Nisha Pillai

Barcelona in February is gorgeous – mild, bright, and uplifting. So thank you Gartner for affording me four days in Barcelona last week at the EMEA  Business Intelligence and Analytics Summit, where I played a couple of different roles. First, encouraging people to network via a series of  ‘Ideas Exchanges’, a new concept which really took off. Plus, as a stage craft coach, helping Gartner’s  BI gurus polish up their big keynote presentation to the conference.

And here’s what I concluded after two days of  presentations prep work with the delightful Gartner guys. That it’s the content that counts as much – if not more – than the star dust. (Though they may not agree with me.) We ended up spending the whole of the  first day putting  stage craft on hold. What do I mean by that? The breathing exercises, body work, gestures, blocking – all the actorly stuff – was put on hold. Instead we dived deep into the content.  Why are we saying this? Does it make sense? Is it convincing? How do we make a better case? Isn’t that graph simply boring, let’s ditch it…and so on.

All of which left just a breathless final day to sprinkle some performance ‘star dust’ over my three presenters. I say ‘my’ because by the end of two days it felt like James, Ian and Ted were my children, about to appear in the school play. And the funny thing is that while watching them from the back of Barcelona’s cavernous Palacio de Congresos, I felt as proud of them as if they were my own kids. So thank you guys for keeping a straight face while singing your scales during warm-up. It was worth it.

But I digress. Here’s the thing, when prepping for a big presentation where do you put the emphasis – on content or stage craft?

Moderating at a big sustainability conference last week I discovered a new kind of journalist, the ‘Tweet Reporter.’ In this case she came in the highly efficient and enthusiastic form of Dutch journalist, Gerdie Schreuders (@TweetReporting).  Her  role was to tweet highlights, bon mots, and unexpected boo-boos to the Twittersphere, and draw questions into the hall for further discussion. What a boon she was for me. With Gerdie concentrating on Twitter, I was free to focus on the content of the presentations -  dauntingly high-level academic research focussing on how to reduce the carbon footprint of the transport sector – and on keeping the audience engaged with the debate and question/answer sessions that followed.  In no time at all, #EeacRli (not the most catchy of hash tags!) had taken off …

As for the content proper, I needed all my wits about me to moderate a whole day of debates on ‘Keep Moving Towards Sustainable Transport’. The conference got cracking with an opener from the EU’s blunt-speaking Sustainability Commissioner, @janezpotocnikEU: ‘I don’t know a politician who got re-elected because he had a long term vision.’

Surprisingly then, given the abysmal sustainability record of the transport sector over the last couple of decades, the overall mood of the speakers was pretty positive. Partly because our love affair with the car seems to have peaked in the rich world, partly because technological alternatives – whether electric cars or hydrogen-fuelled cars – look like being realistic options at long last, fingers crossed. Why there are even plans to trial a hydrogen-fuelled car on the Isle of Wight, as part of its Ecoisland ambitions to lead the UK’s sustainability agenda. And that was the other positive glimmer on the horizon – impatient moves by what one speaker, Maarten Hajer (@maartenhajer),  called ‘the energetic society’ to just get on and make things happen in the face of government inertia/impotence the world over. So here’s to ecoislands wherever they may be … and to Tweet Reporters.

For more on Keeping Moving Towards Sustainabile Transport: http://www.rli.nl/eeac/intro

For more on the Isle of Wight’s Ecoisland movement: http://www.eco-island.org

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Looking back on Planet under Pressure I can’t help feeling a touch dazed. What an extraordinary event to have moderated at, with the next Earth Summit, Rio +20 looming on the horizon. The sheer scale of the conference was mind-boggling, as three thousand people – scientists, NGOs, policy makers, a sprinkling of business folk and about a hundred journalists – descended on London’s Excel Centre from the four corners of the world. Yet somehow the level of debate was mostly high, the boiled-down, ten minute-long presentations were the most memorable I’ve encountered at many a conference, and the electronic questions, despite my initial misgivings, were a triumph… (more…)

Three days to go before the start of Planet Under Pressure 2012 and I feel like a school kid swotting for exams. It is such a big conference in every sense of the world –  with a huge number of attendees,  two thousand seven hundred at the last count, a vast intellectual reach, and seriously impressive speakers including a number of government ministers. My usual conference prepping is a walk in the park compared with the sheer range of articles I’ll be desperately trying to digest over the next few days. So imagine my relief when I discovered that the Planet Under Pressure organisers have prepared a series of policy briefings for last-minute merchants like myself – http://www.planetunderpressure2012.net/policybriefs.asp . Nine briefings in all on a range of topics from Biodiversity to Transforming governance and institutions – at no more than eight pages, they’re short, snappily written and a godsend.

So on the one hand I’m feeling like an under-prepared student, on the other like a groupie at a rock concert: over two and a half thousand people gathered together at London’s Excel centre and who knows how many thousands joining us round the world via live web-streaming. That’s jaw-dropping.  How to make the event truly interactive when the audience will be so massive and far-flung? My role as conference moderator is to help audience members, wherever they may be, to question, perhaps even grill, our eminent panelists. Technology we hope will ride to the rescue by way of social media and a much battered iPad. The idea is that I’ll be gathering questions on the iPad via Twitter, sms/text messages and webstreaming,  instead of running around the auditorium with a mic in my hand to elicit audience participation. Will the technology work? Will the audience take up the challenge and tweet/text/webstream their questions? I must admit to feeling a few butterflies. Let’s hope Steve Jobs, the godfather of the iPad is looking down on us all next week with a benign smile.

Just as I was wondering: ‘ what  is the point of  social media for someone like me?’, hey presto a  project whizzed into my lap via Twitter of all routes.

Most of my work is with  large corporates or mega organisations like the UN – not exactly social media savvy – hosting conferences, panel debates and advising on presentation skills. So imagine my surprise when my blog caught the eye of a corporate communications expert, working on a corporate identity rethink with a major European food business. It was Twitter that brought it to his attention and ‘story telling’  that caught his eye.

Story telling is a journalistic skill which works wonders when someone is preparing a big, barn-storming speech.  Turns out the journalist’s favourite technique is a great way to bring corporate message alive in all sorts of different contexts – not just in front of an audience of hundreds. In this case the client, a food company, wants staff and management to communicate with more authenticity with everyone from farmers, to customers, consumers and  regulators…

The project is just beginning, more to follow in the months to come. Meanwhile, a big thank you to Jurgen Mortier (@jurgenmortier) who spotted my blog on Twitter!

Piracy in the public imagination is shrouded in tales of derring-do and yo-ho-ho. Hollywood’s given us the charismatic Captain Jack Sparrow, not so much a charlatan as a fashion statement. The reality is very different as I discovered recently in Mumbai at the India Shipping Summit.

The conference heard heart-rending testimony from someone who came face to face with the ugly face of piracy: Captain Makne, whose crew was captured despite putting up a valiant defence. It was all over so quickly, he told us.  Despite protecting the ship with barbed wire, and using water jets to repel the pirates, they still managed to get on board, firearms bristling, and then the nightmare began. A seven month long ordeal, during which Captain Makne and his men were at the mercy of their violent and unpredictable captors – Somali youths, intoxicated out of their minds on qat and impatient for their payoff. Because that’s what it’s all about. Piracy may once have been about small-time banditry but no longer.

Indian Ocean piracy today is a lucrative, highly organised business stemming from the long-running Somali civil war with tentacles that stretch much further. Its financial backers have connections throughout the region lured by multi-million dollar pay-offs. Why? Because the ransoms being paid for seamen taken hostage have soared by a factor of ten since 2006 to an average of $4m – $5m today. The financial links are murky and are thought to stretch far beyond the Somalian pirates who actually carry out the attacks to a host of intermediaries and financiers around neighbouring African countries and into the Gulf region.

And it’s getting progressively worse, year by year despite the presence of around twenty warships from the world’s main trading nations around the Horn of Africa and along the West coast of India. And despite the occasional, successful naval counter-attack, most recently on the day of the India Shipping Summit itself, when an Italian ship was re-taken by British and American special forces within 24 hours of capture. A rare victory.

The shipping industry has reluctantly moved towards putting armed guards on board ships. Britain is the latest nation to endorse this controversial step,  supported in the main by the delegates in Mumbai, though there were some dissenting voices who warned against the potential hazards of putting mercenaries on board commercial vessels.

I leave you with this thought: at the beginning of 2011, at the height of the ‘hostage season’ there were over seven hundred seamen being held hostage. Did you know that? No,  me neither. The vast majority of hostages are poor Asians – from India, China, Philippines and elsewhere, who can languish for months with scant attention from the world’s media. The mood of the Indian Shipping Summit was sombre, despairing even. They don’t hold out much hope for improvement any time soon. What do you think?

The Western world’s treatment of many people with HIV is nothing short of barbaric. That was my conclusion after a day spent moderating at the UN Development Programme’s Regional Dialogue on HIV and the Law in Oakland, California. Having played a similar role in Bangkok in February for the UNDP’s Asia Pacific Dialogue, I reckoned I knew what to expect of the last stage of submissions on the Higher Income countries in North America and Western Europe. I was wrong. The distressing testimony I witnessed from people living in the world’s richest countries – the US, Canada, the UK, Denmark, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe – left me profoundly shocked…

The reason is simple – criminalization. Across the Western world, people with HIV live with the very real threat of prosecution if they have sex without revealing their positive status – even if they use a condom.  And so they should, you may well argue. But the facts are these: the latest HIV medications are so powerful that they slash the viral load to negligible levels. That’s why people with HIV  now live long and productive lives. And that’s also why HIV is increasingly being thought of as a manageable condition like diabetes.

What’s more, medical treatment doesn’t just stop the virus in its tracks, it also stops it being transmitted to others. In a recent editorial, the medical journal, The Lancet reported on a major international research study which demonstrated that ‘anti-retroviral treatment can prevent the sexual transmission of HIV.’   Denmark’s parliamentarians have looked at the latest science and decided to suspend their legislation criminalizing people with HIV who have sex without disclosing their status.

But in the US and Canada we’ve seen a surge in prosecutions against people with HIV even as huge medical advances continue to be made. In the overwhelming majority of cases the HIV virus was not transmitted, nor likely to be, yet prison sentences of up to thirty years have been handed out by the courts. A guilty verdict doesn’t just mean a criminal conviction, it also means landing up on the sex offenders’ register along side rapists and paedophiles. In some states of America you can kill someone in a car accident and get a lighter sentence than if you fail to pass on HIV to a sexual partner. Passing on herpes or hepatitis C isn’t prosecuted, but not passing on HIV is.

The injustice is staggering. Seldom in my many years as a BBC journalist, and now as an international moderator, have I felt so outraged. If you were at the Regional Dialogue for HIV and the Law in Oakland, what did you think of how the day unfolded?

In my post-BBC incarnation as a public speaker/conference moderator/speaking coach I’m constantly drawing on a journalist’s tool of the trade – story telling. So much so that I found myself running a communications workshop  for a major European finance company in which story telling turned out to be the main attraction.

After helping  the CEO  polish up a speech, peppered with anecdotes, I was approached by two different teams wanting to flex their story telling skills too. Why? Well they’d seen how their CEO was using stories – rather than grandiose policy pronouncements – to get across complex business themes. And they wanted to have a go too. The results were surprising and immediate.

Even the skeptics (and there were a couple of obvious skeptics) quickly got the hang of it – and found powerful, unexpected examples from their own lives – which worked equally well in a business context.  The anecdotes featured confused Americans holidaying in France, an Indian in London whose bank account was hacked, the sensitive decision to set up a joint bank account after marriage… and many other intriguing tales. What they had in common was how a personal story set up and segued into a more complicated (sometimes off-putting) business message, in such a way that the main message became less ‘corporate’ and more memorable.

For the workshops’ participants the surprise was how easy it was – how animated and relaxed they felt when telling stories instead of  hammering out jargon-laden pronouncements. And the feedback from the group reinforced that  -  everyone could see how their colleagues came alive when bringing something of themselves into their corporate communications. The power of stories, we’ve been telling them since the start of time.

Twitter is a brilliant tool to engage live audiences - that’s what I discovered when moderating at a big conference last week. (#agrivision, www.agrivision.com). Here’s why it worked. By encouraging people to tweet in their questions during presentations, it meant I already had a fistful of genuine questions to put to each speaker right away. That worked a treat in warming up the audience and encouraging more questions – and engagement – from everyone else. A bonus: the twitter questions were of course short, sweet and to the point - unlike the many waffly questions from the floor.

Never having used Twitter in this way before I had no idea what to expect. Now I’m a convert: it genuinely contributed to a fuller discussion and less random questioning. And besides, it was fun. Who else uses Twitter to field conference questions? What’s your experience?