Soapbox (this article appeared in PR Week 14 October 2011)

I’ve been commissioned to write an analysis of the speeches at the Party conferences by Messrs Clegg, Cameron and Milliband, but I’ve got a confession to make. I didn’t watch them.

Instead I’ve been reading Chip & Dan Heath’s book, Switch: how to change things, when change is hard. The authors say analysing the causes of a problem rarely helps to solve it. If we want to change something we have to study what’s working and champion that.

As a speechwriter, I love listening to great speakers but I don’t expect to find them at party conferences.

If we want to change that, we’ve got to ask where we will we find them. Who is putting on the events that everybody wants to be at? Where do the great speakers go?

The answer is TED (Technology Education Design) – a private non-profit organisation. It began in the States and is now a global umbrella for several conference formats.

I’ve watched a future Prime Minister, Rory Stewart MP, give an unforgettable speech about foreign policy in Afghanistan. I’ve heard Sir Ken Robinson talk passionately about education policy. I spotted a brilliant speech at a TEDx in Brighton about the problems creatives have communicating with business people.

For me, there is a huge difference between these speeches and the speeches you get at party conferences: TED talks make me want to leap out of my chair and get involved in the world.

TED has a rule that no presentation can last longer than 18 minutes. If the Party leaders took only one lesson from TED, that would be a sensible one.

TED find articulate people with ideas worth spreading and they give them a platform. That’s the sort of thing we’d all like to see at a C21st party conference.

Brian Jenner runs the UK Speechwriters’ Guild

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