Dallas in Washington

Yes, I know it's confusing. I gave a speech called "Dallas" but I gave it in Washington DC. 

I think it became a bit of a theme of this pathway that the level 2 speeches, in which I'm also counting the first speech of level 3, were a set that I struggled to be inspired by or to find compelling material for. This one (the "Negotiate the Best Outcome" project) was no exception. I had a negotiation in mind which I thought might work well (spoiler: it didn't, well not particularly) but was worried that the characters were too easily identifiable, especially when I personally am well known to them all because of my involvement in the case, and I'm posting so much of what happens on the speedrun on a public blog.

Then I hit on an idea which I thought did work well, that I could anonymise the scenario if all the players became characters from a soap opera. And what soap opera is better known around the world than Dallas? 

That in turn led to the only bit of the speech I'm particularly proud of, which was to give my speech a title sequence and a theme tune. Because I've never seen a Toastmaster do that before. I've blogged about this aspect previously, here, but here's the title sequence video again anyway:

And here's what my main visuals looked like, explaining the relationships between the characters. I decided to give my characters the names of the actors in Dallas rather than the characters from Dallas, to reduce the expectation that a character in my story might play a similar role to that they had in the soap opera. "Larry" doesn't have to be a scheming machiavel, but somehow "JR" does.

But to be honest I think the visuals were the highlights. While I was giving the speech I realised I wasn't really going to be able to do justice to the nuances of the negotiation, and I think that fact (plus me bumping up against the red light) led to what Dalong identified in his evaluation as poor transitions.

I do in fact have a video of my talk (thank you Irene!) taken with a smartphone pointing at the screen of the hybrid meeting. But I've decided not to post it here. I didn't want any of the characters in the real situation to be able to identify themselves: particularly "Larry" and "Pat" might be upset if they did. I have, however, posted Dalong's excellent and thoughtful evaluation, at the end of this blog. And first here are some extracts from the evaluation form: