TEDxWaterloo and The Disconnect

I have the incredible privilege of being apart of the Marcomm (Marketing and Communications) team for TEDxWaterloo. If you are not familiar with the TED format, you are missing out. Thousands of TED talks await you here. The TEDx’s are locally-grown editions of the famed TED conference. TEDxWaterloo is a wonderful edition to the TED family, and it has been a pleasure working with them for the 2012 edition.

I had the honor of writing a piece for the website, and it posted last week on the site. Here are a few thoughts on this years theme, on "Disconnected". Though I had no hand in picking the theme, the idea of "Disconnected" has been near and dear to my heart this past year and writing about it was effortless.

The Disconnect

Can you remember the first time that someone hung up on you?

I mean really hung up on you.

The phone slamming, angry adverbs, mid-sentence cut off, came out of left field kind of hang up?

I can remember my first experience with an angry hang up like it was yesterday. NKOTB and their classic hit “Please Don’t Go Girl” was blaring through my tape deck, as my 12 year old eyes cried a million tears over a boy who shouted into his rotary phone “We are over” and followed his decree with a resounding slam. It was the first time my teenage self had discovered the sense of powerlessness you experience when you are disconnected from so abruptly. It was the first time that I learned the power you wield when you break communication with another and disconnect without an explanation. In a world so full of opportunities to communicate it is a shame that so many of us communicate so poorly, and take the easy road of the disconnect from people and situations when they become difficult.

As I have grown older and have more tools at my disposal then ever to connect and communicate, I sometimes feel more lost than ever before. I have often wondered then if poor communication doesn’t disconnect souls, but rather it’s the disconnected souls who poorly communicate. If that statement could have a nugget of truth, then where does that leave us, as we find the promise and power of connection and our contributions to the communities that we find ourselves in? Where does it leave us when communication has never been so important, yet has never been more misunderstood and misused?

I am not sure what the answers are, and maybe for now, I don’t to figure it all out. Perhaps the answer is fluid and malleable as we constantly recalibrate in an ever changing world. Maybe the most important thing is that we are searching for an answer, together and connected, through an outlet like TEDxWaterloo, wresting through these inevitable tensions.

Seth Godin once said “Connect the disconnected to each other and you create value” I am sure in his marketing guru genius he was talking about connecting products to people, but I can’t help but wonder if that same statement applies person to person. When we connect with one another, in new and meaningful ways, when we choose connectedness over the disconnect, we then create value because of what we create together.

We have all heard the line “two heads are better than one” and “we are stronger together then we are divided”. Maybe sometimes clichés are clichés because they are true. Maybe finding our connectedness and looking for the answers of how each of us, in our own context, can hang up once and for all on our disconnectedness, is the most powerful force on earth for change. Maybe there is hope beyond the disconnect and maybe for now, that hope is enough.