Speaker Ponces Around Stage Like He Is At TED

The man was Bodhi Fairweather, principal of Wildpath Leadership, engaged by the Institute’s program committee on the basis that this year should include something different. His session, “Unlocking the Creative Practice,” was scheduled as Session 4B, between “Transfer Pricing Documentation and the Consolidation Regime: Recent Developments” and “Mortality Assumptions in Long-Tail Liability Valuation.”
Session 4A had gone well. Dr Warwick Mellish delivered his paper seated, reading it aloud in a level monotone without looking up, working through 41 slides averaging 22 lines of text each. Delegates were able to follow along, because he read every line. Several later described the presentation as clear.

Fairweather declined both the chair and the lectern. He had brought his own headset microphone, which took the audiovisual technician eleven minutes to pair with a system that already had a working lectern microphone on it. During this period Fairweather stood at the front of the room maintaining eye contact with the audience, which the audience found difficult.

He then began to move. Fairweather walked from stage left to stage right in silence, turned on the spot, and asked the room what creativity meant to them. Nobody answered. He allowed the silence to sit, as trained, for six seconds, walking back the other way while it did. He then answered the question himself, arriving at the far side of the riser as he finished, which appeared to be the plan.

The riser is 200 millimetres high and 4.2 metres wide. Fairweather stepped off the front of it four times during the session and back onto it three times, the discrepancy being resolved in the final minutes when he delivered his closing remarks from the carpet, among the delegates, at a range they were not expecting.

His slides contained no text. The first was a full-bleed photograph of a lion at dusk. The second was an elephant. The third was a different elephant. Delegates, who had arrived with notebooks and had spent the morning transcribing subsection references, sat with pens raised and nothing to record. One man wrote down the word “elephant” and then ruled a line under it.

Fairweather asked for a show of hands from anyone who had ever had an idea in the shower. Two hands went up, one of them belonging to a delegate who had misheard the question. He pointed at the misheard delegate and held the point for some time. The delegate lowered his hand. Fairweather said that was exactly it.

He then asked everyone to turn to the person next to them and share a moment of professional courage. The room did not turn. Attendees at the Congress do not interact with one another other than by email, and the exercise had no precedent in 29 years of programming. Two delegates in the third row eventually rotated towards each other and exchanged business cards.

The session’s central component was a guided meditation and breathing exercise, intended to help participants make contact with their creative instinct. Delegates were asked to close their eyes, place both feet flat on the carpet, and breathe in for a count of four. The lighting in Function Room 2 was already dim, having been set for slides, and the carpet was original.

Compliance was near universal. One delegate kept his eyes open in order to observe whether anyone else had kept their eyes open. Another used the four minutes to work out whether an amendment period had expired in November or December. Cardigans were widely reported. Fairweather then asked the room to stand and applaud itself. The room stood and applauded itself. One fellow of the Institute later said it was the most sustained physical activity he had undertaken at a professional development event, and that his hands were still warm when he sat down.

Program committee chair Neville Tuckey defended the inclusion. The Institute was founded in 1936 and reconstituted in 1997. “We heard from members that the Congress could be more dynamic,” Tuckey said. “This year we listened. Next year we are looking at a panel.” A senior transfer pricing specialist who attended said the session had been engaging. Asked what it was about, he said he would need to check the handout, and then confirmed there had been no handout.

Fairweather said the material was drawn from his proprietary framework, developed with the assistance of Nova.AI, and that the Congress audience had been “one of the most present rooms” he had worked with all year. He said the stillness during the breathing exercise had been remarkable. He said he had rarely seen a room hold that quality of silence.

An actuary in the fourth row, approached for comment, said the probability of the session materially altering the creative output of the profession was low but non-zero, and declined to elaborate.

Delegates received their outcomes by email on Wednesday morning, in a PDF branded with the Wildpath logo. Each attendee at Session 4B has been formally assigned a spirit animal.

Dr Mellish is a dolphin.

This article is satire. Before you continue, it would like you to turn to the person next to you and share how it made you feel.