What’s the big idea? TED and the ‘ideas festival’ industry

When Richard Saul Wurman came up with the conference we now know as TED, he says virtually all meetings were made up of white men in suits with ties, on panels, reading speeches, about one thing, one business, writes Channel 4 News producer Matthew Moore.

TED – or the Technology Entertainment and Design conference – is in its 30th year. It’s a little difficult to imagine TED as anything other than a product of the internet age.

We learn about the power of body language on our morning commute; in bed before we sleep, we take in 20 minutes on suicidal crickets; in groups, at our desks, on our phones and tablets, we can watch in awe as a precocious teen demonstrates the invention that will cleanse polluted oceans.

Whereas the first TED gathering made a loss, every other TED meeting has sold out without relying on advertising budget.

Wurman, now in his 79th year, says the idea simply came to him one morning – as ideas do.

The goal was to create the best conference in the world. And so on 23 February 1984, after parting with $300 each, a couple of hundred people gathered on a moderate Monterey morning to hear about “things before they happened”, says Wurman. “They saw the first CD – nobody had ever seen a CD before.”

Whereas the first TED gathering made a loss, every other TED meeting has sold out without relying on advertising budget.

Davos – but with singing

These well-produced and ultra-exclusive conferences are at the high end of what is now an industry in ideas festivals, with tickets costing $15,000.

But for a fraction of that price you can attend 5X15, Hay Festival, FutureEverything in Manchester, LikeMinds in Devon, and just last week you might have attended Names Not Numbers (NNN) on the Suffolk coast.

NNN has been likened to “Davos… but with community singing”. Harvey Goldsmith is a board member of Editorial Intelligence, which runs the three-day ideas retreat in idyllic Aldebrugh every spring.

“NNN is an eclectic mix of taste-makers, covering a wide range of topics on a central theme. Discussions are lively and provocative.”

‘Intellectual jazz’

Wurman is still obsessed by organising the “improvisation of intellectual jazz”. He stopped running TED in 2002. Since then, under the stewardship of Chris Anderson, he says it has departed from its roots.

When Anderson took over he changed its mantra to “ideas worth spreading”. To that end he managed the digitisation of TED. Its YouTube channel has almost 3 million subscribers. Three hundred and forty three million people have watched talks in over 100 languages. “Intellectual jazz”, once the preserve of the wealthy middle class, has now been democratised.

But Wurman is uneasy with the changes. “When I ran TED, nothing was rehearsed, nothing was edited. There was no lectern, you couldn’t read a speech, there was no teleprompter. There was nothing that was pre-planned.”

When I ran TED nothing was rehearsed, nothing was edited. There was nothing that was pre-planned. Richard Saul Wurman, TED co-founder

Has it improved? I ask.

“I think the fact that he’s made it into the conference he’s made it into, is an excellent idea. It’s not what I would have done. I would have done it differently I wouldn’t have made it bigger, or as big.”

Goldsmith agrees with Wurman’s point, that growth “has become the problem with the success of TED. NNN has resolved always to be intimate and contained within an economic model.

“TED is about ‘telling’, NNN is about participation.”

Engineering challenges?

Not everyone thinks our new-found obsession with neatly packaged idea videos is as good as it appears to be. Umair Haque is an author and contributor to the Harvard Business Review.

In a blog post he questioned the usefulness of TED: “TED thinking assumes complex social problems are essentially engineering challenges, and that short nuggets of Technology, Edutainment, and Design can fix everything, fast and cheap.

“The idea of our age is that Great Ideas can be simplified, reduced, made into convenient, disposable nuggets of infotainment – be they 18-minute talks, 800-word blog posts, or 140 character bursts. But can they – really?”

I put that to Wurman, who dismissed it outright. “Things change. We take in information differently. They’ve given people permission to be curious.”