Most Speakers Are Management Porn

The Business of Infogasms.

I’m lucky. And blessed. I travel the world helping leaders and managers succeed with helpful tips, insights, and helping them work smarter, not harder. Through keynotes, workshops, books, and more.

At least that’s what I tell myself, and what the event coordinators tell me, and what the evaluations tell me.

But if I were truly honest, and if I was willing to lose the gigs and fees... ("Hi. My name is Bill. I'm a Management Porn Addict.")... I’d tell many clients and many event producers to stop it! STOP IT!

While there are some truly amazing exceptions, most of us are part of an ever-worsening management porn industry — providing quick, transient highs of workgasms through engaging, entertaining, and motivating talks that feel amazing, and will be fondly remembered like a first lover, but will only rarely change what we'd hoped to change.

Mostly, this isn't the speaker's fault or the attendee's. The problem is how the events are designed, promoted, and how the speakers market works.

For example, most of us know TED talks as powerful ideas worth sharing that can and do change the world. But the vast majority of us have only experienced TED through its videos. We're only getting the infogasm portion. The real power of TED (and BIF, 99U, Ignite, The Moth, PopTech, and all the amazing events like them) are the deep and profound connections and conversations that happen face-to-face, in-between the talks, with the presenters and with all others at the event.

The Real Power Is When the Ideas Have Sex (multiplying effects), and with the Person2Person Connections AFTER the Infogasms

I know this firsthand. I was among the first to pay for a teenager to attend TED. My son, Ian, accompanied me twice in the early 2000s. At the time, he was working on becoming an Eagle Boy Scout. He ran up to Eve Ensler (playwright, Vagina Monlogues) and declared, “You have to help the Boy Scouts with sex education! They suck at it!” And then he walked past Matt Groening (Simpsons creator), to talk artistic integrity with playwright Neil Simon. And then he talked with inventor Dean Kamen about how Kamen's robot competition, FIRST, was changing how students like him learned. Those two TEDs, when Ian was with me, remain among my proudest moments as a dad.... Watching how the ideas from the stage, and how the generous people behind those ideas, were seeping into and influencing and becoming part of who Ian was as a teenager, and who he would become as an adult.

You’ve surely experienced something similar, for yourself or your teammates. When the true magic of the moment wasn't really the presentation, it was what happened because of that talk.

The real power of what happens with speakers’ talks is what happens with the talks after the talks. But so few conferences are designed for that. So few speakers are enlisted in that. So few event producers and business execs get that.

If We Are Serious About Getting Out of the Porn Business, We’d Change How We Hire and Use Speakers   

Here’s a modest four-step proposal (updated from a similar past post)…

1. Start with the End in Mind: With a Specific and Bold Point of View About the Topic

Most events need to deliver far more value than they do today. Everybody gets only 1,440 minutes on any given day. You’re about to use 45 of those precious and limited minutes (one keynoter) or up to one-third of that 1,440 (for a full day event). How will your event's point of view be so valuable for that attendee that they will gladly give you that time? How will your event change their life or their work or both? What point of view will all your presenters give that the attendees couldn’t get anywhere else? How will your point of view and designs for the day help the attendees change what they actually do every day?

Note how different this is from the standard approach: Usually, the event producer focuses on popular business topics and then searches for the best speaker to address each topic. Topics that won’t offend and that are fairly safe to attract the largest possible audience. Rarely is the design of the day or the interactions of ideas intended to truly provoke, reimagine, or reinvent.

This usually results in good, motivational, infogasms.

Not bad. But not good enough.

Instead, turn everything upside down: Work backwards from the attendee’s actual work. And have a specific point of view about that work and what needs to change, provoking hearts and minds in completely new ways. Then, find the speaker whose expertise and point of view and approach best matches yours, and who will focus on what attendees will be doing differently for the next couple months after their talk.

2. Help the Speaker Connects the Dots

Speaker: “Here’s how what I learned (insert speaker’s insights here) applies to how you do your work...” (Insert detailed how to's or recommendations or next steps.)

I have found that while not all attendees need these dots connected, most do. For example, they might be motivated by the speaker’s trek up Mount Everest, but then have no idea how to translate that courageous trek into changing how they run meetings or implement a plan.

Good speaker porn can be ohhhh-so-good, but events need to do a lot more to connect all the dots so attendees can better leverage what they just learned and experienced.

3. Design the Most Powerful Part: After the Speaker Speaks

This is where the attendees brainstorm, among themselves, how to change their attitudes/beliefs/habits to leverage what they just learned from the speaker.

Either formally: Designing brainstorms focused on helping attendees think through what they'll change in the next 30-90 days. That way, they're re-writing their To Do list before they leave the event. Or leave it informal, yet still designed: TED post-talk conversation blocks last as long as the presentation blocks, and the conversation spaces are intentionally designed to have attendees connect with others and their ideas.

Let's be honest: 1, 2, 3 above is not rocket science. It's a simple three-step process that's commonsensical: How we connect with ideas, and then act on them.

But 1, 2, 3 above are crucial because most events are not delivering enough useful value: Most of the attendees will go right back to their workaday routines after the rah-rah stuff. So that means: Part of our (all speakers and everyone who hires us) responsibility must be to make it easier for everyone to start building new ways of doing things based on what they just heard.

4. Rethink, Reimagine, and Reinvent Evaluations

Most conference/event evaluations keep us within the world of management porn: "Was it good for you? When the speaker's idea touched your special spot, would you rank that touch as 1Meh, 2, 3, 4, or 5RockedMyWorld?"

We need evals with categories like: Changed My Mind; Disrupted My Thinking; Usability of Ideas; Ease of Implementation of Ideas; Conversation/Breakouts Helped Me Use the Ideas I Heard; How Much I'll Disrupt Myself Because of This Event; I Got At Least 3 Ideas That I Will Use Immediately, etc.

Most evaluations measure the wrong things — SmileSheet Gasm-ometers that keep us in Management Porn Purgatory.

Let’s start a movement to finally get speakers out of the idea porn business. Let's make more of a difference, create more value for whatever portion of everyone's 1,440 we use. 

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Bill Jensen Site, Twitter, FB. Bill’s latest book, Future Strong, is about the five deeply personal choices each of us must make to be ready for all the disruptive tomorrows heading our way. Whenever he presents, he tries to create the value described in this post. He's a two-time TEDx presenter, and a dozen-plus TED main stage attendee.