How many keynotes have you listened to? Just a rough number will do. 10? 50? 100? A fair few, probably.

How many of them were good? 5? 10?

Okay, maybe “good” is too high a bar. How many of them had content that even just remember?

Yeah.

It’s not a great ratio, is it?

Some of this is the fault of the people giving the keynotes. But only a very little bit, because the bigger problem is with the format itself.

Imagine you’re sitting quietly in a room. Maybe you’re thinking of what you’ll have for dinner or whether your partner still loves you. Suddenly, a man gets up and walks to the front of the room. He proceeds to talk in very loud tones at you for an hour. Maybe he puts up a slide of the iPhone and tells you how innovative it is. Maybe there’s a quote from Simon Simek. And then at the end of the hour – he has been speaking unbroken for an hour! – he beams, bows, and thanks you.

How could this be anything other than a disaster?

There are very few things more boring than being talked at for an hour (or even longer). I hate it. I had to do that for decades at universities around the world, and when I was able to stop, I said a silent prayer of thanks to the gods.

So what on earth am I doing offering talks?

Well, I offer them in a way that makes sense to me.

First of all, I don’t do lectures. There’s no way I’m talking at you – and it really is at you – for an hour or even longer. I talk for 20 minutes, at an absolute push 30. If you want a longer talk, call Simon.

Second, I give talks as invitations. I offer interesting ideas, different points of view, provocations and challenges. These are already implicit invitations for the audience to stop consuming the talk and start participating in it instead. And then I make the explicit invitation – I throw open the floor for Q&A or discussion, as the circumstances allow. That’s where the real magic can happen.

Most lectures, you see, end conversations. My talks aim to get them started.