Experiential and immersive keynotes are longer than the conventional 45 minutes because they use all manner of techniques to unleash energy, inspire participation, and maximize engagement. They are powerful weapons in the event producers armory but they can easily go very wrong if not designed from the start to be fit for purpose. Find out what makes them so special and how to get them right at your event.
Embracing Experiential and Immersive Keynotes (90-120 Mins)
Experiential keynotes transcend the traditional lecture format and the constraints of classic keynotes by adding more advanced storytelling techniques, advanced stagecraft, and some light interactive elements. This fusion cultivates an immersive environment, invigorating attendees with a more dynamic and participatory experience. By directly involving the audience in the narrative or challenge at hand, retention and enthusiasm are markedly enhanced.
Such keynotes are adept at breaking the fourth wall, enabling a two-way dialogue that ensures the content resonates on a more personal level. Presenters leveraging experiential strategies effectively turn passive listeners into active participants, fostering a co-created experience that is both memorable and impactful.
Rather than being mere observers, attendees become integral to the experience – the nucleus around which the entire session revolves. It’s a strategic shift from passively absorbing content to actively engaging with it, and when executed professionally, it intensifies the learning curve, making concepts stick with an almost visceral force.
An experiential keynote realizes the most impact when it is built on a foundation of user-centered design. It is essential to employ a fine balance between providing insights and fostering dialogue so the audience’s active involvement leads to a collective advancement in motion and emotion. From detailed preparation to expert facilitation, the success of an interactive keynote lies in striking the right chord between proficient content delivery and fostering a vibrant, participatory, and fully alive environment.
By raising the stakes with audience involvement, experiential keynotes foster a vibrant and immersive climate. Practical exercises, real-time feedback, and participatory storytelling transform a monologue into a dialogue.
This paradigm shift prioritizes human connection over content consumption aligned with the most progressive pedagogical methods.
Longer than the conventional keynote—because the immersive and experiential aspects can allow for greater involvement, which means people can stay tuned for longer without zoning out or getting overwhelmed/bored—this format has considerable advantages over the conventional keynote.
When To Book An Experiential Keynote Speaker
I particularly recommend experiential keynotes to clients and bookers (event producers and speaker bureau staff, who can really help to make successful outcomes happen) for in-company events where there is a clear and ambitious goal for the gathering. However, I have also delivered them to great success with conferences and membership meet-ups, as well as at sales events designed to engage clients to buy.
With greater length comes the potential for greater depth and more intense impact. This means that I can weave a story that explores and seeks to resolve a complex topic without forcing simplicity onto human challenges, which undermines the possibility of my tools and thinking helping solve them. This experience infuses a dynamic vigor into the collective conscience and helps solve the pain points and relieve the anxieties of the audience.
The experiential keynote still needs profound narrative discipline. But it also requires the creation, testing, and optimization (over scores of experiments) of “risky” experiential elements like engaging questions, playful but potent provocations, some kind of collective intelligence activities (like polling), games, visualizations, and surprise elements. Without testing and refining, it can easily go wrong!
While most people in any area of business can be trained to deliver a single 45-minute keynote competently, going beyond this format requires a level of depth, maturity, confidence, and competence that takes much practice, a lot of stumbling-humbling, and mastery.
How To Get An Experiential or Immersive Keynote Right
Safeguard The Time: Make sure there is a good 90-120 minute slot in the agenda that isn’t going to make the rest of the day rushed or overwhelm attendees (if this is not possible, better to stay conventional)
Context Is King: Think carefully about what happens before and after the keynote. This should be true for any speech—like not talking about disappointing results just before an “inspirational” keynote—but for this format, which should be the main course of a 3-4 hour morning/afternoon, it is vital. Precision in matching content to context ensures a more transformative experience.
Design For Engagement: Make sure your speaker can wield powerful immersive techniques without making a fool of themselves (or worse, an audience member): intriguing stories, vulnerability blended with strength, electric presence on stage, and most importantly, innovative experiential and immersive elements (I have an arsenal of games, visualizations, exercises, music, video content, etc.)
Design For Reflection: Design into the agenda space, permission, and time for participants to “process” the experience and make sense of it for themselves—I recommend going to break/lunch/close directly after one and not rushing into something that will reactive stress and busyness and diminish the potential gains
Ensure Your Speaker Has Experiential Skills: Check that your speaker has the requisite skills to engage an audience for longer than 45 minutes and, crucially, can read and respond to changes in crowd dynamics rather than just plow ahead with their agenda. A skilled experiential keynote speaker can shift energy or direction to maintain audience engagement, ensure a good direction of travel, and not get upset, heckling, or reactive behaviors in the audience.
Ask Your Speaker To Customize! A one-size-fits-all approach is likely to fail to deliver. Therefore, customization is key—from case studies used to the nuances of experiential elements—to ensure that your audience enjoys a tailored experience that reflects both current concerns/trends and anticipated future shifts/opportunities within their function or sector.
Coherence Is Queen: Ensure there is coherence between the event organizers—producers, C-level executives, internal comms/HR people, and speaker bureau staff—regarding the event’s ambitions. Without this alignment, the speaker will be set up to fail.
Participation, Not Just Performance: The speaker must be able to shift mode during the keynote: from a full-on “I’m the thought leader” performance (which is expected by the audience) to encouraging participation from all, not just the usual types who are keen to speak, question, and engage
Ensure It’s Part of An Ongoing Journey: Allow time after for follow-up questions and ways the audiences can connect or ask more questions—as the ideas and experience sink in—over the coming days and weeks. This is tricky if the engagement with the speaker is transactional, as conventional keynotes tend to be, so consider what kind of ongoing relationship might be value-creating for all (this is even more important with interactive keynotes, as you will see below)
How To Get An Interactive Keynote 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.
A Speaker Who Can Serve 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’s 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…
Now, if the event has a tangible goal for a significant outcome—whether strategic, cultural, or leadership—then the experiential keynote can blend perfectly into an interactive keynote + workshop, where the keynote plays the role of both a lightning rod and lodestone for change.
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