JJH 2020 for COR

1. The secrete of building collective wisdom is hidden in the children’s game of building blocks or playing the Lego. A bad game would be one dominating kid push away other kids and play by herself but others just watch. A good game is that every kid participates in turn, in “Round-table-style”, one block a time, or 3 blocks/5 blocks/7 blocks a time (don’t go more than 7 each turn). The result created by the group will be more amazing. 

2. That secrete is used to design our standard COR meetings (Club of Remy):  Each speaker is allowed a quota of 7 slides. You can do 5 or even 3, but 7 is the maximum. No need for a title page. The title of your first slide is the title of your talk.

3. Each slide also has its title, but in the body part, you can only have 7 lines, i.e. 7 bullet points. Don’t use smaller fonts to drag a long sentence. You must be brief on each line of your point. You can orally explain more when you present. On each slide, you can have one (sub-) title, 7 lines. You can replace lines with images. But you cannot go beyond the magic number 7.

4. Thus, 7 lines (with the 8^th line as their sub-title) per slide and 7 slides make up your contribution to the group discussion. If we operate at a four-person mode, we have a total of 28 slides to listen, in about half-hour. Then we have the other half-hour for a spontaneous idea-block building.

5. Ted Talks are successful because they limit all their speakers to 21 minutes. (That’s 3×7). Sometimes 14 minutes (2×7). But that is not a “collective-block-building” game, just a “Sage-on-the-Stage” game. Club of Remy wants to develop a different game.  The essence of “Self-Organization” is that every participant is allowed to be a full-self (not too shy nor too dominant), as an “element/part of the whole”, and take action/reaction/interactions to organize.

6. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address had 272 words in 10 sentences. His last sentence was a long dragging punching sentence that actually can be separated into 5 shorter sentences. Thus, 14 (2×7). He delivered it between 2 to 3 minutes with his Kentucky accent.  Can you learn from Lincoln? Yes, you can if you change that bad academic habit and push yourself to be brief and point-hitting. That’s why God created the PowerPoint tool for you.

7. Edward Everett’s Gettysburg Speech, presented before Lincoln’s turn at that same event, of 13,609 words lasting 120 minutes was forgotten by the public and drown in the sea of history. Lincoln’s talk became a corner-stone cultural-gene of this great country, he wrote it with pencil on two pages on the train from Washington DC to Gettysburg. You can do better than Lincoln with your laptop and PowerPoint if you do have a point.