Interactive keynotes can blend the best of a high-impact keynote speech with the transformative power of a high-touch workshop. They are not right for every event, but when the ambitions of the gathering are clear—and the host organization has the right culture—they can deliver a far more concrete impact than any other keynote format.
However, they cannot be delivered successfully using the same approach that conventional keynotes are booked through. Find out how to get the very most out of your event with an interactive keynote by reading on.
Introducing The Interactive Keynote or Keynote + Workshop Element
Perhaps the greatest way to leverage your investment in a keynote speech and keynote speaker is with a workshop, whether an additional 2 hours or an additional 2 days. After all, as I say to my clients, if you're paying me to travel somewhere, and I can't do any other work that day, why not leverage my time, energy, cutting-edge thinking, and facilitation skills to put the ideas to work?
Combining keynotes with workshops encapsulates the ultimate participatory package. The seamless blend of inspiration and application creates an amazing ROI. Insights not only resonate but are transmuted into impact. Inspiration is transformed into concrete action. Workshop sessions really amplify the impact of an experiential keynote speech.
When a speaker incorporates interactive elements such as deep reflection—(with audience members invited to become vulnerable and authentic with what they ask—role-playing, working on live business and culture problems, the introduction of powerful transformation tools, innovation problem definition, or well-guided learning circles, they ground the ideas in the keynote into actual reality and drive progress toward meaningful change.
The Key Benefits Of Interactive Keynotes
With an interactive keynote (that usually includes workshop elements), the keynote itself becomes more than a talk: it becomes an anchor to ground a more transformational journey, a North Start to guide it, and an emotional context for the initiation of growth, learning, change, innovation, and/or transformation in an atmosphere of psychological safety and trust.
Reliably "warming up" a room as a keynote speaker takes a lot of skill, confidence, and experience. This warmth, this heat with a safe crucible-like container, is what is needed for personal and organizational change to occur. So why not leverage the heat and the energy it took to create it, to amplify the change that you're gathering to initiate?
A keynote used in this way can:
Help attendees people cognitively around a complex topic and difficult challenge so everyone has a shared sense of what it is, how it works, and any specific language or terms needed. This is why I often recommend them for a top 10-500 top leader event.
Help people come together emotionally into a resonant space where they feel safe, seen, and heard together.
Initiate a new strategic plan, innovation journey, or transformation process.
Signal a step change in a company culture or leadership culture.
Start a leadership development upgrade by developing a new micro-school.
Resolve tensions, anxiety, and relational ruptures from the past that are getting in the way of the present (this one takes more thinking about and skill to pull off).
The interactive keynote speaker must be dynamic and highly attuned to their audience’s signals, fostering a seamless flow of engagement and interactivity that makes a difference to all. They must be adept at reading the room and adjusting their tempo and tactics in real time to maintain audience engagement in the workshop exercises and tasks at hand.
This could include varying the complexity of activities based on the audience’s response, adeptly managing time, and doing expert experience design to ensure that each segment seamlessly integrates with the overall theme of the event.
After the keynote part, the speaker—assuming they have the IP, tools, and facilitation skills (which should never be assumed)—can introduce specific techniques and practices that take the (hopefully) big and bold ideas in the keynote and land them in the organization or association.
The tools and techniques I use—I have created tools from everything from defining business purpose to storytelling for leaders—turn theory into practice and big ideas into actionable changes that make a lasting difference.
Major Mistakes Are Easily Made With Workshop Sessions
Caveat emptor: a lot can go wrong with an interactive keynote, particularly if shortcuts are taken, and due diligence (on all sides) is not done. Without significant care, attention, and collaboration, you cannot get a major ROI win.
To own my own power, people have told me that the experiential and interactive keynotes I have given have been amazing. I have never met a client who did not thoroughly enjoy the creative and transformative workshops I have designed and facilitated (and I have delivered perhaps 1000 for corporations and institutions over the last 30 years).
But a few have been tough, either because the client was confused about their needs (and the implications of their needs) or because they did not understand how to leverage the workshop element properly in their event.
A few failed to launch due to problems with contracting that stemmed from clients (and bureau bookers) using old habits designed to procure classic 45-minute keynotes to book innovative keynote formats. This is a mismatch and a regular cause of failure.
Workshops Require A Duty Of Care That Keynotes Do Not
It is easy to make these mistakes. They can undermine the organization's goals and, far worse for change agents like myself who have a duty of care when doing change work, leave audience members “in process”: frustrated, confused, disappointed, or dejected.
Like baking a cake, we must avoid leaving attendees feeling or being half-cooked emotionally and psychologically.
Just as a therapist or coach has a duty of care to take care of their client’s emotional and psychological needs when intervening in their lives, so too does the quintet of event producer/conference owner, HR/culture owner, big boss, bureau booker, and keynote speaker.
I am not sure many people realize this, and ignorance of how change happens best in people can have dangerous consequences.
Remember: the more impact you want, the more you will need to intervene in people’s lives. That means disturbing, sensitively, and with care, their established (but often outdated) mindsets, their coping behaviors, and their emotional landscape. Breakthroughs don't happen without the old breaking down. This can be done wisely, with care, or it can happen to people, that doesn't feel so good.
Therefore, it is my sincere belief that inexperienced event managers, HR reps, main clients, and bureau professionals need the advice of seasoned facilitators—who really get the difference between a straight keynote and something more powerful—to make workshop elements work and to avoid costly errors and psychological dangers.
Most keynote speakers simply do not have the requisite skills, training, or experience to take people on a journey of change, even if it is only 2 hours long.
How To Get An Interactive Keynote, Or Keynote With Workshop, Right
Context Is Queen: Without deep and broad context, high-impact interactive keynotes with workshop elements are impossible to get right. If you don’t have time or inclination to fully brief your speaker and then let them go deeper by asking penetrating questions so they really grasp the context they are working into, this format is probably not for you. Likewise, if the speaker is neither curious about nor able to handle the complexities of your business and people context, they are probably not right for this format.
Coherence Is Essential: Without internal alignment and then alignment with the event producers, bureau bookers, bureau ops people, and keynote speaker (and their back office), failure is likely. This can be both embarrassing to the client and damaging to top participants. If the speaker/facilitator (and ideally seasoned bureau booker) is experienced, let them help you to find coherence around the purpose of the event, the ambitions for the engagement, and the ideal outcomes required so that the format and design are fit for purpose.
Do Due Diligence On The Speaker As Facilitator/Workshop Host/Change Agent: Make sure the speaker is an expert facilitator of large (and not just small) groups. It takes years to be able to hold space for a group of smart people to come together and engage in big and bold ideas and then leave with some kind of closure and action agreement. It may look easy when done right… until one participant is cynical or another tries to derail the process. Just as a driver makes it look easy to handle a Formula 1 race car on Netflix’s Drive to Survive, seasoned facilitators make it look easy. It is not easy, and much can go wrong. Any fool can wing it once and succeed. It takes years to ensure each session, no matter what business or emotional issues arise (and they need to in order to have a real impact), succeeds.
Select A Speaker For Business & Emotional Acumen: Your speaker (and event team) should have the cognitive capacity to engage fully in your business strategy, commercial issues, business model, industry specificities and constraints, and emerging tech, as well as the emotional capacity and wisdom to engage fully in your team, cultural, and leadership dynamics. Otherwise, how can they contribute to solving either business issues or the cultural ones that are usually part of the problems? Many keynote speakers are subject matter experts but cannot bridge into business matters, let alone emotional/cultural ones.
Optimize The Audience Experience: This means paying meticulous attention to detail, from the seating arrangements to the sound and lighting to the digital platforms used for interactions—as it all contributes to the atmosphere that makes the experience valuable rather than merely enjoyable. Remember, the objective is not just a “wow factor” but to inspire lasting transformation and action—sometimes, things that sound good on paper or look good on TV (Dragon’s Den/Shark Tank, anyone?) actually do the opposite of what you want in terms of mindset and behavior change.
Embrace Mindset & Behavior Change Techniques With Care: An interactive keynote hinges on active engagement and change technologies that should be thoughtfully integrated into the program. Techniques might include real-time collaborations, simulations, role-plays, or problem-solving exercises that relate directly to attendees’ real-life challenges—but bear in mind that these require different levels of care and planning than typical event programming. There is nothing more worrisome to me than leaving an audience “half-cooked” or without proper closure. This can leave a ticking time bomb of fear, psychological unsafety, and unresolved complaints rather than planting the seeds of positive change and transformation.
Consciously Shift From Transaction To Co-Creation: Whereas a classical keynote, and even an experiential keynote, can be fairly transactional (1-2 briefing sessions > delivery), as soon as you are dealing with real change, the speaker/facilitator needs help from the industry experts—you the client!—to land the right tone, design, and language and so deliver big. This requires a co-creation mindset, where both parties respect each other’s expertise. It usually requires some proper engagement from the executive or senior leadership team (and it is a major worry when they don’t have the time or care to do so). A co-creation mindset also means trusting the speaker/facilitator—given you have done your due diligence—to do things in ways that their experience tells them will get the most ROI for you.
Protect The Speaker’s Independence: You’re booking a speaker because they are not an employee. They have independent minds that allow them to be thought leaders. So make sure you are aligned on the goals and behavior change needed and that they are comfortable supporting your ambitions as an independent thinker. You want their genius and reputation as a thought leader to amplify and accelerate your goals earnestly, rather than either the speaker secretly worried about what they hear being said or them paying lip service just to get the gig. Most audience members will sense if either of these is happening, and this will diminish everyone.
Choose A Speaker Who Can Serve Change, Not Just Dazzle The Audience: Your speaker must be able to master two very different modes of leading an audience. The first is the jazz-hands keynote speaker performance, in which they dazzle and wow the audience. ideas are flying fast. There are gasps and giggles. But pretty quickly, the speaker has to transition to be a facilitator, guide, and coach, serving the audience according to their needs and the music in the room. This requires the speaker to come off the pedestal (or stage) both literally and metaphorically and put their need to be applauded and respected well after the needs of the group for change and safety. Many professional speakers cannot make this transition.
Allow Yourself To Be Challenged: If you are looking to go beyond a transactional keynote into what is essentially “consulting lite, you want a speaker/facilitator who can respectfully challenge any outdated ideas or design notions you have that they think will undermine your goals or even damage your audience. As one of my first clients (an SVP at Microsoft) told me: “We pay you to tell us what we don’t want to hear (or simply cannot see), not to confirm our biases and tell us to double down on mistakes.” So leverage your advisor’s insights and experience fully, which always requires some humility, openness, and a real (as opposed to much talked about) “growth mindset”
Design & Plan With Requisite Care: Everyone needs to be clear that as soon as you are shifting from wanting to entertain or educate an audience with a classic keynote to wanting to change their mindset and behaviors, a duty of care (akin to a therapist or coach) is paramount. This means much more care must be taken not to fail the participants (and so undermine your own ambitions and goals). This is serious stuff, and it means spending the requisite time (and therefore budget) on briefings, co-creation, design, discussion, nuancing, etc. More functions and senior leadership folk should be involved. Without this investment in care and collaboration, no speaker/facilitator can deliver gold and cannot be expected to. In other words, don’t try and create a life-changing event/workshop in a slapdash way, on the cheap. It can easily backfire and leave people more upset, frustrated, disturbed, or doubtful than when you started.
Ensure Participants Know What Comes Next: The most senior person in the room, as well as their functional support such as HR/L&D and Org Dev, should have a plan for what comes next and how the effort and contribution made by each audience member during the event will be harnessed for good rather than frittered away or never mentioned again. If they are the right speaker/facilitator, they will have some ideas from past experience…
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