Collaborative speechwriting produces better speech

I recently completed a speech on “diversity of thought” for a new client, a global company. It was a great topic and I enjoyed researching it. My premise was that diversity of thought leads to creative collaboration in which the end result is more than the sum of its parts. Two heads, three heads, or many heads, I wrote, really are better than one.

I set up the speech by talking about the decline in U.S. creativity, citing a July 19, 2010 Newsweek cover story. I also cited a 2010 IBM CEO study in which 1,500 worldwide CEOs named creativity as the number one, most important attribute for leaders going forward.

How to bridge the gap? Through diverse thinking and creative collaboration.

For the speech, I read and/or culled Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration by Keith Sawyer; The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki; The Power of Many by Meg Whitman, former eBay CEO; and The Google Story, by David Vise. I also researched the company’s own web site for examples of creativity, diversity, collaboration and innovation. And I trolled the web to find and print out a number of articles on these topics.
 
Little did I suspect that the process of writing the speech itself would bear out its premise: collaborative thinking by diverse people results in a better product.     

For example, at the top of the speech, I cited examples of diverse thinking that led to success – the Founding Fathers, the Green Mountain Boys, the Marx Brothers, the Rat Pack, the Wright Brothers, the Underground Railroad, the Suffrage Movement, the Tuskegee Airmen, the Civil Rights Movement, NASA and The Supremes (not the court).

Reviewing the first draft, which included this list, the Vice President of Communications, from whom I received this assignment, suggested I think about the relevancy and currency of these examples, and that I consolidate the list – a lot!  Of course he was right. First, I pared the list to a few examples in a short paragraph. But by the final draft, the list was no longer needed to support the talk, so it was dropped.

To illustrate creative and diverse collaboration, I first included the Impressionist painters, which Keith Sawyer cites in his book. The group – including Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Degas and Pissarro – often went to the countryside together.

There, Sawyer writes, they set “up their canvasses side by side, monitoring each other’s paintings and discussing what they were doing.” Their “styles are so similar that it’s not always obvious who painted which one. Looking back, no one could say who was responsible for a given innovation.”

Sawyer’s book includes another example I cited in the talk. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, who met at Oxford University in 1926 and discovered they each had a hobby they hid from the world – writing mythical fiction and poetry.

With other local scholars, they formed a writers’ group called the Inklings.  Gradually, trust built within the group. When a new idea emerged in discussion, Lewis and Tolkien returned home and drafted a chapter capturing the idea. At the next week’s meeting, they’d read their drafts aloud and listen to critical suggestions from the group.

This collaborative process gave birth to Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

I loved these examples, in part because we were going use visuals to illustrate them when the speech was given, including images of Impressionist paintings and clips from the Narnia and Rings’ sagas.

However, as the Vice President pointed out in reviewing this version of the script, they were hardly contemporary and were not, perhaps, ones with which the audience would identify.

In addition, he pointed out, they were all guy examples. There were no women or people of color represented. In a speech about diversity! How I missed this, I’ll never know. My very bad!

Additional research led me to Jean Nidetch, who founded Weight Watchers on the collaborative input of a group of women who at first held meetings in her living room. And to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who fostered collaboration among his team members. I also identified a good Powell quote on teamwork, which is in the talk. 

In the next review, the Vice President of Communications and a former Vice President of Engineering at the company suggested more relevant examples than Nidetch for an audience that would be composed in large part of technical innovators. 

They suggested the founders of Google – Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Brin was born in Russia; Page was a child of the American heartland. They were different in a lot of ways. Together, they were magic.

They also suggested Meg Whitman, former eBay CEO – whom I was already researching – would make a good example. In The Power of Many, Whitman writes about fostering collaboration with the eBay community. On its suggestion, in fact, eBay Motors was created, and quickly became the largest seller of used cars in the U.S.

I also included a great example of diverse and collaborative thinking between my client company and a company in a very different field that resulted in an excellent product the client company produced.       

This speech iteration, this input from the client, is what freelancers miss because we often work in isolation. It’s something I call “the loneliness of the long-distance speechwriter.” 

But this time around, on the very first speech for a new client, when I needed it most, I was allowed to try things, get feedback on whether they worked or not, and refine, refine, refine, until the speech worked for the client.

During the writing process, I also sent the speech to two close speechwriting friends for review, which I had not done before. Under oath of confidentiality, they advised me on the length of the talk and how to keep it energized and moving forward to hold the attention of the audience. 

This whole process resulted in a better speech. Because diversity of thought really is a beautiful thing.