Here is an analogy that I came up with today: Speaking is like surfing and the audience is the wave.

Let me explain what I mean:
Get ahead of the audience and you crash. (Just like a surfer will crash if he or she gets ahead of the wave.)

Get behind the audience and they get bored and move on, leaving you dead in the water (Just like a surfer will be left behind if the wave moves on without him or her.)

But ride the audience just perfectly and the energy that is in this big group of people will propel you forward and give you the ride you are looking for. (Just like how a great surfer will ride a wave.)

It also means that just as a surfer need to become one with a wave, we as speakers need to become one with our audience.

Today I caught a great wave.

I did a speech for the global marketing team of Tata Communications who had gathered for a conference in beautiful Kerala, India.

Before my speech my client had warned me about how the speaker that they had had the day before had not been able to connect with the audience and how that had resulted in a bad session with a disconnected group of people not listening to the speaker.

Hearing that the previous speaker had had a tough time might not be what you would like to hear just before you go up to give a speech, but for me it worked as positive fuel. It reminded me of the need to connect with the audience and ride through the speech together with them.

So what did I do?

I focused on really feeling the energy of the room, listened in on the mood of the group and pushed the audience just so far as they would let me.
And just like how a surfer needs to paddle fast in the beginning to catch the wave a speaker needs to build up just enough momentum in the beginning of the speech to get just a little bit ahead of the audience – but not too much – so that the audience will want to carry the speaker forward.

It worked.

The feedback from the client afterwards was : “I think this is the first time ever we have had a standing ovation at one of our conferences. (Fredrik is) scary likeable, and it was an amazing session.”

I am happy the client was happy – but a great speech is really a cooperation between the speaker and the audience.

They might have thought that it was an “amazing session” – but I also thought it was “an amazing audience”.

I am surprised when I read advice to novice speakers telling them to “pretend that the audience is naked” or “pick on person in the audience who looks like she likes you and speak to her.”. To be advice like that is making the speaker pretend that the audience is something it is not. I think that is terrible advice.

Instead I think speakers should try to get as much feel as possible about how the audience is really feeling, how it is reacting to the speakers message, how they are processing what you say. In other words: “dance” together.

Here is an observation: “A speech will never be greater than its audience.”

The audience is playing an important role in building the experience that a speech will deliver.

When you realise that as a speaker you get better at feeling the energy. And you get a deep respect for the massive power and influence that an audience has on a speech. Just like a surfer will have big respect for the power of the wave.

Today at the EY Global Mobility Conference there were two keynote speakers: Me – and a robot.

When I came into the conference ballroom and saw the very robotic looking robot standing there I said to the client, just half jokingly, “Today there is pressure for me to perform; if I get beaten by a robot in the evaluations I might consider quitting this job on the spot…”

The robot was there to highlight the rapid changes in the industries of AI, robotics and machine learning and the hosts of the conference used it to perform a “dialogue” between themselves and some (pre-prepared) answers from the robot.

Based on the robots “performance” I will reflect on what makes a “live”, as in “real, human, emotional” speaker great.

– Move.
This particular robot did not have the ability to walk and seeing “him” stand still in the corner of the stage through out the speech made “it” look very much like a machine. I am a big believer in walking around on stage. It should not be done “according to a plan” and it should not be “deliberate”, but a speaker should let himself (or herself) be “drawn” to different sides of the stage as the energy of the room dictates.

– Do not move too much.
This robot moved his arms around a lot while speaking. It was very distracting. Body language should support your “speaking-language” but not take over. Too much body language is like when the drummer (or bass player) of a band think they are too important and start to take over. All you are left with is a blunt message drowning out everything else. Same with hand gestures and facial expressions (and props for that matter) – use it for support, not as your main act.

– Do not give canned answers.
As it would have it the person who controlled the robot happened to press the wrong button making the robot look silly when it to the question: “What else can you help us with?”, replied “Thank you for inviting me to this conference. I wish you a great day.”.

Some speakers seems to go into a similar “canned reply” almost regardless of what the audience has asked. That makes them look like robots.
The magic in audience interaction is the fact that we do NOT know what is going to happen. Assuming that you do will just risk making you look silly. (This is important to remember since many, many times we CAN predict what the questions are going to be, making it extra important to pay attention (just like how it’s easy to have a car accident on a road you have driven many times, because you get fooled into thinking you “know” what is going to happen because you know the road so well.

– Interact with the audience.

The more experienced I become as a speaker the more sure I am about the fact that the one thing that makes a speaker great is how he or she interacts with the audience. The robot did not do that at all. And many speakers do not do it at all either. And speakers who do not interact at all might as well be robots – or videos.

Should there be a point of having a person live in the room speaking then make sure you make sure you use the most powerful rhetorical weapon we have as speakers: our ability to interact with other humans.

Those where some of the thoughts I got after going up on stage after a robot for the first time today.

ps. Will robots take over also the job of a professional speaker in the future?

They might very well, but we are not there yet.

Having said that after I and the robot had delivered our speeches about 4 people came up wanting to take a picture with me, and about 20 people went up to have their pictures taken with the robot… Seeing the audience line up to have their pictures taken with the robot really did get me to want to up-my-game as a speaker – having said that I do think I still got more future business from the conference than the robot. Human speakers are, at least for a while more, in demand. 😉

It is my experience that when a client books me for a keynote they already know why they want me to speak. Usually someone at the client have heard me speak before and wants me to give the same message (or similar) to what they heard to this new group that they are booking me for.

And since I speak globally I can almost never meet up with the client beforehand to be briefed, so the brief happens on the phone, usually in a conference call that is shorter than one hour.

But even if the brief is short, that doesn’t mean you can not do your fair share of research to find out more about the group you are speaking to.

Let me exemplify with the group I spoke for today: The global management conference of Grant Thornton: 140 CEO’s of the different member companies of Grant Thornton from 100+ different countries.

I had a briefing call with the client on the phone. (to get the gist of what they wanted to get out of my speech and to learn more about the group.)

I then asked to get (and got) all the material that the delegates to the conference would receive. (so that I could put my speech in context with the rest of the conference.)

I also asked for (and got) their strategy documents, and any other documents that would be relevant for this conference. (To learn where the company is now and where they are heading.)

I, of course, googled the clients name to read up on the latest news about the company and went to their website etc to get a feel for how they communicate with the external world (So to be able to use references to relevant things that was going on in their company or industry.)

I asked for (and got) the slides of the speaker who would speak before me. (So that I could get a feeling of what the audience would have heard just before I got up on stage.)

I got a second briefing meeting with the global CEO on Sunday when he had arrived in Singapore.  (To get his view on what he wanted me to achieve with my talk.)

I then arrived early today to listen to the CEO practice his speech to the audience that he would deliver AFTER my speech (So that I could align my speech with the speech he would be doing later, and also to get a feeling of the room from the perspective of the audience.)

I also grabbed a few attendees before my session to hear their view of the company. (To make sure the brief from HQ was in line with what the delegates thought about the company.)

In the coffee brake before my speech I got a hold of the speaker who had spoken before me (on branding) to test the message that I was going to deliver. (So that I could be sure that the audience would feel that our two messages where in line with each other.)

I had a short chat with one of the members of the board to make sure I got the boards view on the direction of the company to make sure my speech fitted well with that.

And so on.

All of these “brief extra briefings” make my overall understanding of my assignment much deeper.

Lesson: Doing research for a keynote is not necessarily about spending hours and hours in briefing meetings, or on the Internet – it’s about doing many different kinds of connections with the client to learn as many different things as possible about the company, the industry, the audience, and the room.

 

(Picture of me outside convention centre with the purple theme of the conference, wearing a purple shirt, since one person in one of the briefings before the convention had used the phrase “the purple people” about the employees of Grant Thornton and because I had seen a few of the delegates on Sunday wearing purple clothes even before the convention started. So thought I should “live the brand.”)