Science in the Triangle

Feeling dull and uninspired? Try to practice selflessness like a Trappist monk. Play a video game that does more than entertain. Doodle.

The three tips could have come from self-help books, a consultant or a mentor. Instead, they came from the first TED talk in the Research Triangle Park area. The all-day, free event Saturday at RTP headquarters attracted more than 150 people, who on a sunny and balmy winter day sat inside, listened, did the wave and talked to people they had never met before.

Amy Calhoun

Durham couple Amy and Eric Calhoun organized TEDxTriangle, an offshoot of the TED conference, over the past 10 months using word of mouth, Twitter and Facebook to recruit speakers. In the spirit of TED, whose motto is “ideas worth spreading,” TEDxTriangle brought together local speakers willing to share their ideas and insights.

“We’ve been TED fans for a long time,” said Amy Calhoun, who runs a management consulting business. The goal of the conference, she said, was to get attendees excited, plant seeds of passion and help people connect to solve problems.

TED talks follow in the footsteps of storytellers who spread knowledge and wisdom - at TEDxTriangle they included the director of the Entrepreneurial Leadership Initiative at Duke University, a Raleigh author of books for program developers and New Music Raleigh, three clasically trained musicians who played a work of a living composer.

But TED talks go beyond traditional storytelling. They are among a growing number of events that combine old techniques with new technologies.

Raleigh, which just topped Forbes magazine’s most wired U.S. cities list, RTP and Durham have been venues for these digital storytelling events. There’s IgniteRaleigh, which allows for five minutes and 20 slides, and its counterpart, FizzledDurham. And there’s Pecha Kucha Night, which gives each presenter six minutes and 40 seconds to get an idea across in 20 slides.

Together, these events are a grab bag of anecdotes, each with an idea at its core and a kernel of wisdom as inspiration.

A few examples from TEDxTriangle:

• Ideas are fragile and slippery, said Andy Hunt, author of “The Pragmatic Programmer.” Carry a notebook with you and jot them down as a drawing. “Doodling is good for thinking,” Hunt said.
• Christopher Gergen, the director of Duke’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Initiative, is about to open Bull City Forward in the downtown Kress building, where he hopes to nurture innovators willing to take on social problems. To follow through and put ideas into practice, Gergen suggested shifting from fear of failure to fear of regret.
• “Talent is not in short supply, passion is in short supply,” said August Turak, a business consultant and author who gets inspired by regular visits to a South Carolina Trappist monastery, where 24 monks work in silence.

When the stories are told, the new technology takes over.

Social media tools take on the role of word-of-mouth to spread the reach of the storytellers on the Internet beyond time and place. The videotaped TED talks are posted on YouTube, where they can be watched round the clock and the world. Bloggers write about the talks and their posts are distributed on Twitter.

Events like TED and Ignite aim at what Hugh Hollowell called connecting people with yearning to form tribes. Hollowell runs a Raleigh nonprofit to end chronic homelessness. The kernel of wisdom in his TEDxTriangle talk: Tribes spread ideas and change the world.

To become a member of a tribe could be as easy as what Zach Ward, an impromptu comedian and founder of DSI Comedy Theater in Carrboro, did with a fellow comedian to perform at TEDxTriangle.

To reach his creative place on stage, Ward said he accepted every idea his counterpart presented him without judgment and then added to it. Ward, who emceed TEDxTriangle, called this “Yes, and …”