Ever since his Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has been viewed as one of the world’s most persuasive public speakers. So when his new climate change lecture was premiered on Ted, a website dedicated to “inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers”, earlier this week, I decided to pick it apart to see how it worked.

Like many people, I was impressed by An Inconvenient Truth. I’d even stood in line to hear Mr Gore speak in New York last May (this was deeply hypocritical, given that I had jetted in from Paris for an emission-heavy long weekend in Manhattan - unless getting him to sign a DVD counted as a carbon offset).

It was my hope that a close analysis of his new slideshow might be useful to public speakers in the business world. Having viewed it three times - and watched An Inconvenient Truth yet again for context - I think I have been able to identify four key elements to the performance. But after studying his verbal and visual tricks in detail, I’m not sure I’d queue to see him again.

1. Jokey self-deprecation

Mr Gore gets an audience on his side by gently mocking himself. He did this at the start of An Inconvenient Truth by declaring: “I used to be the next president of the United States.” He also does it during the Ted talk, describing how one woman had told him that he’d look like Al Gore if he dyed his hair black.

A couple of years ago, this self-deprecation was disarming. Post-Nobel peace prize, it sounds a touch insincere. Telling a story about a woman who thinks he looks like Al Gore only underlines how famous Al Gore is. It would have been genuine self-deprecation if she had mistaken him for Walter Mondale.

2. Inspired comparisons

Parables and analogies are Al Gore’s most powerful verbal weapons. His trick is to link things he doesn’t like to things that are almost universally repugnant. Want to convey how oil addiction will disgust subsequent generations? Explain how cigarette smoking was once mainstream.

The same dynamic is at work in the new Ted talk when he dismisses oil-bearing tar sands and shale rock as ”subprime carbon assets”, adding that ”junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse”. Both powerful images.

3. Slippery slides

Mr Gore uses slides like bludgeons. Forget nuance: it seems that a graph is only allowed to appear on the screen behind him if it has a gradient of more than 45 degrees. He is also fond of broad-brush graphics that show things disappearing, declining or changing colour without being clouded by context.

There was a textbook example in the Ted talk: a map showing the over-fishing of international waters between 1950 and 2000. Stage by stage, the waters went from blue to pink but it wasn’t clear what statistical change this was supposed to signify.

That is not to say he is misleading his audience, it is just that his slides derive a lot of their force from visual impact - look, the sea has turned pink! must be bad! - rather than the reasoned analysis he otherwise advocates.

4. Road-testing

At the start of the Ted talk, Mr Gore declares that he had delivered his old climate change slide-show about 2,000 times, warning people that they shouldn’t expect too much from the new presentation he was about to deliver for the first time. It turns out that this wasn’t false modesty: it does feel like a work in progress. But this only emphasises how his old, ultra-slick routine had benefited from being honed night after night.

At the very least, one can only hope that he will refine his new speech’s clunky closing exhortation: “We are the generation about which 1,000 years from now philharmonic orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying they were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future. Let’s do that.”

Mr Gore’s 20-minute talk, followed by a Q&A session, can be viewed here.

SATURDAY MORNING UPDATE: I’ve had to disable comments after realising that a conspiracy theory website had linked to this post and was now driving most of the traffic. I’d also just like to repeat that the post was not in any way an attempt to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change. All I was trying to do was look at Al Gore’s public speaking style and see what lessons other public speakers could take away from it. Perhaps it was a mistake to analyse the delivery outside the context of the problem. 

April 10, 2008 5:59pm in Career/skills, Leadership | Comment