The Ruins of Toastmasters

lies in Zoom

We can never know the future. We can make a good guess, but just how it will play out is unknowable. Unknowable because the human factor can be so inconsistent. How can we know, beforehand, how someone will react to an event. What will be a reaction to an action taken?

From where we stand today, we can see that in the future, new technologies will continue to develop. Those technologies promise us many opportunities. However, it is how the new stuff is used that is much more important than the tool itself. Something invented is rather like a book that has been written: it is subject to interpretation by the reader. Or user.

Let’s look at the lockdowns and Zoom.

Locking folks down in their homes for two years, is, in my estimation, a dumb idea. Because life will go on, whether or not you’re participating. Zoom gave many, many people the chance to keep working. Zoom brought their various team members into a virtual room. There they continued to work, relatively risk free from the disease. Except, of course, when they went out to hang with their friends.

There were other risks that no one would foresee. Here’s one. Workers didn’t want to go back to the office. In their thinking, if work could go one with Zoom, why couldn’t it continue that way?

Indeed, why not?

Zoom is a wonderful tool, but its use as a meeting room for so long has had an effect that is truly detrimental. It’s about all those people that don’t want to go back to an office. I mean, why sit in traffic for 90 minutes every day, buy expensive clothing, put expensive gas into the car, when one work in their home office? For many jobs, this can be so. But unless we want the shipping companies to rule the world, we do need to get out and buy food, at the very least.

No extrovert wants more Zoom, or any real time video platform, in their life. For introverts, well hello heaven. For the lazy? Ha! Happiness is holding a meeting in their jammies. And they sure as hell don’t want to put on their hard pants, or skirts, again.

I’ll leave those work place issues here. It’s the organizations like Toastmasters I address. Toastmasters has lost, and continues to lose, its membership. It has become an older person’s organization. The average age of the average Toastmaster is 47 years of age. That’s a bit on the aging side for an organization that is about learning and teaching communication and leadership skills. I don’t want to negate the oldsters. However, they are best as mentors and coaches. The younger crowd needs to learn to lead, by leading. They will learn the art of public speaking by speaking in public. And to learn to compete by competing in the speech contests. The optimum age for this training is late 20s to early 30s.

This is the second year that Toastmasters speech contests are being brought to us by Zoom. This temporary fix is staying around too long. It too, is getting old.

Speech contests have an element to them that Zoom will never convey: and that is audience reaction. Zoom just doesn’t cut it. Toastmasters, stupidly, passed by an excellent opportunity when they promoted the idea that there was little or no difference from a live contest, and one that was done to a camera. I was one person that was vehemently opposed to Zoom contests. Because as an experienced professional of both live and recorded performance, there is a huge difference between the two. I repeat, live performances are different from recorded. Each takes a different skill set.

I am astounded that the leadership of Toastmasters was so ignorant of this reality. I lost respect for the leadership. I mourned for the contestants. Plus,Toastmasters missed a golden moment to bring these skill sets, camera and microphone techniques, into their educational platform. Because reality, the best teacher of them all, tells us that recorded performances are the bulk of the speaking opportunities in this modern age.

Schools reopened because educators get it, that the virtual classroom is quite different than the live classroom. Unless the educators change their way of presenting, this will continue to be. Video versus live, are two different presentation styles. It is silly to pretend they are the same.

Now, as more public meetings are held, many clubs want to have hybrid meetings, with some members at home, and others in the room. This too means adapting to a new way, and in some instances, more expensive way, of holding meetings. Expensive because to have a quality meeting, quality tech toys are needed.

When it comes to this new technology, it favors those with the money to spend on it. The cameras alone can cost thousands. Speakers and microphones, another couple of thousand for quality stuff. Clubs that meet in corporate conference rooms don’t have a problem. Small clubs renting rooms do. Because a part of the quality is bandwidth, and that too can be more money, clubs that want to go hybrid need a budget to go with it.

Are there any questions here as to why Toastmasters is losing members?