I’ve been scrutinising public speaking disasters in preparing for a forthcoming online course that I am running for the UN on Drafting Talking-Points and Speechwriting.

I found this handy list of horrors compiled a while back by Scott Berkun, with help from his readers. This one is good:

Moscow, 1997. I was one of several speakers at a consumer electronics company-sponsored “thank you” dinner in a magnificent restaurant. Several important executives had flown in from Tokyo for the evening.

Thirty seconds into my talk, the doors burst open and six balaklava-hooded and heavily armed OMON troops moved into the room. They did not speak. Neither did I.

Four of them occupied the corners of the room while two headed directly for a table on the far side, AK-47s drawn. They grabbed a man at table, stood him up, and marched him out of the dining room. All quiet, the remaining four sidled out.

I finished my talk. The Tokyo executives never returned to Moscow.

Plus this one, where a speaker looks frankly at her own mistakes and the ghastliness of having a live Twitter feed on screens in the room while she was talking:

I walked off stage and immediately went to Brady and asked what on earth was happening. And he gave me a brief rundown. The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast.

My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that’s not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked. And responding the exact opposite way the audience wanted me to.

This pushed the audience to actually start critiquing me in the way that I was imagining it was. And as Brady went on, he said that it started to get really rude so they pulled it to figure out what to do. But this distracted the audience and explains one set of outbursts that I didn’t understand from the stage. And then they put it back up and people immediately started swearing. More outbursts and laughter. The Twitter stream had become the center of attention, not the speaker. Not me.

Still, these are ordinary folk like you and me grappling with Reality on our own. What about US Secretary of State John Kerry in Paris, where he has hordes of experts flitting around him and still UTTERLY MESSES UP.

Thus:

The planet gawps at the spectacle of US Secretary of State John Kerry descending on hapless French President Hollande (who has enough to worry about these days without weird foreigners embarrassing him in public) and hug-kissing him in no little profusion.

As if this were not enough, John Kerry brought with him to Paris James Taylor to play “You’ve Got a Friend in Me”. But this highest-profile gesture of American solidarité after the Paris terrorist attacks was bungled: the organisers made the rookie error of not checking and re-checking before the performance started that the practical sound arrangements were working. Watch the whole ghastly spectacle unfold here.

Poor James Taylor is perched high on a stool but hunched awkwardly over a useless microphone so that you can’t see his face. John Kerry stands there in ill-suppressed tension. As diplomatic self-mutilations go, this is right up there.

What is happening in all this awfulness?

…

The way these gestures of support were managed was unforgivably incompetent: there is almost nothing worse in professional diplomacy than teeing up something apparently smart and ‘different’, but then messing up on the day.

But more than that, the underlying emotional logic was misplaced. The whole effort was aimed at satisfying American embarrassment on American terms, not at showing respect for France itself in its current difficulties.

It’s like a man who somehow disgraces himself on a first date with a sensible woman, then rushes around pestering her with huge bunches of flowers and other over-ostentatious gifts to express his remorse.

The insistent profusion of the man’s remorse is more annoying than the original mistakes. What the woman wants – and in fact will value far more – is a quiet sincere apology and maybe when she asks for it a frank discussion on what went wrong and why, to get things back on track.

In this case imagine how much better it would have been for US diplomacy had John Kerry strode up to President Hollande and simply shaken his hand with a private warm word of greeting, then gone indoors for tough exchanges on how Washington and Paris can work together to tackle those fanatics. No kissing or hugging. No awkward elderly songsters whose microphone fails. Deal with the issue by striking a firm, businesslike tone and letting the outcome of the talks be the story.

As so often in speechwriting as in the choreography of public encounters at the highest level of diplomacy, less is more. And above all, remember that in any relationship it’s not all about you and your feelings.

This latest episode is instructive from many operational points of view. But above all because it shows the Obama Administration being so self-absorbed.

The whole point of diplomacy is patiently building relationships. But to build a relationship you need to think about the people other than yourself who are in it!

President Hollande might or might not not have welcomed this abrupt overbearing kissy bear-hug of faux US solidarity. Did anyone on the US side bother to ask him how this high-profile public encounter might best be handled to mutual advantage and a shared classy outcome? I doubt it. Hence embarrassment for both sides, as the tone and substance of this public Kerry/Hollande greeting were both inappropriate:

And above all, remember that in any relationship it’s not all about you and your feelings.

As for not getting the sound system and other details right for the James Taylor moment, that was unpardonable incompetence by the State Department. Mind you, Americans have high-level form when it comes to getting things bewilderingly wrong on the protocol front.

Conveying important messages in public and private as the heart of diplomacy? All human life is there.