In some sense even the best talks are an attempt to distill things we have learned into a tight enough package that it helps people (a) think a little differently and (b) go read and learn more themselves. Sometimes that turns into self-promoting puffery, but I don’t claim to have anything particularly original to say in this talk. To the contrary: the whole point and structure of the talk is “This stuff is out there, let’s pull it together and get thinking about it!”—pointing to good work other people have done.

Now, maybe it lands that way and maybe it doesn’t, but I think that our industry could use lots of “discovering something mundane and wrapping it up as a TED talk” if it helps us to be more serious practitioners of the discipline. Most of what we need is mundane, after all! But that doesn’t mean it is unimportant, and it doesn’t mean everyone already knows it.