Inspired actions - a summary of TEDxSydney 2017

This year’s TEDx Sydney was slightly different from previous years. Not just because of the location change. The move to the ICC from the Opera House certainly gave it a different feel. No … this year was noticeably different from a content perspective because it didn’t stop at just inspiration and ideas worth talking about. Many of the speakers gave the audience of more than 4000 things they could and should do to make change happen.

The Head of Curation, Fenella Kernebone pointed this out from the start. “Don’t just argue for change… make it real.” A reminder to us all that in these ever challenging times it’s up to us to step up.

For those who couldn’t attend but are interested, below is my outake of each of the 15 speakers that took the stage this year.

The first speaker, Bronwyn King shared something with us that is a hidden and dangerous reality. Bronwyn is a Radiation Oncologist and she was shocked to learn that most of us (including herself) own and profit from tobacco companies. My mother died of lung cancer after being a life long smoker so this spoke to me on a personal level. Apparently our super accounts routinely invest in tobacco companies – in fact 4 of the top 5 are tobacco companies.

7 million deaths in the last year globally are attributed to tobacco and we are on track for 1 billion deaths this century. These are shocking figures. Yet tobacco is not only legal but continues to be a big business.

We cannot and should not keep our heads in the sand when it comes to where our money is going.

Bronwyn’s action?

Ask your super fund where your money is being invested and make changes if you need to.

Tom Griffiths, a Professor or Psychology and Cognitive Science was next and his message was broader, but there was a similar undertone. We are lazy … we go with the path of least resistance and hope that it’ll all work out. Prof Griffiths tells us that when it comes to decision making, we have the optimal stopping problem – at what point do we stop thinking and decide.

Tom talked about this as the explore/exploit trade off. Speaking broadly, in our lives we start by exploring … learning, testing, trialling and building our knowledge base. Then we move into the exploit stage, where we exploit the knowledge we’ve gained and do what makes the most sense in the least amount of time. He uses the example of the old man who goes to the same diner every day and orders the same thing. Many would say he’s boring, but in fact, he’s simply exploiting the information he’s gained from his lifetime of lunches and sticking with what he knows works.

Tom’s action point?

Rationalise your life and learn more about decision making.

Find out more using the book “Algorithms to live by”.

Judy Atkinson earned a standing ovation with her message of Dadirri. Dadirri is an aboriginal word which means “listening without judgement”. She reminded us that both as individuals and as a nation we resist feeling our own pain, but in fact if we are to heal, we must listen to and release it.

Dadirri is the greatest gift to the nation and we as a nation can grown if we accept it and use it. But with listening comes responsibility.

Every day we can and should listen without judgement and help to heal each other.

Jane Gilmore is a journalist who is angry. And having listened to what she had to share, it’s understandable. She opened our eyes to things that we have come to take for granted. The language being used by journalism to describe horrible crimes perpetrated by men on women is simply wrong.

By making the victims the headline, using descriptors that have no relevance (ie. Drunk teenager) and hiding the men who commit the crimes deep within the story, we are perpetuating the myth that women are somehow responsible for sexual assaults and domestic violence. There is never a rationale or justification for an assault on a woman.

Jane reminds us that just because this is the way it’s always been reported doesn’t mean it’s the way it should be done. We must demand better from our journalists.

https://janegilmore.com/category/fixedit/

#fixedit

Then we came to Mike Cannon-Brookes. As a highly successful entrepreneur – the co-founder of Atlassian – it was refreshing to hear that he suffers from imposter syndrome.

Mike shared his innermost fears with the crowd in the ICC and told us that the fear doesn’t go away with success. It’s also not limited to business … apparently the most successful relationships are when both partners feel they are out of their league and fully expect the other to realise this and leave at any moment.

But rather than let fear freeze you, harness the fear – learn, move forward and use it as a force for good.

Question ideas and knowledge but never question yourself. Feeling out of your depth is a good thing.

Elanor Huntington is a female engineer and she is feeling like a member of an endangered species. There are 250K engineers but less than 1K of them are women under the age of 50.

But we are about to enter a new era … an era where people, tech and society intersect and this is the realm of engineering. The next social disadvantage will be the lack of data. And as we enter this new era we need a new type of engineer. An engineer that doesn’t have to choose between creative and tech. But we need to populate that world and to do that we need to re-think engineering.

Elanor asks us to re-think the world around us and how engineers can fit in and add value to it.

Mariam Veiszadah is a diversity and inclusion lawyer. And before I start to share her talk with you I need to disclose that I hosted an event a week before TEDx Sydney as part of Vivid Ideas that was a debate on gender diversity – quotas vs. merit. The information shared by Mariam in her talk was very similar to that shared in my event the week prior and therefore I am somewhat (ironically) biased in my support of her and all the points she made. Mariam’s talk went broader than just gender however and talked about diversity as a whole.

She talked about stereotyping, unconscious bias and privilege (unearned advantage).

She reminded us that what we’re exposed to every day reflects how we see life and make decisions and the overwhelming majority of what we see in media remains anglo saxon and middle aged men. It creates and maintains an affinity bias. 90% of brain behaviour is unconscious.

There is a diversity dividend that we are not taking advantage of. We must be conscious of our own unconscious bias – just like the blind spot we have when we drive. Knowing it’s there helps us be more careful about our actions.

We cannot aspire to be what we cannot see and what gets measured gets done. So giving a leg up to someone who is walking in a gutter only helps level the playing field – it does not provide unfair advantage.

Change is required to level the playing field.

David Hunt is an Australian historian. He’s also hysterically funny and this is a potent combination. It makes you pay attention to what could be uninteresting history. But let me share some things with you that he shared with us … did you know …

The Captain Cook monument at Botany Bay has the wrong date on it and it’s never been fixed (it notes his landing a day earlier than it actually was)!Canberra does not in fact mean “meeting place” - it actually means “breasts”!! Perhaps that’s why it has such a colourful reputation!

Star Trek was based on Cook’s voyage on the Endeavour. “To boldly go where no man has gone before” was paraphrased from Captain Cook’s diary!

Mark Twain once said that Australian history “does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies”.

Hunt tells us that we have a fascinating history and we must make an effort to know it. Because we can’t know where we’re going unless we understand where we’ve been.

Uncle Jack Charles took to the stage with a very rousing welcome by the audience and shared his experience of incarceration – 22 times to be exact – with a warning that there is a crisis in detention centres that we must face.

We must consider how we get our youth back on track with the help of elder’s influence.

Sarah Houbolt is partially sighted and had her eyes opened by her experience in a dance class. She walked in with a pre-supposed expectation of what she would need and asked the instructor to consider what she was doing to include her. She walked out with an understanding that she in fact had a role to play in the class and felt that she had something to offer them as well. Her place in the class was not just important to her, but also to the others.

She also reminded us that we need to consider how we design and include those around us with disabilities because when we are older and less able we will all feel that need.

David Power reminded us of the need for sustainability and what happens when we work together to achieve it. We are all part of and responsible for the future. And again … we must not take the lazy route, but consider labels – what they tell us and ultimately what they mean to the outcome and future of not just wildlife but our own species.

Andy Dexterity reminded us that 5% of the world’s population have hearing issues and there are 300 different sign languages. He shared with us the beauty of language with an engaging lesson and rounded it off with an energising rendition of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.

Jordan Raskopolous is shy. But you’d never know it on stage. And this is the paradox she lives with. She has “life fright” or to put it a different way is “shy loud”. This means that her appearance on stage in public environments is confident and outgoing whilst she struggles with anxiety in more private situations … from private parties to one on one chats. She is learning how to deal with this and thrive, but her experience reminds us not to judge a book by it’s cover as we don’t always know what goes on underneath.

Scott Griffiths deals with people who struggle with weight issues but in a different way – things like anorexia and bulimia are day to day struggles with his patients. But he shared something few of us have heard of … something called muscle dysmorphia. A disorder that affect men who take anabolic steroids in order to reduce what they perceive as their “scrawniness”. But they are not scrawny.

Similar to Jordan before him, his lesson is for us all to challenge what we have as traditional expectations. But this time in the realm of what masculinity means. The picture above shows how our expectations have changed with the appearance of figurines from the original Star Wars movie and those from the latest movie.

Our final speaker was Peter Greste. His story is well known of course - it was in the headlines for months as we sat on the edge of our seats wondering what was to be his fate and the fate of those arrested with him.

In a world that is changing rapidly he reminded us that the government is using the war on terror as a way to chip away at fundamental elements of journalism. What began under Obama has been weaponized by Trump he told us. The espionage act, which was designed to help safeguard the country, is now used to stop embarrassing administrations.

“You’re either with us or with the terrorists” – quoted by George W Bush after 9/11 - is a binary choice and one that does not allow journalists to do their job – to be unbiased observers and reporters.

A press that is not free cannot be anything but bad.

And that is true now more than ever as we look to our uncertain future. But TEDx Sydney has reminded us that we are part of the solution.

#TEDxSydney #inspiredactions #legendsandleaders