We included Hands and Ola Rosling on our best public speakers list for the energetic, humorous and creative ways they use rhetoric.
Rosling studied (1967–73) statistics and medicine at Uppsala University and (1972) public health at St. John’s Medical College in Bangalore, India. He worked for much of the next 20 years in Africa—first in Mozambique, where he served as a district medical officer, and later in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania. In the latter, he and other researchers identified the cause of a paralytic disease as being consumption of insufficiently processed cassava roots, which contain high levels of a precursor to cyanide and form a large portion of the diet in all three countries.
Hans Rosling, with his famous charts of global population, health, and income data (and an extra-extra-long pointer), demonstrates that you have a high statistical chance of being quite wrong about what you think you know. Play along with his audience quiz — then, from Hans’ son Ola, learn 4 ways to quickly get less ignorant.
What are the main communication takeaways?
Audience Engagement: The question and answer style is an effective and creative way to keep an audience engaged. However, Ola and Hans don’t stop there. They take in every audience reaction and responds to their humor as if they’re having a real-time conversation with them.
Enthusiasm: His level of energy and enthusiasm stays consistent and high throughout the entire presentation. Even when he’s talking about stats, which he often does in this talk for rhetorical purposes, he uses his excitement to convey numbers that could otherwise be dully presented
Humor: Clearly, this is important to Hans and Ola. It’s a way for him to connect to his audience. It’s also a way to build trust. The audience is not only laughing because they’re being compared to chimps, but because they recognize themselves in the larger context of what he’s presenting, which is world awareness and education.
How could they improve?
Hans could stand to show a little more emotional empathy for his audience. He seems to know a lot about what their educational life is like, and it would be effective if he coupled that with an acknowledgment of their emotional life.
Ola could use a bit more variation in his voice. He has a naturally low tone that he sticks to for nearly the entirety of his part of the talk. We can also observe the effectiveness of variety when we compare Ola to Hans, who has quite a bit of variety.
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