain. They could be in the same organization, same building, or same town.

Mutual Engagement. How you will work and learn together is usually forged by a Community Charter conversation.

Well-functioning informal communities of practice give many advantages to any organization. A community of practice will:

· Build overall organizational knowledge.

· Increase specialized knowledge while at the same time moving the best of that knowledge across the bureaucratic silos.

· Create a highly skilled amateur, voluntary workforce that can provide needed support and services from the inside. Jobs do the daily work, practice improves and builds the culture.

· There is enormous pride as people find their entrepreneurial practice, build it, and then make a unique leadership contribution to the organization.

· Communities of practice are fiscally modest. Jobs come from a rigorous production culture where costs are critical. Communities of practice come from a culture of wanting to improve things around here and we have the voluntary capacity to do it ourselves by giving back.

I have had many jobs over the years, including teacher, burger flipper, molten metal handler, taxi driver, school principal, head saw tailing in a lumber camp, policy analyst, and so on.

I was, however, very short on the practice side. I wish I had known about practice and communities of practice when I was younger. So, it was quite late in my career when I managed to develop practices in facilitation, engagement, event planning, writing, public speaking, and leadership as my quest for practice grew. The important thing I learned about practice was that I “owned” it. The jobs all belonged to the organization and when I left, they stayed there, in the organization.

The practices I took with me, and I still have them.

Etienne, a fine influence.

Margaret Wheatley

I drove Meg from Calgary to Red Deer where we were guest speakers at a gathering. She insisted I put the top down and then asserted that we must make our way via the back roads. Of course, I thought, this was a woman who has walked every trail and backroad all over her home base in Utah and the world. She has brought her spirit infused practice to the largest of governments and business and the smallest of villages. She has worked around the world as a speaker, consultant, community worker and teacher. Her Berkana Institute has trained thousands in many third world countries and her impact especially in women’s leadership, will be felt in so many countries deep into the future.

I learned much from her, but two things stand out, one simple and one quite profound. The simple concept was when she told me that we need to stop having table-based conversations in rooms full of people. Six to eight people at a table does not work she insists. Rather we need to have conversations in groups of no more than four. Four people sitting knee to knee constitutes a deeper possibility for a more fully engaged conversation. I found out soon it makes a huge difference for the level of engagement in a room and the four-pod is always in my practice.

The other profound thing was her definition of leadership. Everyone knows it is only a fool who believes in single line definitions. There are more definitions to leadership than can be contained in any one MBA professor’s office library. However, I really like this one of hers. She says she can define leadership in four words, “How can I help?”

This is the mom with three kids who instead of scooting out the door at the end of a Girl Guide meeting, stands up and says, “Excuse me, great meeting tonight, how can I help?”

This is the doctor with a full plate these days, who at the end of a staff meeting asks, “How can I help?”

This is the public servant at the end of a long meeting who, as others scurry out, stops and says, “Excuse me, how can I help?”

These folks, says Margaret, are stepping fully into leadership. This was such a big lightbulb moment for me. The true spirit of leadership, it occurred to me, might lie, not in the front of the room or up the proverbial ladder, but throughout and across the room and the organization itself.

A truly remarkable story was Meg’s work with some challenged youngsters who just could not deal with the school system anymore. In their leaving they told her, “Don’t worry about us ma’am, we are not walking out, we are walking on.”

An amazing story of young warriors of the spirit.

A big influence this woman.

Peter Senge

I met Peter Senge at the University of Toronto in 1992. For me, it was like meeting Bob Dylan, for him it was just a handshake and a quick chat with some punk. His seminal book, The Fifth Discipline was still pretty new, and I had gobbled it up in a couple of weeks. However, I knew that I would be influenced for the rest of my career by the brilliant organizational theory called the Learning Organization. I thought I had pretty well cased learning as something that humans did for short periods of time. Naturally. I was quite blown away by the notion that to survive in a knowledge economy we have to consider that organizations and each of their people, need to be in a state of continuous learning in order to be fully successful. I worked hard to wrap my head around Personal Mastery (finding the authentic self), Shared Vision (beyond Strategic Planning), Mental Models (world views that are powerful but must often be unlearned), Team Learning (dialogue-based goal achievement), and Systems Thinking. System Thinking changed me. I realized that the core of the intelligence in a system was in the system itself, not necessarily in the corner offices.

I will never forget the first time I was able to put a whole system in a room for a day.

Everyone from the receptionist to John Watson, the Director General, was in that room. Every silo was there. The whole of that systems knowledge and skills intelligence were in that one room. The tool was OpenSpace and the whole room built the agenda, talked across the silos and came up with 142 recommendations on how we could work together better. The biggest cynic in the organization took me aside later and said he had the best day ever.

He said, “I met people today, had brilliant conversations and got to know people that I did not even know worked here.”

It was through the work of Senge that I started to understand that in a Learning Organization, we needed to turn the mountains of data into manageable veins of information and those veins of information into manageable nuggets of knowledge and those nuggets of knowledge into sweet little gems of wisdom.

Senge. Pretty big influencer.

Steve Denning, Sylvie LaPointe

I carried on a running battle with PowerPoint for so many years, still struggle with it today. I found it to be predictable, boring and oh so very safe. It was like mayo on oratory. I sort of knew about the art of storytelling, even fancied myself a bit of a storyteller but it wasn’t until I read Steve Denning’s ground-breaking book called The Springboard that I knew there was a true business case for storytelling in workplace culture and it was a great vaccination against the rapidly spreading noxious PowerPoint culture.

Denning tells a fine story about how he was trying to get his organization, The World Bank, to become a knowledge-sharing organization. The presentations did not do it. Then he started to tell a real story about a health care worker in a small, impoverished town in Zambia who was able to tap into critical malaria treatment. People listened, responded deeply to the storytelling, and workers and citizens became more fully engaged and began to respond and change the culture, from talking to audiences, to talking with audiences.

Denning taught me that a story must be authentic and true, short and have a happy ending. A good story can be a springboard into the reality of what the listener needs to deal with in their world. After six years of figuring this out, my colleague Sylvie LaPointe and I wrote our own little book, Get Real on workplace storytelling.

It’s still one of my favorite territories to play in.

A big influence.

This ends Part A of this mini memoir. Please look for Part B in May.

You may already have it but if you do not, you should pick up a copy of A Public Servant’s Voice by Jocelyne Bourgon. This is a truly exceptional new Canadian book, part memoir and part first-hand account of the challenges of our well respected federal public service.

I have been waiting for this book for thirty-four years. I started looking for a book like this in 1992. I was at the University of Toronto doing graduate work in leadership, learning theory and engagement practices. I was gathering and reading all sorts of books on these issues but I soon realized there was nothing on the shelf for the public servant story. They were all about private sector leaders and business based innovative practices. I read Senge, Peters, Drucker, Mintzberg, Welch, Frederick Taylor and Alvin Toffler, looking for at least one public sector story.

Actually, there was one.

I got to interview Toffler once and when I asked him about the lack of good writing on public service, he argued with me and went on and on boasting about how he changed the American military to be a winner after the epic failure in Vietnam.

His bragging didn’t really help me in my search and over the years I thought of him and the subsequent epic failures in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Gulf War, but I digress.

Over my forty-eight years in public service, I worked for a number of fine leaders. I saw some good organizational practices and I was always in a continuous learning and curiosity mode. I was also an amateur freelance writer and story collector and so I was always on the lookout for stories.

The Chapters bookshelves had some excellent public sector academic writing but were still shy of any fine public service memoir and stories.

So, when Madame Bourgon sent me this autographed book with a lovely note of thanks for a small contribution from me, I was over the moon.

It was indeed the book I had been waiting for.

Jocelyne’s leadership path covers the whole spectrum of public service and will speak to all civil servants regardless of where they might be situated in these times.

I won’t try to cover that whole journey but like many of us she started early in 1973 as a summer student in Transport. She became a manager with Fisheries in 1975, a Director General in 1983, then an Assistant Deputy Minister and then a Deputy Minister in 1989.

I started my public service career in 1969 and never did get to management so her taking only sixteen years to the very top, tells me this woman had all the tools and the heart of a leader.

Obviously, she was brilliant, strategic and tough and so her last promotion is really where the book shines a big light. The real pinnacle in our Canadian public service is that final upgrade to Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet.

There are no more rungs on the ladder.

Let me give a personal summary of what I most appreciated in her story. Here are some examples of her leadership, coupled with her quotes:

· We see her humility. In that moment when Prime Minister Chretien told her she was the one he wanted for the top job, her reply was, “he could do better.”

· We see her clarity on good behaviour. When many of the men dealing with the Charlottetown Accord were exhibiting some bad behaviour, she took them on and she explains, “I am not a shrinking violet.”

· On executives constantly being shuffled into different portfolios, including her: “I was furious and made it known.”

· On the constant reorganizations: “Reorganizations should be avoided whenever possible.”

· On cuts and good fiscal management: “The challenge was not to figure out what to cut, but what to preserve for the future.”

· On the stress between the public service staff and the increasing volume of political staff: “There are six to eight hundred politically exempt staff who daily generate programming demands on departments. Is this wise?” she asks.

· On the role of Ministers in our government: “Ministers have lost direct access to the Prime Minister.”

· On the core value of leadership at all levels: “It calls for distributive leadership where every public servant is individually and collectively responsible for acting within their sphere of influence to improve the public service.”

· On learning organization theory, practice and system thinking: “The learning needed was not limited to the individual level, the public service needs smart organizations able to think through complex issues in new ways and to work across sectors and across boundaries.”

· On the next generation of public servants: “People serving in the second quarter of the twenty first century are facing a convergence of existential threats of which climate change is only one. They will serve without the benefit of the protective shield of international conventions that contributed to an extended period of peace and global growth. A world of realpolitik governed by the rule of the jungle is very different from a world governed by rules.”

Yes, indeed.

This was a voice that brought real change to the federal government in her time and in my opinion, a voice that could inspire every civic organization struggling these days in a world not appreciating or understanding the role of an impartial, professional and accountable public service in our democracies.

Also, when they decided that the word Clerk did not fully capture the role, the Head of the Public Service title became her new challenge. She had to not only create better administration of the public sector, but also build a renewed organizational culture of citizen driven service and civid engagement, that would bring more effectiveness and pride.

I only got to hang out with her once.

It was in a bar, or probably a fancy lounge in Halifax after a conference. How I was invited into that special table group, I have no idea. It was a lively discussion and she was a conversational delight. In fact, I was welcomed enough, to such an extent, that I felt emboldened to make a pitch. The evening ended and I found myself sharing the walk to the hotel elevator with her. By this time in my own work, I was tired of how much cash we were spending at these conferences on keynote speakers who had just climbed a mountain or won a Grey Cup. I wanted to hear more public service stories from working public servants.

So, I pitched this to her, but I added some crazy. I suggested that in my work I had come to really believe that mistakes were more often great learning opportunities rather than occasions for risk management. So as the elevator doors opened, I proposed that we hold a federal conference, once a year and the only speakers and workshop presenters invited would be public servants who had really screwed something up that year.

The learning from those mistakes would be through the roof, I suggested, cautiously speaking through a single glass of wine.

She could have responded from her position of wisdom and authority with a kindly but knowledgeable smile, but instead she was very positive and made me feel like my voice was not a bad thing for her to finish the day on. That evening she and I were actually far ahead of the now worldwide movement that started some year’s later in Mexico City. I really believe this leader enjoyed and respected conversations with front line workers like myself.

As I finished this book after so many years in public service, I do wish I could have read it when I was in the middle of it all, but I am so grateful to see it out there now for those still in the trenches. She has a writerly voice that grabs one’s interest in how departments work, how central agencies work (or not) and how the public service deals with constitutional crises, sovereignty, cabinet intrigues and balancing budgets.

She introduced us to disruptors like the La Relève initiative, challenging how we see leadership, engagement and change. This book is a peek behind the curtain and I would encourage my public service readers to share her story with those working out there, keeping the heat on our Canadian democratic values and needing a little inspiration.

She was a strong woman’s voice in a time when primarily men still chaired the meetings. This book can serve as an inspiration to women, and to all public servants, who follow in her footsteps.

Two significant things here, I suggest.

One is the importance of the word home-made. You are stepping into wonderful analog life-giving world of our homes from the increasingly digital and business world of the office. Sometimes that may be expressed as cold into warm and bureaucratic into beauty. This could be good. Wonder bread world into homemade bread world.

Secondly, I can make this bread this afternoon because I am at home sitting at my dining room table not sitting in front of a screen in my old cubicle drafting a briefing note. I am so full of gratitude and sit with a smile on my face that resembles that wrinkly crust.

Retirement.

I don’t believe many of us ever really wanted it. We loved our jobs, we served and we were rewarded with bread on our tables and cash in our jeans. I was certainly not ready even though I was sixty-seven. I was doing good work and felt needed. That was not how management felt and I was more shoved than embraced, after close to fifty years in First Nations, municipal, provincial and federal public services. I had been shoved a few times before but this one took.

True story.

It was two months before my retirement date of April 1^st 2014. I know what you are thinking. Me too, appropriate date indeed. I was talking to a potter, whose husband was a musician. She asked me if I knew how his last day at work went down.

I did not. Do you know what he did? she asked.

Nope.

Well, he came home with the bag of golf balls and Dairy Queen cake on his breath and told me he was leaving in the morning.

Where?

Don’t know.

With who?

No one.

How long?

Don’t know.

Are you leaving me?

No, no so sorry. I just need to get away for a while.

And he did.

Threw his guitar and suitcase into the Volvo and headed due east to open mics in the Ottawa Valley, pubs in Quebec, and kitchen parties in Newfoundland.

I asked her how she took it all. Not well, she said, but you know Bob, when he came home a month later, I had my old husband back.

I went straight home and said to my wife, I have something to tell you.

I bought an old Volvo ragtop and on April 2^nd I pointed it south.

Would not actually do that these days but I found myself in post career pilgrimage mode. I busked in Nashville, recorded in Memphis and came up with a good idea at midnight in New Orleans: I would go home and create a music district (the Music Mile) in my neighbourhood. I believe I may have come home a better man, ready to do things with others.

Music and I had a mission. The mission was essentially to blow out four decades of bureaucratic carbon and hierarchical sludge and I had to do it solo. Then I hoped I might be better prepared to be a better person in the next stage.

On retirement.

Over the years I watched my grandparents, my parents and assorted friends and relatives dip their toes into the retirement pool. The dream of retirement and the reality of retirement were often at some odds.

My folks were always going to go to the coast with other prairie kin. They did not. I just couldn’t imagine leaving family, friends, church, and neighbours and having to collect new ones explained my dad.

The retired couple next door in our country hippy days dreamt of leaving the city for the country and pulled it off. Then he broke a hip in winter and had to deal with a quart of milk five kilometres away and no doctor in sight. They scooted happily back to Edmonton.

I had friends leave the public service and start consulting. Made a lot of money but died in the same saddle.

Had a friend who dreamt of going to sea. Spent a lot of cash on a boat, hit a lot of rough water, bad storms, and after two years embraced a new condo back on land.

My friend Norm Rooke was a WestJet pilot and welcomed thousands of retired folks aboard. I know I should have felt more joy from them, he says, but mostly I felt they were just checking off an expensive to-do list.

Bali this year, Costa Rica next year.

For every one of these little vignettes the reader can tell me many of the same stories where it worked out very well, thank you.

I am here though, for the cautionary tales that I got to hear and how they may have influenced me.

Bless you, if you are on the high seas still full of joy!

For me however, the pick of this first decade of retirement would be reflected in three big personal decisions.

1. I fully embraced the creative arts. Hobbies are fine but often not a big stretch. For thousands of years, humans have aspired to find and touch their creative core. So, for decades we have dutifully fed our families, fed our clients, fed our bosses and fed our systems. Perhaps it’s time to feed our souls. If pursuit of religious practice is filling your soul, again bless you. But I never really felt that soul stirring until I wrote my first story, scratched out my first song, threw my first pot and now baked my first loaf of bread.

2. The second big challenge came from Canada’s truly great mayor who challenged us to re-embrace our volunteer core values. Mayor Nenshi gave us three ways to step up. Do something with your family, do something for your community and do something for your city. I stepped up with ukulele lessons for grandkids and kids on the street. Catherine and I play for free in our community garden. I have started a facilitated self-directed music program for elder homes. I am trying, Mr. Nenshi.

3. The third reflection for me is choosing to embrace the word elder. I believe at this point in our lives, we should all re-consider the word and consider stepping into a new practice as elders. It may not have the ring or the fancy office of being an ADM but it is every bit as important in this world. Let’s turn loose the lexicon of pensioner, retiree and senior and re-claim the ancient and respectful name of elder. As you leave the official world of titles and public service and step into the everyday world of home-made and community service, know that you are going to feel really, really good about it.

The internet will give also you a thousand or so great tips for your return to home but here are a few more from me…

· Learn something brand new.

· Teach something old.

· Tell your stories, pick up a pen.

· Read some stories to the kids in that daycare in the neighbourhood.

· Have a monthly breakfast with those youngsters from your work who you mentored. Keep them in your life, they need you.

· Find young people in your community and become a mentor.

· Give back.

· Be grateful.

· Form some good habits for your mind and your body and your spirit.

May you awaken that soul that wants back out.

Oh yeah . . . learn to nap.

* I wrote this reflection for my good friend Richard Rochefort, who was coaching some new retirees. Thank you Richard. Now I have a challenge for you, the reader. What advice, story, or encouragement would you give a new retiree? I would like to create a special article with everyone’s contributions. Send your thoughts to me, I look forward to hearing from you.

After a few years they organized, a little. They picked a day (Sunday), and agreed on a starting point and an ending point (BeerLandia). The throwing expanse broadened and soon there was no back alley, river trail or wild lands path not thrown. The balls became community property, badly chipped and worn. They would be banned from any self-respecting bocce field.

Each player was and is a unique character and the personalities remain part of the weird charm of the back-alley bocce clan. The train guy, airplane guy, the rink rat, electric bike guy and the great Dane are all pretty competitive and good players. No one has yet matched the 12-point streak of train guy and after my half dozen years, I am still not even sure how you get and lose point standings. The new young guys like to kick a little elder ass but they are generally very, very kind and good players as well.

I have never really related to the competition side. In high school, I loved the pool hall, but it was the hang that I loved not the winning. Back alley bocce reminds me of the pool hall ambience where old guys and young fellas got along in a dark den of fun, smoke and respect.

I miss the smoke.

Some of the original bocce boys are gone. The drummer was a founder, a philosopher and a continuing story. His passing is remembered with affection.

The sailor packed in the hood for the sea.

Others like salmon, headed up stream to the coast.

So, traditions have become important and the big bocce annual ritual is the New Year championship played on the first Sunday afternoon in January. The prize is your name on the quirky Bocce Boy trophy donated by the rink rat.

Train guy and myself were in the lead until the balls stacked in the snow and the three points were summarily stolen from us.

Next year country.

The Dane and electric bike guy have their names being scribed now.

This year the big win was the championship round played in a sweet winter ambience of hoar frost. Makes losing easier.

So, the story this month is a reprise of how I found myself accepted into this local legend and as usual I wrote the story. To my surprise, the Globe printed it and so here it is again.

I share it with you as we enter a year where the metaphorical balls being tossed out in this crazy world may come down hard and with some consequence. The back alleys of our humanity may hold some pretty noxious elements. Perhaps we can help to reclaim those back alleys if we do it together in a spirit of community, care and play.

So, perhaps we could ditch our screens for a while and get outside, even to the back alley.

Best to you all, readers, share if you can.

We appreciate your support and your feedback.

As a thanks, here’s a musical greeting card for your enjoyment.

We are looking forward to 2026 and another year of good stories. Please subscribe if you haven’t already and share it with friends who may be interested.

Warm wishes of the season and Happy New Year!

Himself and I have had a rocky seventy-nine years. It started out as a non-negotiable conscription. I was born into a Pentecostal family and I was not given Christianity in my life as an option. Of course, I had a lot of trouble with his people, the rules, the shame, the hell thing and the intellectual confusion.

So, the Lord and I parted ways. We have still managed to have a few nice coffees together, and we seem to respect each other’s opinion more these days. I still think he is a fine gentleman and he is still not so sure about me. Lately he says he agrees with me that his people have indeed taken a hard turn. So, I never really had an issue with him personally, but his corporate organizations and his religious bureaucracies continue to throw me off.

1963 was probably the year that we quietly realized we would be going separate ways as I was becoming more a seeker than a believer. This story is about my final year in the Lord’s department of education and this song is a little tongue in cheek recall of the preacher’s anthemic instruction to us teens on the weekend.

“When you are out tonight kids, always remember to leave a little room for Jesus.”

So happy birthday my old friend. If I may suggest that next year, perhaps you could do a little less helping with the football winning and give us a little more help on the peace and loving your neighbour stuff.

Thank you, Jesus.

Merry Christmas to all.

The Backstory

It was 1963.

I was sixteen, fully equipped with a new driver’s licence, a 1953 Plymouth, a burger joint job (see my piece on Edna) in a small town suitably stocked with a seedy pool hall, bootleggers, naughty girls (I hoped) and a gang of rowdy beer drinking boys. Mother’s red flags were flying on her clotheslines in the breeze.

My main interests were in the order of that list. The reality was that I was not so good at eight ball, seduction or guzzling. The three guardrails, I suppose, in my teen life were the spectre of the Pentecostal leader, Aimee Semple McPherson, and the threat of eternal hellfire, the unpleasant taste of Pilsner, and the weeping mother. I did want to be the bad boy but did not really have the courage to pull it off.

Still, the weeping mother smelled the pool hall and the Export A on me, caught the lipstick stain and assumed the 12 pack of Boh.

So how to get Bobby, the backslider, back on the Youth for Christ team?

Caronport

Of course, everyone in our evangelical world knew of the Moose Jaw adjacent early adopter (1935) Christian boarding school and the success they were expected to have with the backsliders. It was founded by a devout man named Henry Hildebrand with an initial enrollment of eleven perhaps well-behaved kids. It worked and it soon became popular to imagine sending your Christian kids to a school where absolution, not evolution, was a big selling feature of the curriculum. Now parents could send their kids away from the godless schools to God’s own school and by 1946, they were out of space.

The Lord as usual, provided.

For fifty grand, the founders bought the old air training facility outside of Moose Jaw, near the village of Caron. The war was over and the little village and the airport became Caronport. Schools need rules and Caronport developed their fair share of them.

So off I went with my zealous mother’s blessing, backed by my father’s hurting chequebook. The first days were packed with those rules, then more rules, then the unsettling notion that you had to share a bedroom with strangers.

Dorm Life

The dorms were old military bunkhouses in those days still full of the air and vibe of hundreds of young pilots in training. To this day, I can’t remember my roommates but that is perhaps a good sign. Still, you pack an old musty building with dozens of teen aged boys, add in a few buckets of testosterone, a soupcon of early onset puberty and suitcases crammed with equal dosages of anxiety and energy, and you can expect a little tension.

I was not a tough guy, but I got bullied to a breaking point one night and I beat up two idiots, much bigger and dumber than my own skinny self. I remember actually seeing red, which I had heard about but never really seen up close. I was learning the art of war in a Christian bunkhouse!

The high school boy’s dorm had a dean. A mean dean. I think I will not give him any more space in this essay.

Everybody got a nickname and mine was racist and try as I might, I couldn’t shake it till the day I left. There was also an awesome theft ring in the dorm. It was centred on cool sixties clothes. A team would head to the Moose Jaw men’s wear stores and then a teenage retailing outlet was set up in the dorm. I believe I got my first pair of Beatle boots in that dorm.

If I was apprenticing to be a bad boy at home, it could not compare to the journeyman delinquent education in dorm life.

Gratis

Gratis was one of the most positive things to happen to me that year. Gratis of course, means free and free is just another word for volunteer. Hey, this was a school that taught me how to volunteer and give a portion of my self centred, valuable teenage time to the institution that now fed me.

Caronport was a great place for gratis. They had cows for milking, bread for baking, gardens for weeding (I think), dishes for washing, café for waitering and snow for shovelling. I got the dishwashing for a while, then I got lucky. Let’s switch to…

Sports

There was a very decent athletic program there. There were kids from all over, so the California boys rocked the basketball court. The Saskatchewan boys, who were hoping for Notre Dame. rocked the hockey arena. Speaking of the Notre Dame school in Wilcox, my hard-nosed dad considered Father Athol Murray to be a perfect example of a real Athol. The year I was in Caronport, Pere Murray was railing against Medicare on the radio and praying for violence.

He was a shaky role model for his hockey players and a perhaps a caution for residential schools in general.

But I digress. I had been knocked out of hockey, with bad knees in bantams, so I took up the roaring game of curling, where, in Saskatchewan we took the house, the button and sweeping out of the kitchens and into the curling rinks. I took up both the sport and the upkeep. Back in my hometown, I had been a rink rat interning with old Joe Fisher, a bit grumpy, but a man who knew ice. So, I sort of knew how to make ice. That was all Caronport needed and my gratis was upped to assistant ice maker in the curling rink. It was the highlight of my year there and I still think every school should have some form of gratis work to teach volunteerism as well as math.

Chapel

Every morning.

Radios

Radios were taboo.

This was a surprise to me because even with the Pentecostals, I had no idea Jesus had a big issue with the radio. Actually, I suppose the Lord was a little miffed at the attention rock and roll was getting in those days. So just go ahead and ban something and you know what happens, the black market emerges. Turns out a tiny little piece of electronics called the transistor was finally in Saskatchewan and about to make radio much more up close and personal.

My new buddy Don had one. It was contraband and it was in high demand.

The evangelical teaching of the day was that one should not be of the world, but the world was coming in strong on that little transistor, piercing our delicate teenage ears with Please, Please Me by those unholy British mopheads. I was introduced to the Beatles on Donny’s smuggled-in yellow transistor, hidden under my pillow after lights out. What a delicious introduction to the English invasion and my little heathen rock and roll soul. Thank you, Donny!

Girls

I hesitate but must press on.

At Notre Dame, you may have been hazed, humiliated and given an early introduction to modern, hard edged conservatism, but at least there was no girls to distract you from the stupid. In Caronport we had more of a spiritual hazing, the humiliation of teen guilt, lots of biblical indoctrination and we had, girls.

Pretty girls, smart girls and smiley girls. Please Lord, may I have one?

It was made very clear on the rules-based day one. Yes, we were co-ed, but there will be no co-eddying or co-anything, for that matter. Girls were a no contact sport. No sitting at the same dinner table, no sitting with them even in chapel, no talking to girls and I guess no making out with girls either.

It was a bit peculiar.

Essentially, we were living on a campus with girls but there was an invisible but very real Berlin Wall. Of course, when you ban something, you create a thriving underground or resistance. We mastered the spy art of the note, the secret dead drops and the codes. We had the suggestive look across the aisle and of course we had the Mile.

The Mile was the authority’s distraction gambit. There was a huge block of deteriorating runway asphalt out in the windy and treeless cold. They partitioned off a square of this sad, broken down macadam that was theoretically a mile square. It would have been the absolute last trail any starry-eyed lovers would choose to go for a walk in Saskatchewan. So, they said that on Sunday afternoons, for one hour both genders could walk around the Mile in the cold.

It seemed promising until you realized…

· Adult sentinels were watching.

· The Lord was watching.

· It was at least twenty below for most of the school year.

There were daring escapes…

· The intrepid after midnight wheatfield assignations.

· Someone has a car.

· The passed note gets a positive response.

The Lord heard my plea and I got a girlfriend. But it was very platonic and I did not even know what platonic meant. So, one fine escape day, someone had a car, the received note was positive, and we blasted out to a small lake nearby. I was pretty enthusiastic about what the puppy love world might look like beyond the scribbled note. We arrived, parked and split off in pairs to walk around the lake. In a quiet, alone moment I imagined maybe some hand holding, maybe a little smooch…

No sir, there would be a chaperone. We had to make room For Jesus.

She insisted we get on our knees by the lake and invite Jesus into this romantic moment. The afternoon did not get much better with Him around and I always felt that I may have lost a lot of my amorous juju that afternoon. Still this romance lasted all the way into June as I suppose it’s hard to break up when you’re not allowed to speak to each other.

Anyway, finals were being written and the threat of the last goodbye loomed. The notes intensified. I wrote her that I had found a way to break into a locked broom closet and set up a low rent rendezvous. She agreed and met me there. I was over the moon and hoping for that first kiss in a long year. We didn’t even get close, as almost immediately there was a fierce knock on the door and we were truly and righteously busted. It was our ancient history teacher, and believe me, history is old but he was ancient.

I was hauled up before the dictatorial principal, for whom the word ‘grim’ was actually a portion of his real name! I would be allowed to write my last exam and then I was to be gone.

Not for the year but for life, he growled.

It struck me as pretty harsh as I had been under the impression that the Lord was a big fan of forgiveness and I was somewhat vaguely aware of a Sunday school concept called redemption.

Not so much at Caronport. Much like the belief in heaven or hell, you are either welcome or banned for life.

So

· I hitchhiked home.

· I wrote the girl.

· She finally wrote back.

Dear John, (Did she already forget my name?)

I could never love a boy caught in a closet with a girl and banned for life from an institution where my daddy is on the board and there is a tall, dark basketball player in the Bible School waiting for me.

Ok maybe she did not say that exactly but memory is tricky business.

My parents were prepared to send me back for one more year but I was kind and told them to save their hard-earned money. It was years later, at family Thanksgiving and we were all around the table spinning yarns. Suddenly from nowhere in particular I blurt out, that ‘This story reminds me of when I got kicked out of Caronport.’

My poor mother lost it. She had no idea that I had been banned for life.

But now she did.

Caronport, you were indeed an interesting port of call in my growing up. I am sure you are quite different now, more liberal and more modern. You probably even have radios. You might even have the gift of pardon and if so, I would be delighted!