When your audience is a government minister, an NGO director, or a UN assembly — and you have five minutes — every word has to earn its place.
ATscale is the Global Partnership for Assistive Technology — a UN-mandated initiative working to ensure that the one billion people who need assistive devices (wheelchairs, hearing aids, prosthetics, communication tools) can access them. Their work is not desk work. Their work is people work: partnerships with governments, cities, NGOs like Médecins Sans Frontières and the ICRC, and international institutions.
Every day, the team presents, argues, negotiates, and pleads their case to decision-makers who control funding, policy, and access. Sometimes they have a full meeting. Sometimes they have five minutes at the annual gathering of NGOs in New York to make a case that will — or won't — result in a partnership worth millions of beneficiaries.
The stakes are real. The audiences are demanding. And the protocol of speaking in political and diplomatic spaces adds a layer of complexity that most communication training simply ignores.
The CEO had a TEDx talk coming up in Geneva — a public platform with global reach. But more than a great talk, he needed a mission narrative: something crafted well enough to work on the TEDx stage, but versatile enough to become the go-to introduction for ATscale in any meeting, at any level, in any country. Not a script. A framework.
The team had a different problem. They were already good communicators — intelligent, mission-driven, and deeply expert. But expertise is not the same as influence. In high-stakes environments with five-minute windows, protocol constraints, and audiences who've seen dozens of pitches that day, the difference between being heard and being forgotten is not content. It's delivery, structure, and clarity under pressure.
The program had to work across both levels: one leader's very public, very visible talk — and an entire team's day-to-day advocacy in some of the most demanding rooms in international development.
The program was designed as a sequence: CEO coaching first, to model the work and build a shared reference point, then the full team in an intensive two-day workshop, then a follow-up session three weeks later to consolidate, adjust, and deepen.
We worked together to craft a TEDx talk that would work in two registers simultaneously: as a polished, ideas-first public talk for a TEDx Geneva audience — and as a structured mission narrative that the CEO could compress, expand, or adapt for any introduction, pitch, or bilateral meeting.
The talk wasn't just prepared for the event. It was designed to become a permanent tool — a crystallised articulation of why assistive technology matters, who ATscale is, and what it's asking of its partners. That kind of dual-use talk requires a different level of architecture than a standard keynote.
The full team of eight came together for an intensive two-day program covering the complete communication arc: message clarity and audience mapping, structural frameworks for different formats (five-minute pleas, bilateral meetings, formal addresses), delivery under protocol constraints, and handling the questions that come after.
A significant portion of both days was dedicated to practice — real presentations, live feedback, filmed delivery, and iteration. Not role-playing hypotheticals. Practicing the actual conversations and formats the team faces in their real work: a pitch to a ministry of health, an address to a UN sub-committee, a bilateral with an ICRC programme lead.
Three weeks after the main workshop, we came back for a full day together. By then, the team had applied what they'd learned in real situations — real meetings, real presentations, real audiences. That practical experience gave the follow-up session a depth it couldn't have had immediately after the workshop.
We reviewed what had worked, addressed what hadn't, deepened the structural and delivery work on the areas that needed reinforcement, and gave each person individualised coaching time. This is where the real consolidation happens — not in the intensity of the workshop, but in the integration that follows it.
In international development, the room is rarely neutral. Whether addressing a UN assembly, a government delegation, or a ministerial panel, there are protocols — spoken and unspoken — about how you take the floor, how direct you can be, how much you can push. Violating those norms, even unintentionally, can undermine the very credibility you're trying to build.
A specific thread running through both workshop days and the follow-up was the balance between persuasive directness and diplomatic register — how to advocate forcefully while respecting the conventions of the space. That combination is not common in communication training. For ATscale, it was essential.
The CEO's TEDx talk became a living asset — used not just for the event, but as the basis for his mission introductions, bilateral presentations, and media appearances. One crafted piece of communication. Reused in dozens of contexts.
The full team developed shared communication tools — a common framework for message architecture and structure, applied individually to each person's real formats and real audiences.
Confidence in high-stakes advocacy contexts — participants reported feeling significantly more equipped to hold the floor in political and diplomatic environments, without sacrificing either impact or protocol.
One of ATscale's programme managers was presenting at a large international congress in another country. After he finished, a senior official approached him — unprompted — to tell him that his had been by far the most interesting and engaging presentation of the day.
It was the first time in his career that someone had come to compliment him specifically on his delivery, his presence, his power as a speaker. Not what he said. How he said it.
— ATscale Programme Manager, international congress
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