Greta Thunberg: Lessons for a Visionary

At the Austrian World Summit 2021, Greta Thunberg was again given the stage to give her influential and powerful audience the earful. Her message: your talk won't fill any holes. Your time is up.

The speech is well put together - kicked off as Speech of the Month August in the Radio1 column - and her message remains as relevant as ever. At the same time, her well-known incantation formula also seems to have had its day.

Where do I think the shoe pinches in this speech, and what can Thunberg pay attention to so that her future speeches maintain impact?

The visionary's challenge

In a speech, speaker and audience enter into a special relationship. Success factors in this are whether the speaker takes charge of the audience (stands for his or her cause), is authentic (does not play a role and shows himself or herself) and knows how to connect (by evoking recognition and emotions).

Greta Thunberg is a visionary. She is way ahead of the troops. She sees, she sees what we don't see. That's a gift, but it also means distance. Where she scores high on leadership, she will have to work extra hard to attract and engage people. And that does not work as well in this speech.

What 4 lessons can we learn from this?

1. Truthfulness prevails over form

As a speechwriter, I would spend hours poring over beautiful sentence structures, witty rhetorical tricks and the right cadence. With varying degrees of success. Over the years, I discovered that a prerequisite of an inspiring speech is that the speaker feels what he or she is saying. Form can get in the way of that. Too contrived, too constructed or not one's own words or style. Even Thunberg here sometimes seems more concerned with saying the right words than conveying the message. And if she feels no connection to the text, then we as an audience certainly don't.

2.Nothing to cling to

In no way does she meet her audience. No bridge is built. In previous speeches this was no different, but we were touched by her deeply felt anger and envy. That purity (authenticity) had appeal. Here she holds up to her audience: "[...] you are saying things for the sake of it, because the words are in your scripts." And in this very speech, she herself seems to speak more as a character than a person. That leaves little to cling to.

3.Power loss through repetition

Each time, Thunberg managed to hike up the superlative further in her speeches. This kept them surprising, even though the tone and emotion were always the same. But even this staircase proved finite. Beautiful inventions like "So, you started to act. Not acting as in climate action, but acting as in role playing." and "Nature and physics are not entertained by your theater." can no longer offset the predictable envy.

4.In the end, we want to (keep) hope

That little superlative remains is also evident from the end of the speech: "The audience has grown wary. The show is over". Conceptually a great ending, but as an audience we run into a dead-end wall. To inspire and win people to your cause, you must also show them a way out of the darkness. Now we are hopelessly left behind. And nobody wants that.

Hopefully next time she will be able to bring vision and feeling together again. And touch us again with her important message.

Do you have any questions? Please contact janneke@speaktoinspire.nl (for in-company possibilities!).