Turning on a pin

When it comes to sermon delivery, it's not just your range of volume and tone that counts - it's how agile you are in changing. The drama in your delivery is all about in-flight dynamics...

This week we talked about delivering a sermon. And already class members have been listening to some of the greats, like Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller, trying to figure out what makes them so interesting to listen to. To be honest, I still can't quite figure it out. In class, we experimented with the idea of a big 3-D space defined by the axes of pitch, speed and volume. How much of that space can you occupy when you're speaking to a crowd? How much of the space can you occupy without sounding like a lunatic or a chipmunk? Most of us don't use nearly enough of the 'delivery sphere.' But here's the thing. The pitch-speed-volume space is only part of the story. I'm wondering if agility in moving around the space is one of the defining marks of a great natural communicator. That's when I started thinking about quadrotor robotic helicopters... as you do in these circumstances. If you've got the time to watch Vijay Kumar in the TED talk below, at around the 6:12 mark he gets into some interesting stuff about agile navigation. Differentiate distance and you get speed... the differential of that (in other words, the rate of change of speed) is acceleration. The differential of that (here's where it gets interesting, because we usually stop thinking about it at this point) is called 'jerk' or 'jolt'. And the differential of that is called 'snap'. They're busy programming 'snap trajectories' for these cool little 'copters, and finding the can pilot them around 3-D space with incredible agility. In other words, they're tinkering with the rate of change of the rate of change of acceleration! (Roller Coaster designers work with similar equations to make sure they won't snap your neck on a tight turn.)
It all got me thinking... maybe the best natural communicators are working on that level. And it's not just fine tuning our delivery pitch or pace or volume, but the way we move from one to another... the snap, the jerk, the dynamic agility of delivery, that really makes it zing. Just as long as you can do it without actually sounding like a jerk. Class notes are here.