Tim Harford: evaluation

Transcript context

…How good is your own self-understanding of what makes you emotionally persuasive? I suppose, if I had a tremendous degree of self-understanding, and if I had no self-understanding, I would give you exactly the same answer, right? Am I emotionally persuasive? When I worked on a book called Adapt, I became very interested in feedback. I’m very conscious of how rarely we get good feedback. And I am aware that I rarely get good feedback as a speaker. You step offstage, and you say to people, “How was that? Was it any good?” And people say, “Yeah, it was great. ” Of course, they say it was great because it’s difficult to get onstage and give a talk, and no one’s going to say, “Actually, you sucked. ” You don’t get any good feedback. So I’ve taken to saying to people, “Can you think of one thing that you would recommend I do differently next time?” It’s astonishing how rarely people are able to give you one specific piece of actionable feedback. But I did once get specific, actionable feedback from one of the senior people in the TED organization. He saw me give a speech. I thought it went very well. It was about innovation and lessons from building the Spitfire, a particular fighter plane that was very influential in the Second World War. I stepped offstage, and people gathered around and said, “That was a great speech.” I thought to myself, “Yeah, it was a great speech.” And I became aware that this gentleman was standing just off to one side. And when everybody had cleared, he came over to me and said, “Yeah, you did well, but many of the people you were talking to were not British. They don’t have the same cultural references as you do. They will not know what the Spitfire is. Next time, you should show them a photograph of a Spitfire.” That was a very useful piece of feedback. It was very specific. It explained what I should do differently in future. And I’m astonished at how rarely such feedback is given, even when you explicitly seek it out. I found it’s easier to get negative feedback on a public talk from women in the audience. I’m not sure why that is.…

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