Hacking the Red Circle Mark Sylvester, Host

Finding ways to be creative and stay connected to your TEDx Community during these challenging times of sequestering and dealing with a global pandemic can test even the most creative Organizers.

When I read about our guest, Martin Nera of TEDxUCLouvain on the TEDx Organizers Facebook page, I was intrigued about their plans that involved virtual production, strategies to engage their Community - all while focusing on creating an experience. Their theme for the event was All-Knowing Generations.

TEDxUCLouvain is a University event that has been in production for five years. It was started by 4 Ph.D. students and a 100 person license. This year they were supposed to produce their live event for 800 people in April, and due to COVID, elected to postpone until the Fall and see if things changed. In fact, they didn't, they got worse, however, Martin and his team used those constraints to guide their creativity.

In this episode (and sorry for the long delay between episodes) you'll hear how Martin and the team focused on living into a few guiding principles. One, Change Expectations and two, "If you don't want to disappoint, you have to surprise." You'll need to listen to the show to get the deeper and profoundly interesting way those ideas manifested themselves.

Martin explains that his audience of students' lives for authentic experiences and streaming pre-recorded TEDx Talks to dorm rooms was not the experience his team wanted to deliver. Listen as he explains how they decentralized the event into forty (40) locations of ten (10) people each, created and distributed a Knowlege Box to each pod of listeners, and how they activated each pod, the collective pods and individuals to deliver a truly unique experience and refined what a TEDx event could be.

Congratulations to the team at TEDxUCLouvain and the impact they made on 400 people and how they delivered on the promises they'd made to their speakers, the community and their partners.

Alerted to an amazing TEDx's theater design posted on Facebook, we sought out the organizers of TEDxHyderabad to walk us through the fantastic video and tell us the story.. Please meet Vipin and Viiveck, the co-organizers of the event and a lively pair of conversationalists who told us that story and more.

Ironically Facebook came up at the beginning of the show when they told me how they hadn't known one each other, and no one on the team had known one another until a post appeared asking people to volunteer for the event.

Their 2018 TEDx, with over 2,500 people, was held in the 400-year-old city of Hyderabad. Watch the video posted below to see how they transformed the space into a stunning technological wonder - and listen to the show to hear how things just barely made it by showtime.

We talked about how they've interpreted the TEDx Mission of 'Ideas Worth Spreading' into their local Mission which is to "Build a community of (T)hinkers, (E)nablers, and (D)oers with the X standing for a single idea." Listen as they go into detail on how this Mission is a binding theme that pulls their team together.

Team is a consistent theme for TEDxHyderabad. In their advice to existing organizers, they suggest focusing on building sustainability into the team structure.

Listeners will note at the end that I was invited to join them in Hyderabad and we're going to do the next best thing which is to meet at TEDSummit 2019 in Scotland!

https://HackingTheRedCircle.com

TEDxGaborone - Gomolemo Lolo Madikgetla Organizer by Mark Sylvester, Host

In 2011 Stefan Bucher, an award-winning Designer, presented at TEDxAmericanRiviera (now known as TEDxSantaBarbara.) He recently spoke with Mark Sylvester about reflections of his road to the Red Circle. Stefan speaks to audiences large and small and travels the world talking about design, typically to designers. He remarks that stepping onto the TEDx stage is unlike any other event.

For Organizers, hearing this conversation will help you understand the thinking of an accomplished speaker when understanding how different the TEDx experience is - and how he'd wished he'd taken more advantage of our help. You'll get some great tips on how to coach your speakers by listening to him.

Stefan's hack for speakers is to consider how you open your talk and capture the imagination and energy of the audience. He suggests using a musical opening, much like the overture to a Broadway play. You'll see how he used this in his talk from 2011. We've posted Stefan's talk below so you can watch, then listen to this episode so that you can understand the context of his answers.

On the first day of TED2019, Randy Bretz joined the show as a guest host to help me interview the founder of TEDx, Lara Stein.

My favorite quote from her was "there's so much innovation on the edges."

Randy Bretz wrote an extensive piece on this interview on Medium. You can read it here: https://medium.com/@randybretz/lara-stein-founder-of-tedx-and-believer-in-the-open-source-movement-7f2c949c2eb

In five minutes of listening to Mariette Fourmeaux du Sartel talk about why she has spent the past couple of years going to prison every week to help create TEDxDonovanCorrectional, you will understand how her passion drives her to continue, overcoming obstacles every visit.

Mariette deeply cares for the men at Donovan Correctional and taught me so much about the challenges she and the team face in producing the event. She quoted one of the men who told her, "In my 20 years of incarceration, I've never been treated as a human until now." Wow.

After the wild success of TEDxDonovanCorrectional held at San Diego’s Donovan state prison, Mariette has transferred her passion for building resilient high-performing teams and authentic human-centered leadership – honed through two decades in corporate and start-ups – into the unlikely environment that is prison. She founded Brilliance Inside, a nonprofit program to transform prison from being strictly a container of violence to a creator of rehabilitation and peace.

Before this, Mariette spent 17 years in business, developing cutting-edge technologies for world-scale problems, such as a cancer-detecting medical device in Paris, d.light’s solar lanterns for the rural poor without electricity in India and a new augmented reality technology at HP, Inc. She also grew up intertwined in the creation and expansion of her family wine businesses, starting at the ripe age of 6. Mariette is a true global citizen: born in France, she’s lived on four continents and has explored some of the most remote corners of our world. Finally, Mariette holds a double materials engineering and economics degree from Brown University and a Berkeley MBA.