Among the school children

A couple of weeks ago I was giving a talk on enabling (pattern) asset consumability at an IBM hosted best practices conference down in Palisades, New York. The talk was scheduled to be at the end of the day so I knew my audience brains would be fried and overload by technical content by this time. Also, the title of my talk enabling (pattern) asset consumability would make the best of us yawn. So I decided on a different tack here, I am still not sure how successful it was, since only a handful of poor souls made it to my talk, but here it is anyway.

Recently I have read two excellent book on speech giving. The first is Give Your Speech, Change the World and the second on is Make to Stick. Now where there first book is excellent in detailing how to actually give presentation, the second book excels in detailing how to make your messages, in those presentations, stick to your audience. So for my talk I decided I would shake things up and open with a poem in a effort to exercise the right side of my their brains. The poem titled "Among the school children" from one my favorite poets W. B Yeats. Now this poem is long over 8 stanzas, so I just focused on one of the stanzas, here it is:

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

Here Yeats is examining the philosophies of some of the worlds famous philosophers from Plato to Pythagoras, yet with all their knowledge and insights, they all still withered and died away. In his later poetry, Yeats uses this recurring theme of a scarecrow to symbolize his own mortality. Here from the same poem:

Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

As I said I am not sure how successful this technique was, my audience of five just was enough to swing it either way, but I would certainly be interested to know of other unconventional speech giving techniques that you have used in the past that have worked?

We will be publishing a paper on this talk soon and will post the link as soon as it becomes available.