I had fun last week attending and giving a presentation at TEDx-Maastricht in Holland.  Many of you have enjoyed watching presentations on TED and its TEDx spin-offs around the world.  Those are great, but it is even more fun to be there in person and have a chance to interact with other presenters and with people in the audience.

Marije Elderenbosch, a local writer, was engaged to write blog posts about the presentations, and you can find her entry about mine here.  She did a great job in real time, posting the summary within a very short time after the talk.  Also, someone named Wilg drew the little cartoon shown above to characterize the main themes of the talk.

Regular readers will not be surprised that I relied heavily on soccer coaching themes to deliver a message about the learning process — especially, acceptance of mistakes and near-misses — needed to reduce the amount of harm caused in hospitals.

You get 8 minutes for these talks.  That is not a lot of time, especially if, like me, you are used to speeches lasting 40 minutes or more.  You really have to extract the essence of your message and make it interesting to a highly diverse audience.  I decided to base my talk on two stories contained in Goal Play!, one about Margaret and one about Tovah.

I was proud to wear the orange jersey of the Dutch national soccer team while on stage.  At least, that way, I could be sure that the local fans would like at least some part of my talk!

Thanks to Lucien Engelen, Corine Jansen, the other organizers and sponsors, the dozens of volunteers, and the engaged audience on site and watching on simulcasts who made TEDx-Maastricht a success.

Here’s the video of my talk.  I hope you like it.  I welcome comments.  If you cannot see the video, click here.