Speaker 1: Hey there, it's James Taylor here, keynote speaker on creativity, innovation and future trends. Today I'm in Cancun, Mexico. I was the closing keynote speaker at an international management conference here for one of Europe's biggest companies. And I just want to share with you just now a little bit about the process that goes into writing and preparing and delivering a keynote. So this is maybe useful for you if you're looking to book a keynote speaker so you can understand the kind of questions to ask them and help them prepare so they can give the best possible keynote for your audience. But maybe you're watching this, you are a keynote speaker, and maybe you just want a little bit of insight into how I prepare and deliver. Now, it's not the same for every keynote speaker, everyone does things a little bit different. In my case, my keynotes tend to be quite tailor-made for the client, it's very bespoke, so no one speech is ever the same. I know other speakers who are good friends of mine who basically give the same speech every single time with very small changes at the edges. And that works for them, and that's perfect for the kind of thing that they talk about. For me, it doesn't work as much because I usually touch a little bit more on future trends, so those are always moving. And also, I really like to understand the organization. So let me give you a little bit of the background. I'm going to share what I call the tailor's seven Ts for preparation for a keynote. And in this case, the client came to us in November, I'm now in February as I'm filming this today. So they came a few months ahead of notice, and we had what we call a discovery call, first of all. And on that discovery call, we're basically just making sure that we're the right fit for each other. Usually at that stage, they may be looking for a few other speakers, maybe talking to a few other speakers, just trying to get the perfect speaker for their event. Now, on that discovery call, the first thing that we're doing is we're trying to find out, first of all, I'm trying to find out what is the topic for their event, what was it that attracted them to me. In this case, the topic that they wanted to bring me in for was to talk about innovation. Now, innovation is a really broad topic. So on that first call, really what I'm doing is I'm starting to just go dig in a little bit more and just get a bit of an understanding, like what the organization is, what their goals are, what their objectives are for their event, about the audience, a couple of other questions as well. So once you've kind of defined that, the topic, the other thing I'm asking about is the theme. So we've got topic, first T, theme is the second one. Now, the topic and theme will be very different things. So in this case, the topic was innovation, and the theme was called destination now, which might not make any sense, but I asked them, like, what does that actually mean for you? And so we kind of went into detail on what the theme is for that event. But often, what I'm already starting to do when I'm thinking and talking to the client, I'm starting to think about what is the sub-theme or sub-themes that I want to build my keynote around. So you have the topic, innovation, you have the theme for the event, and then you have the sub-themes. And I'm really, I'm trying to find what are those red threads that I can put right across my presentation that will echo what their objectives are and what they're trying to do. So there's the first call. And then, so you have the conversation, and then they go away, have a think about it. And in this case, usually what I think I did as well is I had another follow-up call with some of the other senior leadership, and we had another conversation, and they went, yep, that's great. James, we want you, which is fantastic. I was very pleased that they wanted me to come and speak at this event. Then what we do is we do what we call pre-event call. And on that pre-event call, I want to try and have all the decision makers on this call. So on that call, there was about eight people on the call, including the CEO, and that's a very big company. It's got over 90,000 employees, so it's kind of very difficult to get time with the CEO, the main person. But this was the senior leadership event. There's 170 people here, all the most senior people from this organization. So this CEO had a very definite thing that he wanted to make push, and my role, I had to support what the CEO was trying to do in this event. So we had a conversation. I also had a conversation there with some of the other people that are related to it in some of the different operational areas of the business. And on that pre-event call, what I'm doing is I'm going through a whole bunch of questions. I've already sent them a document in advance. I've asked them for their brand guide. I've looked into, maybe I've looked into the annual report, as it's a publicly traded company. I've spent time on their website. I've kind of started to understand a little bit initially about the company. So that's the first side. And then once we've done that, I usually, and once again, not all speakers do this level of preparation. So please don't confuse this. If you're a speaker just now, you don't do this level, then I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm just, this is what works for me. I like to be over-prepared when I step on stage. So what I then do is I ask to speak to two or three audience members in advance. So the client organized for me to speak to, in this case, this company had three main divisions of the business, and I spoke to someone in one part of the division who was very new into the organization, someone that was in the kind of fastest growing part of the business that I had a conversation with, and also someone that was more, that's been in the business for a long, long time. So I can understand what they've heard before, what is resonating with them just now. So once you've done those calls, you've got a whole bunch of other notes and other understandings about what this client needs, what the challenges are. Which brings me to the next T, which is the target audience. So you might think that the target audience initially is that CEO, or that those people have had that first pre-event call. But for me, I'm always thinking about what's called an 80-10-10 rule, 10% of people in any audience are hopefully going to love your stuff, regardless, they're going to just completely go for it. 10% of the audience will probably not resonate for whatever reason with your topic and what you speak about. But for me, I focus on the 80% in the middle, how to win that bulk, how to win that 80%. So what I'm doing is I'm really kind of trying to dig into what is important to that 80%. And for me, that's the target audience, which is different necessarily from the person that's writing the check or paying you as well. So you have to kind of like triangulate a little bit. Obviously, the C-suite have their objectives. But for me, I want to make an impact of transformation in the room, support that C-suite's objectives, but really connect with that audience. And here's the other thing I do, which is a little bit different, most speakers don't do this, is I'll use an artificial intelligence to analyze the people in the room before I ever step in the room. So in this case, it's very easy to do to now. If I'm speaking for an association, all I need is that association's social media account, public social account, and then I can run that through an AI, and it'll basically give me the psychometric map. It basically tells me what the values of this audience is, what's important to this audience, what their hot buttons are as an audience. Now, in this case, I was very lucky because they were able to share with me in advance the list of delegates, the attendees. So I spent a little bit more time kind of looking at their social profiles. All this is publicly available information. Some of them have written articles for their trade magazines. I give all that stuff to the AI, and then it gives me the psychometric map of the audience. So this is really important. This means that I know that when I step on stage, I have a great understanding or a better understanding of the audience's business, what their business model, what the challenges are, but I also have an understanding of the softer stuff, like what is going to get them to resonate with the message that I'm trying to get across. And then what we do is about a week before the event, I'll walk the client through my presentation. I do it from my studio. And so there's no surprises for the client as a result. And at that point, that's a really interesting conversation. Most clients, when you do that, they go, great, fantastic, I'm doing an event actually tomorrow, and we did that. And it's like, don't change anything, perfect. But about 25% of clients you work with say, there's something not right here. We need to change this. Could we add more of this? We'd like to go more in detail on that. We don't need to cover that, because maybe another speaker at the event is covering that topic. So that is great. And in this case, with this client, they had a whole bunch of things that they said, oh, I wonder if we could a little bit focus on that. We don't need to cover this area so much, because that's not the strategy that we're going to unveil. It's not going to focus on that area so much now. So that allowed me just to tweak and to do. But even then, I still felt I was probably only about 90% there. And what the client did, which I think was really great, is they brought me in a few days in advance, and I just spent time with the team here. It was 170 people. I spent time just talking, having conversations over drinks, over dinners. And then I was going back every night to my hotel room, and I was tweaking my presentation again. So I would make small adjustments, small changes. I would hear something, a phrase that someone would say, so that when I get on stage, I could say, hey, when I was speaking to John yesterday, he was saying this is a key thing. Well, let me show you how you can blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that means I'm super prepared when I go on stage. So this kind of brings me to the next point. Even before, as I'm starting now to write the presentation, before I come on site, I'm thinking about my next T, which is the template or the structure of the presentation. There's loads of different structures you can use for having a presentation, but basically these are foundational blocks for your keynote. And you want to think about structure very carefully, and you differ structure depending on the thing you're trying to do. In this case, I had a very definite sense of the kind of structure of the keynote I wanted to do. I had 60 minutes, so that's a good amount of time, and I knew that I could do what I wanted to do in that time. So I created my structure, and you can watch other videos from me where I talk a little bit more about templates or the structures of a keynote. So we've covered topic, we've covered theme, we've covered template, and then the other thing I'm starting to think about now is, I've covered target audience, the other thing I'm starting to think about now is the tone. So because this is a global audience at this event, we had about 60% of the people here were from America, I would say 30% were from Europe, primarily Germany, and then the rest were from Latin America or Asia, different parts of the world. So that means that you have to go in with a certain kind of tone, I feel, because if I was speaking to purely an American audience or a Filipino audience, for example, I would probably go a little bit higher on the entertainment value of a keynote, because I tend to find that works a little bit better for those audiences. If I'm speaking purely to an Eastern European, more an Eastern European audience, I'll go a little bit more geeky, a bit more data-focused, really show evidence for everything I say. But this is a global audience, so you kind of have to find a tone. And in my case, the tone that I kind of opted for in the end was to go for quite fast slide changes to keep things moving at a very fast pace. That tends to appeal a little bit more to North American audiences. I find they like that kind of faster pace, it's almost like more TikTok style in what you're doing. But at the same time, in terms of actually the words that were coming out of my mouth and the evidence I was presenting, it was quite... It was a little bit more evidence-based than I would perhaps normally do. So you're trying to find that, you're trying to find what is the right tone for this. Humor is another way you can think... I know some people are very great humorists on stage, and they'll use humor right to the front. But what I'm doing in my keynote is I'm adding a little bit of humor right at the start for me to be able to test how far can I push it with this audience with humor. And I do two little things at the start, what I call a cold open of my keynote. And that basically tests, okay, how far can I push this? In this case, I was getting a bit of resonance there, but I also sensed they really wanted a bit of interactivity in that conversation. So as I went through my presentation, I'm still remaining flexible, agile, improvisational. But the tone I was going through was quite speedy, quite fast, but my language wasn't fast because this is an international audience. Many people here, English isn't their first language. So tone is the other critical thing. So we've covered tone, then we've really come to tempo is the other one, that pacing piece. As I mentioned, the pace was quite fast. I think this is a change that's happened after COVID, where before COVID, you could do a presentation and you could be sitting on a slide for five minutes talking about the thing in that slide. And it still works in some ways. But I tend to find now, our attention span has got a little bit shorter, maybe it's the TikTok thing again, younger generations coming into audiences, that I tend to be changing slides every 45 seconds or so. So that's quite fast. That's moving fast. I'm not speaking fast, but I'm keeping the visuals moving at a fast pace. I'm using a lot of video, a lot of interactivity. We also did some... I think we did three different levels of interactivity. I got them doing a little exercise in the room. So that changed the tempo a little bit. And then I did other things with the audience back and forth. And then we did Q&As at the end, live Q&As where the audience were asking questions using an app. And then the CEO also came up and asked a series of questions. So what have we covered? We've covered theme, we've covered topic, we've covered template, we've covered target audience, we've covered a tone, and we've covered tempo. So it brings me to the final T, technique. And when I say technique, this is everything that goes into preparing for when you deliver that presentation from a technical perspective. So this is how I use my voice on stage, how I use what we call blocking, how I decide in advance where I want to be at certain points of the presentations. I'm not pacing back and forth. There's nothing worse than a speaker pacing back and forth. So I can see, okay, at this point, I want to land this really important line here. I want to be up front on the stage, stage left. Something happened here at the event, early in the event, which was kind of quite dramatic for one of the other speakers, and she was standing at a certain point in the stage. And so I know as a speaker that I will not probably spend any time at that part of the stage, because people have kind of subconsciously made a connection with that part of the stage. So I actually moved away. So there's a little bit here about psychology, audience psychology as well. And then I'm also doing technique. This is things like alliteration, when you're speaking, the use of strategic pausing, pausing before you land an important line, pausing after you've landed a really important thing, being able to stop, to think, how you use your body, your physicality on stage. This is all technique, technique, technique. This is something you become better at over time. And so if you're going and finding any speaker, if you're a client and you're looking for any speaker, I would be looking a lot also at their technique, looking at a lot of the showreel videos, how good are they on stage. They might have a fantastic message, but if they can't communicate it well on stage and don't have what we call stagecraft, then it's not going to work as well. And actually, here's an interesting thing. There are people that are great virtual keynote speakers who can't really cut it on stage, and also people that are great in-person keynote speakers on stage, but can't really do it virtually. I actually do both, but there's actually very few people that can really make those changes as well. So that's the background of this event. Usually when I get to the event, in the morning of the event, I'll walk through the presentation on stage. We'll do the AV checks. We'll do all that stuff. And then you go up on stage, and you deliver it, and you do your thing. And it was lovely last night. It was an end-of-conference event, and we spent a really nice time together with all the people. People coming up with further questions, like, oh, I love that thing here, or that's got me thinking about here. And once again, that 80-10-10 rule, you're never going to win the entire audience with any speaker. It doesn't matter who it was. We were talking about here, I think, a benchmark here is someone like Simon Sinek, who I know a lot of speakers, the clients here really like Simon's work. And so even someone like Simon will go and speak on a stage, and he's not going to win 100% of the audience. So you have to be prepared for that. And it's always great, obviously, when you get the 10% of people who are really enthusiastic, and you're really speaking their language. But for me, I'm always more keen on trying to get that 80%, trying to change people's perception about a topic, to create a transformation in the room. That is my job, is to create that transformation for your audience in the room, whatever that thing. So it's creativity, innovation-related, collaboration-related, future trends, things like Metaverse, NFT, So hopefully that's useful for you, and give you a little bit of a background. It's a little bit of a longer video, but I was quite keen to do this because a lot of people have asked me, and they were asking me last night, how do you prepare? So I just kind of wanted to share that a little bit. And now what I'll do is I'll actually do my debrief, probably on the flight back, I'll look at the video, and just kind of watch and see if I can prove certain things. And then what I'll also do is the client will get feedback. I've already got, they did a polling thing yesterday, which came out really well, but I want to get some other types of feedback from them as well, some written feedback. And then often what I'll do is I'll do a case study. If you go to my website, jamestaylor.me, you'll find case studies from lots of my clients where it gives feedback on how they experience working with me. So hopefully that's useful. Please leave any comments, or feel free to reach out to me at the website, jamestaylor.me. My name's James Taylor, keynote speaker on creativity, innovation, and future trends. Thanks for watching.