How to Tummel, Design for Conversation with Heather Gold

How can we let everyone be heard and enable a magical "community" to appear around our talks, businesses and web sites? The reality is that most group formation fails and most presentations bore or drive people away to their phones.

The key is to have a tummler to catalyze conversation and connections. Tummeling is a model for managing in a post-hierarchical setting and is a critical skill set that can catalyze a group and set the tone so it can evolve into community. The communities that fail, whether dying out from apathy or being overwhelmed by noise, are the ones that don't have someone there making the space genuine, cherishing the conversation, setting the tone, creating a space to speak, and rapidly segregating those intent on damage. We don't have a English name for this role; they get called 'Moderators' or 'Community Managers' or 'CEOs', and because when they're doing it right you see everyone's conversation or feel the connected environment, not their careful craft, so this role is often ignored.

How do you create the conditions for conversation for many people? How do people genuinely connect with each other and with you or your company?
Influenced by the web and her community of it's earliest makers, innovative comedian Heather Gold began creating a way to involve the "audience" in her shows, scale conversation and hasten intimacy over a decade ago.  In this lecture she'll show the basic differences between presentation and conversation and the assumptions underneath each. More entertainingly (and usefully) she demonstrates these ideas by creating a great, relevant conversation in the room so that all can feel the difference.
 
Work directly with Heather and really understand the art of a conversation at the Unpresenting Workshop

In her UnPresenting Workshop Heather will teach a very limited number of people how to engage the room in a heavily participatory experience that comes "highly recommended" from past participants like WordPress founder and CEO  Matt Mullenweg and Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg.

You'll learn how to give talks that are more fun, require less preparation and leave you and your "audience" feeling awesome. By unlearning  habits and allowing informational flow to follow social flow, you'll discover you can improvise quite easily and turn stiff, scripted talks into engaging conversations that serve both you and the "audience." Most important, you'll go from talking AT or TO a large group of people to speaking WITH them.  

No bullet points. No slides.*. Just the greatness in you and the "audience." Be yourself, in public.
*Designers, this means for now. It's best to learn to skate before you get a stick.