Speaker 1: Hey, my name's Scott Kersner. I'm a journalist. I'm a CEO and co-founder of a company called Innovation Leader. I'm a public speaker, and I've also moderated, I think, more panels than most people at all kinds of conferences, from conferences like South by Southwest, to the Consumer Electronics Show, to National Association of Broadcasters events, to academic events at Harvard Business School or MIT. And I want to talk in this really short video about how I use an index card, just one index card, when I go up on stage to moderate a panel. And I know you're going to think this sounds a little bit crazy, like, don't you need a whole yellow legal pad or an iPad full of introductions and questions and plans? Well, I bet you've seen people moderating panels when they have a yellow legal pad with 28 pages of notes. And every time they're getting ready to ask a question, they're paging through it, flipping through all the pages, looking for that really brilliant question that's on page 26 of their pad, or they're scrolling through the iPad and clicking and looking for some data point that they're going to mention in a question. And it totally just takes them out of the flow of the panel. And it just, it doesn't feel authentic. They're not there with the panelists. They kind of, you know, you drown in your notes. And so I actually think the index card creates a really great constraint and forces you to really be present as part of the panel and also forces you to do some thinking and preparation in advance to condense everything down to this index card. So I want to talk about really just the eight things that I write down on the index card, the eight different elements. You'll see in the upper right-hand corner, I usually write down the time that the panel is supposed to run. You know, this is a one-hour panel. I might put my iPhone in my pocket and set it to vibrate at 1120 or 1125, just to let me know that I'm approaching the end of the panel. Or I might ask the conference organizer or a friend in the audience to give me the 10-minute left sign or the five-minute left sign, just so I'm aware of needing to wrap up. The first box there is Intro Me. It's a reminder just to introduce myself because sometimes you're thrown on stage at the beginning of a session and they just say, and now for our panel on the future of artificial intelligence, please welcome our moderator and panelists, and they forget to introduce you. The next thing is my goal. I like to set a really concrete goal for what I'm going to try to achieve during this hour-long session. I think it's great to say things like, I want this to be the best panel you've ever been to on the future of AI, and we're going to pack a lot of insights into this hour, but I need your help to achieve this goal, so get your questions ready. That might be something that I would say in this section of starting the panel. The third thing is a reminder, even before I introduce the panelists, to get the audience involved in some way. Ask them to raise their hands or ask some people in the front row to tell me why did they come to this session? What do they hope to get out of it? Or sometimes it's asking people to applaud or boo if they disagree with two different statements. Applaud if you're bullish about the future of AI, boo if you think that there are lots of concerns and worries and problems, that sort of thing. The next is really short introductions of each panelist because I believe it's the moderator's job to introduce the panelists. Once you say, panelists, please introduce yourself, 20 minutes of the panel goes away, goes poof, as the panelists give you their entire life story from the moment they were born up until the moment they walked onto your stage. It's terrible. So you introduce them really briefly. Then flipping to the back of the card, there's some space for questions. I really think with a good panel, if you can fit five, six, seven questions on the back of this card, that is probably enough for an hour. If you have too many questions, you use up all the time and you don't leave any time for the audience to ask questions. Or maybe sometimes you can let the panelists ask questions of each other. They often have really good questions. The next is a reminder for audience Q&A time, and that could happen at the half hour mark. You could start opening it up for audience questions and keep weaving in questions of your own. If there aren't a lot of audience questions, or you might wait till the 15 minute left mark, but I always like to create time for audience Q&A. Then finally, what are the things you have to say when you're wrapping up this panel before you conclude? Now let's look with my really terrible handwriting at a card, what one of these cards might look like filled out. You'll see I have my introduction. I would say something like, hey everyone, I'm Scott Kersner, CEO of Innovation Leader and a columnist at the Boston Globe. I'm really excited to be moderating this panel today about planning the ultimate summer vacation. My goal, we just have one hour together, but my goal is to give you the best possible advice for planning the ultimate vacation this summer. I'm going to need your help. I'm going to need lots of questions from you. I want to make time throughout the hour. If you ever want to raise your hand or go up to one of the microphones in the aisle, we will weave your questions in. Next is this audience involvement checkbox. There I might ask the audience to applaud if you've already planned a vacation. Then you'll see I might ask a couple people, okay, if you applauded, where are you going this summer? Would you tell us and ask people to pop up? Maybe there's someone who's going to run a microphone around to them, or if you're in a small enough room, you can just hear. People, get three, four, five people to tell you where they're going on summer vacation. That actually could be interesting later as you start getting into the panel to get your panelists to respond. Do you have any advice on someone who's going to the Amalfi Coast for their summer vacation or someone who's going to Big Sur or someone who's going to Tokyo? The next checkbox is introducing your panelists. I like really short introductions. Nobody cares where the panelists went to college and went to high school and where they grew up. I would say something like, our first panelist is Bert Mooney. He is the CEO of Go Now Travel, and he's also the author of a really fantastic book. It's a great reference. It's called The Summer Vacation Guide 2019. Next down to my left is Carla Santorini. She is the resident travel expert at Triparama.com, which is a website that I use really often. I find it super helpful. Then finally, Jenna Reynolds is a seasoned world traveler from the city of Phoenix. She's also a diamond medallion status traveler on Delta. I'm jealous of Jenna and her status. Please welcome these three amazing panelists. Saying please welcome or please give a warm round of applause. Sometimes the audience needs to know when they're supposed to applaud, so don't be afraid to tell them. Then on the back, you'll see I've given thought to what are all the possible questions that you could ask somebody about planning a summer vacation and really boiled it down here to this is probably five or six, seven really good questions. Now, could you have a second index card with more questions on it? Yes, you could bring a second index card up with you. Maybe you write even bigger than my messy handwriting, and you need a second card because you're going to use the back for a mix of bios and questions, and then you need more space for the audience Q&A and wrap up stuff. Two cards is okay. I think once you start getting to a stack of index cards, the full deck, it might become a problem. But as you can see, my questions are things like, how did you plan your last vacation? So nice specific question. What sites or planning tools do you recommend or do you use most often? What creates the conditions for great vacations? What about bad vacations? And then I'm planning to get the panelists to tell some horror stories of their worst vacations or vacation nightmare type things that happened and maybe how they dealt with it. It's always fun to get people to share anecdotes and stories. And one way to make sure that the panelists are going to have some good stories ready is send them these questions in advance by email or when you're on site at the conference facility just to stand with them in the hallway or the green room and run past them to say like, hey, one thing I want to ask is how did you plan your last vacation? And I also want to make sure you have a good vacation horror story that you can tell. And that ensures that you're not putting people on the spot when you ask it on stage. And then you can see my last question is, where would you look to save money on your summer vacation? And where would you look to spend it and maybe be a little more lavish? Then there's a reminder of audience Q&A time and making sure that you bring the audience in. One good pro tip about this is not to just suddenly say, okay, we have 15 minutes left. I'd love to have audience questions now, but to give them a little bit of a warning or a heads up. So before you get to these last questions about where to save money or spend it, say, I have just two more questions that I would like to ask the panelists and then we're going to take your questions. So please get your questions ready so that you don't have kind of the whiplash of going to audience Q&A and everybody is deathly silent and trying to think up a question. And then finally, the wrap up. I'm not a big fan of trying to sum up everything that happened in the hour. I think if it was a good hour, it was a good hour and people took some notes and they got a lot out of it. I'm also not a fan of letting people give a last thought, a parting thought at the end of the panel. I mean, if you have a really good question, you know, maybe you want to close this panel on summer vacations with like, what's one place that's on your bucket list that you haven't been for a summer vacation and kind of do that as a quick lightning round at the end. That could be a good wrap up question. And then to wrap up, I would usually say something like, we're just about out of time. I want to thank these fantastic panelists for sharing all their advice with us. I want to thank the organizers of this conference who invited me to moderate. And also, I want to thank you for all your really wonderful questions. Please, one more big round of applause for my panelists. And that's how I would use an index card to moderate a panel discussion. Good luck the next time you moderate a panel discussion. And I'd love to see any thoughts or different approaches you have or tell me how this worked for you in the comments below. Thanks.