San Diego 2050
Part 1: Climate Change and Procopio
“This scientific study considers the regional impacts due to climate change that can be expected by 2050, if current trends continue. Higher temperatures, changing precipitation, and a rising sea level will create new issues that will require considerable planning and coordination, as well as exacerbate existing stresses. The extent to which these impacts from climate change affect local communities will depend not only on our ability to change current trends and reduce regional emissions, but also on careful planning in the face of the most serious vulnerabilities.”
My first “big presentation” as a new member of the Director’s staff at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography was to a large Southern California law firm with its name atop a skyscraper in downtown San Diego.
I felt a bit like a fish out of water when I arrived at Scripps from the large multi-strategy hedge fund in Chicago where I led a quantitative research team linking weather to energy trading. UCSD recruited me to La Jolla to develop an initiative to link basic science to commercial applications.
Procopio, the law firm that was audience to my first big presentation of Scripps science, had a well-established reputation in environmental and climate-change practice and was a major supporter of Scripps. So, it was a friendly audience.
I crafted my presentation from a newly published study at the time, The San Diego Foundation Regional Focus 2050 Study: Working Papers for the 2008 Climate Change Impacts Assessment, Second Biennial Science Report to the California Climate Action Team. San Diego, California. I felt quite confident that I could accurately represent the material because of my background as a meteorologist with a law degree.
Climate change for lawyers … right up my alley!
I joined Scripps after a decade as a weather-communicator. My career included work for television and radio stations around the country, including a series of “special reports” on climate change for WOR Radio in New York City in response to the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
As I set up for my presentation in the large and comfortable conference room at Procopio’s penthouse office in San Diego’s Financial District, I was feeling quite confident. Coincidentally, this was the first week for a summer intern that was working in my office. The Stanford undergraduate was eager to see how public sector climate change science intersected with private sector law practice and I invited him along to watch the presentation.
It went something like this:
My presentation ran about 43-minutes longer and 50 additional slides versus the introduction posted here. That said, you’ve seen enough to get the idea.
On the drive back to La Jolla, I asked my nineteen-year-old intern what he thought. I expected he’d be full of praise and figured he’d gush about everything he’d learned during that hour at Procopio.
As a side-note, this hotshot kid from Stanford would go on to get an MBA from Harvard Business School and -12 years later- runs his own investment firm after starting several companies of his own.
He didn’t hesitate to speak up and, from the passenger seat of my Honda Civic as we headed north on The Five, he said:
“It was fine but it could have been a lot better.”
He bluntly told me that I had failed to capture his attention. He told me how he had “drifted in and out” as the slides went by. He watched the faces of the lawyers in the room who silently stared out the window as they sipped coffee and munched cookies during that hour in the sky-lounge conference room. He was pretty sure that I had also failed to inspire them.
He went on to ask me, “Have you ever read Made to Stick?”
It’s easy to give a presentation and fail to inspire…
Have you ever given a presentation that “fell flat” for your audience? Share your experience with us…
I remember when I was first learning the material for a new job position. I was a Field Studies Instructor teaching various science courses in the United Arab Emirates. One of my courses was titled Squid Dissection, and it was precisely that. We dissected squids, so many squids. It was meant, however, to be an educational class, not just a lab full of students cutting open a poor deceased specimen. That, however, is precisely what happened when I started teaching the course. At the time I did not possess any education in marine science nor classification, so teaching the taxonomy of cephalopods and the anatomy of a squid was very new. While first conducting the material I am fairly certain I incorrectly explained the concept of taxonomy to 10-year-olds, confused the arms versus tentacles, and couldn't find all 3 hearts. These continuous slip-ups weren't exactly noticed by the students, but in my mind, the presentations fell flat as they were not anatomically correct nor of the best educational quality. After a few more tries, however, I nailed down the information and was able to conduct fun, interactive, AND educational presentations for the students. It soon became my favorite class to teach!
I have taught many different courses like this in which I must learn on the fly. Two lessons I always come away with: kids usually don't know the difference and practice really CAN make perfection!
I have definitely given my fair share of cringe-worthy presentations. My worst, while definitely very boring and unengaging, was horrible for other reasons. At work, I was asked to speak for a few minutes on an article I had written as part of a webinar that my company was hosting for an association. I had never heard of the association and wasn't too worried about it. I put together a slide or 2 on the article and figured I would just recap those slides..no big deal. In retrospect, I probably should have done more preparation, including asking about who would be attending and how many people there would be! After signing in to the webinar, I will never forget those feelings of panic as I watched the number of attendees climb well into the thousands. Turns out this webinar was for an association with well over 50,000 members in the US. Even with only around 10% of them attending, that was an exponentially bigger audience than I was used to or expecting. (I think the largest presentation I ever gave prior to that had 10-15 people. I naively was expecting this webinar to be similar in size.) When it was my turn to present, my body basically shut down. My vocal cords constricted to a point where I was basically just awkwardly whispering the words from the script I had created. People were typing into the meeting chat that they couldn't hear me, why was I speaking so softly, etc. At some point I gave up and just stopped talking mid-presentation, allowing people to think my connection had dropped so they would move on. Still mentally plagued by that moment whenever I have to speak to a large group of people I don't know, but hopefully, I'm making progress! Having solid and engaging content definitely helps!