The need to improvise
I listened this morning to Pushkin’s industries’ Cautionary Tales podcast episode on the art of public speaking by Martin Luther King Jr. I recognize a bit of my own process. By no means am I an oratory marvel as Dr King was. However, just like during his early days preparing for a sermon, I prepare and over-prepare, and practice when I have to give a big presentation.
Several years ago, I was reading every post on Presentation Zen and elsewhere, of how to become a better presenter. I remember one which gave a behind the scenes look of how Steve Jobs prepares for a keynote. As simple and as authentic as his keynote looked, Steve Jobs would prepare a week long.
Steve Job made presentations look effortless because he put a lot of effort into making it great.
Thus I figured if I wanted to be any good on stage, I would need to follow a similar process: first focus on the story, then the slides, then the timing, and practice, practice, practice. I have seen good progress because this.
However, that leaves one important element out of it: the power and need to improvise as to connect better with your audience.
That’s what the I had a dream speech did. As the podcast episode covers, or as it has been described in a 2013 New York Times opinion piece one of the most famous lines happened because Dr. King improvised. It happened because he had both practiced it before, and because he improvised and adapted to the situation.
As King neared the end, he came to a sentence that wasn’t quite right. He had planned to introduce his conclusion with a call to “go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction.” He skipped that, read a few more lines, and then improvised: “Go back to Mississippi; go back to Alabama; go back to South Carolina; go back to Georgia; go back to Louisiana; go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.”
Nearby, off to one side, Mahalia Jackson shouted: “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” King looked out over the crowd. As he later explained in an interview, “all of a sudden this thing came to me that I have used — I’d used many times before, that thing about ‘I have a dream’ — and I just felt that I wanted to use it here.” He said, “I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.” And he was off, delivering some of the most beloved lines in American history, a speech that he never intended to give and that some of the other civil rights leaders believed no one but the marchers would ever remember.