Now almost all events are virtual, creating a very different dynamic for both audiences and speakers.

Challenges of virtual events

If you are attending a virtual event, essentially you are sitting in front of a computer or device, with legion opportunities for distraction, rather than the enforced attention of sitting among many others facing a stage.

On the other side, professional speakers are performers, and many I know have said they find it very hard to project the same energy in front of a camera as they can in front of a large audience.

Powerful visual presentations

Given that the role of keynote speaker will still often remain, for both incisive content and inspiration, striking visual presentations that emulate TV or other powerful visual media can be helpful.

Below is an excerpt from my recent keynote at International News Media Association’s Virtual World Congress, demonstrating my current style of visual presentations using full screen video to support my messages.

Creating new virtual keynote styles

While the standards of visual presentations in general have increased substantially over the last years, they still need to improve, and in particular be adapted to the constraints and opportunities of virtual formats.

There is massive scope for creativity and invention in generating new visual and other presentation styles for virtual events, which we are just beginning to uncover.

Beyond the visual styles are the exciting opportunities for interaction and engagement, which I will touch on in an upcoming post.

My previous keynote speaker showcase video was getting rather dated, and it’s been long overdue for me to create a new one.

I’ve finally finished my new showcase video, after trawling through many videos of my keynotes, and selecting highlights to include.

Please check out my new showcase video below:

Let me know any thoughts or feedback!

You can contrast this with my old showcase video below, which has a similar format and structure, a more dramatic but perhaps slightly less contemporary intro, though often poorer video quality.

I have chosen to use all new clips in the new showcase video, but there are some nice ones in the old one too :-)

It is a great privilege. Speaking is a truly wonderful way to make a living. I get to travel all around the world, having done paid speaking engagements in 30 countries so far. I learn in every engagement, in preparing to do the best job possible each time and by being exposed to a wonderful diversity of people, organizations, and industries. And I love the performance of professional speaking, stemming from my younger days as a musician.

However speaking must be done with purpose.

As an aspiring speaker it seemed presumptuous to expect to have a lasting effect on people by speaking for 40 minutes or so.

Yet over time I met a number of people who in telling me their life stories said that a turning point for them was hearing a speaker who changed their perspectives, turned a light on for them, and prompted them to change their lives.

It is possible to have a massive impact on people, simply by speaking to them.

As a futurist part of my role is to inform people about emerging trends and possibilities that they may not have been fully aware of, and as a speaker be entertaining and engaging in the process.

However that is far from sufficient.

My real job is to change people, to make them think differently, and if at all possible act differently to reflect their changed understanding.

Unless the people in my audience are changed from my speech, I have failed, I have wasted my time and theirs.

Entertainment and education are good, but in the times in which we live, far from enough.

Anyone who has the temerity to stand in front of a group of people and speak should have the clear intention of changing their audience in a positive way.

It’s a tough ask.

But being a speaker has responsibilities as well as rewards.

Next time you speak to an audience, start with a purpose of changing them. That is the true role of a speaker.

Image: Wikimedia2009 Beatrice Murch

The transcribed interview appears as an extended article Platforms are the Future of Media, which goes into depth on some of the issues I see in the future of media. Below are a few brief excerpts, but read the full article for more detail.

Platforms are the future of media. One could argue that a newspaper in the past had its own platform, which was its distribution of paper, primarily. There, it aggregated news, advertising, classifieds and so on. So it was a platform in terms of being able to pull all that content together and distribute it to all of its readers.

But now, in a connected world, we’re starting to see just how many other platforms there are, and single participants are finding it very challenging to be able to play successfully in this world. Most prominently of course we’re seeing the social platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) and now the messaging platforms as being places where people go for all of their media. The way in which we interact with people on social is an entirely valid form of media, along with the more traditional news, entertainment and education from established publishers.
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In the future we can start to see more and more fluid platforms for news professionals. I think that starts to become a more apt term than journalist. They’re news professionals who are working with crowds, who are working with algorithms and who are working with each other, not necessarily in terms of just being an employee of the news organizations. In order to be able to collaborate with other news professionals around the world and bring together content, sometimes they will work independently and sometimes ad hoc for the right news, event or content. News professionals are supported by a platform where consumers, individuals or organizations around the world can access their content, and where a fair value exchange can happen.
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If we look at how you participate in other platforms, I think there are four key elements in that:

1. Analyze those platforms effectively; map them. Identify what the costs are of participating in the platform. What are the trade-offs between them? Explore some of the potential paths forward, the different scenarios and how they may play out.

2. Engage with select platforms because you can’t engage across all of them; but you do need to make a commitment. Then establish contingencies that determine in what situations you are going to pull out, and what the trigger will be that moves you into a different space. If you end up choosing to engage with a platform, promote it and then get and understand the data from that.

3. Strengthen your position, given the fact that you are going inside a relationship. Ensure that at all points you are accumulating as much data as possible. You are using platforms to entice readers into a direct relationship, which The New York Times and others have done successfully on Facebook. Yes, promote on Facebook, but always use that to try and create direct relationships with audiences.

4. Apply influence as we saw recently where the editor of Aftenposten essentially changed the policies of Facebook. It was partly through, I suppose, being right, but it was also being able to take a stand prominently, drawing others’ opinions out. It is critical that if you are participating in other platforms, then you need to be able to say, “How can we collaborate with other participants, not as an individual player, but as collaborators and share our data and influence in order to make sure that we can shape that platform as effectively as possible?”

If you’re participating in a platform, you need to monitor the shifts in the landscape, engage with new platforms that are emerging and potentially develop/add onto platforms that are complementary. Once you’ve made the choice to engage with others’ platforms, which is essential in today’s distribution world, you do need to have effective strategies to participate in those platforms in a highly dynamic way, where you can respond to changes as they emerge.

However, many more people desire to become professional speakers than those who actually succeed on that path. What have those who have thrived in this career done to achieve their objective?

Professional keynote speaker and futurist Ross Dawson shares five critical steps that have helped him gain the experience, insight and authority to have been invited to deliver hundreds of highly successful keynote presentations across 28 countries.

1. Learn from the best

Understanding—and eventually matching—the benchmarks for successful keynotes is essential. Aspiring professional speakers can kickstart their journey by watching and listening to a wide variety of their more experienced peers. “I used to see a lot of successful keynote speakers, and I thought, I could do that,” Dawson says. But he also warns, “You will see people who are so good that you think, I couldn’t do that.”

In Dawson’s view, the key is to find a balance between having realistic expectations for yourself and being motivated to improve. The more speeches you hear, the better you can compare yourself to in-demand professional speakers and gain a fuller indication of your own strengths and weaknesses.

2. Harness the power of practice

Malcolm Gladwell famously wrote in his book Outliers (2008) that “ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness”. While it can be difficult to amass ten thousand hours of public speaking experience, Dawson suggests that “you should certainly aim for hundreds of hours to obtain a reasonable level of confidence”. He achieved this by joining Toastmasters to practice public speaking soon after he finished university, and embracing opportunities to speak and run seminars during his early career working for NCR and Merrill Lynch.

Dawson also points out that “practicing a speech is as important as giving a speech. Speakers shouldn’t expect that it’s going to require any less practice than any other type of performance.” Dawson says that what distinguishes amateur and professional speakers is that “an amateur speaker speaks; a professional speaker performs”.

“An amateur speaker speaks; a professional speaker performs”

3. Actively seek out and learn from feedback

In the world of public speaking and keynote presentations, constructive feedback can be lacking—unless you actively seek it out. Most of the time, says Dawson, “People either say nice things or they don’t say anything.” Seeking more comprehensive feedback—whether it be from audience members, peers, or self-assessment—can significantly boost your future speechmaking skills. “You must always try to work out how you can get better next time…That’s still my focus now after over 15 years of being a professional speaker,” emphasizes Dawson.

Whenever possible, he recommends obtaining a video or audio recording to analyze the delivery of your keynote later. “We don’t hear what we sound like, so we have to record ourselves and listen to ourselves and be critical of how we sound.”

4. Cultivate your credibility

In order to start receiving speaking invitations, you must first become known as an expert in a particular field. “You need to be in-demand as an unpaid speaker before you become a professional speaker, and you have to understand that’s part of the journey for most people,” Dawson advises. Speaking bureaus are much likelier to represent you if their clients have already heard about you or seen you speak. For these reasons, demonstrating your authority and expertise is essential.

Nowadays a wide variety of channels can help to establish the credibility and value of your work. These include written and digital publications, video content showcasing high quality examples of your previous speaking engagements, and social media profiles that attract attention and build your authority. “The major threshold is when you get sufficient invitations to speak for free, to the point where you can start to ask to be paid,” says Dawson. For him, that transition came with the launch of his first book, Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships. “People wanted to hear from me on what I had written, and I had sufficient experience to be able to do the opportunity justice.”

5. Give your clients amazing value

Ensuring that your clients receive value from your presentation is important before you become a paid speaker, and absolutely crucial afterwards. “Being a professional speaker means that you have to be a consummate professional: you need to pay every attention to making sure that your client that has paid is getting value for money,” says Dawson. This typically involves full and clear communication, a comprehensive understanding of the purpose and value of your talk, keeping to deadlines, and not allowing any margin for error in anything that you do.

A challenging and rewarding journey

The journey to becoming a successful professional speaker is fraught with challenges and setbacks. Not everyone will succeed. But the benefits of achieving this objective are compelling. The above insights from Ross Dawson’s journey can provide valuable lessons to those who are embarking on that path.

Image sources: The Next Web and Jean-Jacques Halans

It was a very broad-ranging interview, however one of the topics I touched on was the concluding point of my keynote that afternoon, on governments as platforms.

I have written before about issues such as the role of crowdsourcing in government, how crowdfunding could shift the shape of taxation and government, how we can envisage the future of government as a solution enabler, and the value of a framework for the Transformation of Government.

As I have recently spent increasing time and attention on platform strategy, it has struck me that “government as platform” provides a clear and compelling vision for the future role of government.

The current view of government is of a set of institutions that take money from citizens in the form of taxes, and spend it to create social value. One of the most fundamental problems with this model is that governments are indubitably highly ineffective and inefficient at achieving the desired outcomes with the resources they have.

Governments should not be doing work that they do very poorly. They should be facilitators, enablers, catalysts, and orchestrators of value-creating interactions between citizens.

The starting point needs to be agreeing and understanding the social and economic outcomes we want, which can still happen through a political process that may not be dissimilar to current structures (though the shift to true participatory democracy is another important topic, to return to another day).

When we know what outcomes we want, we can design platforms that bring together participants to create those outcomes in the most efficient manner possible.

As a small example, HireUp enabling people with disability to find and work with their own support workers. The platform is able to enable the desired outcomes at substantially lower cost than any government body has been able to do. Moreover, since it enables people to find each other, it is far more likely to bring together people who will get on well with each other, rather than be randomly matched.

The idea of government of platform is by no means new. Tim O’Reilly has written and spoken about the idea at length, including an excellent book chapter on the topic. The UK government is currently discussing the topic, though largely from a narrower technological perspective.

Now that platforms models such as Uber, AirBnB, PayPal, Upwork, Tripadvisor, Lending Club and many others have not only helped people understand what platforms are, but also for us to develop far better principles for effective platform strategy, we are in a far better position to build not just the metaphor, but the reality, of government as platform.

The potential is exceptional.

In the lead-up to the conference, an article Healthcare 2020: what will the future of healthcare look like in Australia? draws on an interview with me to explore this space. Below are just a few excerpted quotes from the extensive interview with me:

On big data and data sharing

“One of the things that is critical not just in the health industry but more broadly, is the ability to find and share data more effectively as an industry.

One of the major challenges the healthcare sector faces in achieving this, is privacy, both from a regulatory and individual perspective and the attitudes towards how information is shared. An education process is needed to show the value of sharing personal data, as well as providing the structures to be able to share data using appropriate tagging or classification of data.

“If you think about data from the big picture or the potential of the sharing of individual genetic data more broadly, this could lead relatively swiftly to a transformation in healthcare efficiency. While there still might be reluctance from people to share personal information about their health, it will be the individuals and organisations that will need to provide leadership to drive this effectively.

Because data sharing won’t happen by itself. There are so many blocks in terms of attitudes and regulations that are currently stopping data sharing.

There are also some layers of resistance in the technology infrastructure currently being used in Australian healthcare, especially when it comes to medical health records. These records are sometimes being designed to be held within organisations rather than to be shared in any way.

The format of these medicals needs to change to promote sharing and this requires leadership to establish and propagate these standards to drive value.

But this is an ongoing journey and for more than a decade we have already had people working on these issues and yet we don’t have a very good sate of medical data sharing at the moment. But at the same time, we need to look at how far we have come and find ways to improve, because we are going to have to move in a world of dramatically different levels of data availability.

In the future industry leadership is required and we need to look at data sharing as not just a sharing of personal health records, but as how we can use data to create more value for the community.”

On tele-health

“A big part of the future of healthcare will be tele-health and the ability to deliver healthcare remotely. We are already beginning to see more and more medical consultation with medical professionals done remotely, using everything from Skype through to richer services, which allows the doctor to instruct a patient to do particular tests on themselves.

This is part of a shift from responsive to predictive medicine. Instead of waiting until something goes wrong and then treating the patient, doctors will be able to anticipate when things might go wrong and take appropriate actions to prevent sickness. This transformation is partly based on data as well as connectivity.

Clearly there will be times when people need to physically go into hospitals, which will mean the most significant driver in healthcare globally will be cost. With an ageing population with increasing expectations on how to manage health, costs are rising. This could begin to be a massive social problem, so one of the things that will become important is the ability to minimise the amount which people have to go to hospital, both by pre-emptive care and being able to consult doctors remotely.”

On community care

“The vast amount of healthcare expenditure is currently going towards ongoing chronic conditions which can last a life time. A shift to community care in the future will provide an opportunity to not only reduce costs, but also shift the focus to patient centered care.

For example, community care will mean that people will be able to live in their homes much long. They will have the data and facilities to be able to monitor their own health. As we are also going to face an increasingly ageing population, community centered care will enable us to support elderly and unwell people to stay in their homes longer in much better conditions than they would today.

This can be achieved through simple robots in the house which through memory aids can help elderly people remember things, such as something as simple as where they left their glasses. These robots can also be supplemented by people in the community can drop by and support them. We have already seen the rise of mobile nurses and in the future the need for mobile nurses is going to be far greater.

Community centered care will improve people’s quality of life, because they are receiving care in their own home and have people around the support them. This will be a more structural and systematic shift that will be driven by cost and the quality of care that people seek. To a degree, it will also change the role of government in how they can best fulfill societal needs as efficiently as possible.”

For additional insights on other aspects of the future of healthcare go to the conference website.

Networks are always at the heart of innovation. The new comes from combining the old in original ways.

Chemist Kary Mullis aptly described how he arrived at his innovations that won him the Nobel Prize in 1993:

“I put together elements that were already there, but that’s what inventors always do. You can’t make up new elements, usually. The new element, if any, it was the combination, the way they were used.”

Whether it is bringing together existing ideas to create new ideas, or connecting people in ways that generate new insights, organizations must design how they work to facilitate value-generating connections.

Organizations are rapidly shifting to network frames for their structure and operations. Those that do it in such a way as to better support high-value innovation are leading the way.

Below are the slides for a recent keynote I gave to the C-level executives of clients of a major telecommunications firm.

While the slides were designed to support the story I told through my keynote, on their own they still give an indication of the issues I raised, in placing networks at the heart of innovation.

Below is a video excerpt of the opening minutes of my keynote.

You can see a video of the complete keynote here, and the static presentation slides here (though much of my visual presentation was video).

A post in INMA’s Keynote blog, Creator of “Newspaper Extinction Timeline” lays out industry’s optimistic future, described the messages I brought to the audience.

The entire news media industry was buzzing in August of 2010 after Ross Dawson released his predictions for when newspapers worldwide would cease to exist.
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“This is one of the only predictions that I’ve made,” Dawson said at the INMA World Congress in New York City last month. “As a futurist, I believe predictions are often not worthwile because nobody knows the future. The future is unpredictable. Yet the reason why I did make these predictions was to provoke, to be able to wake people.”

If he provoked people to consider why they disagreed with the timeline, then “I’ve served my purpose.” His intention was never to necessarily be right — although he might be closer than you’d like to think.

“This is about news on paper. I think the dynamics of that are not bright. But the point is about the news overall, the future is extraordinarily bright.”

Dawson will revise his predictions at the five-year mark later this year.

We are working not just on the revised newspaper timeline, but also on developing research, content, analysis, and frameworks on the far more important topic: the future of news. Keep posted for a lot more on how we can create an extraordinarily successful future for the news industry.

I approach this idea as both a speaker and an event organizer. I have been a professional speaker for over 15 years, and have also organized many conferences and events, including our Future of Media Summits, the first cross-continental conferences ever held.

A recent article in Sydney Morning Herald on how the new app Zeetings helps “keep audiences awake” looks at Zeetings, “a presentation app that is both interactive and social, and promises to stop audiences slumbering in their chairs.”

The article describes the background of the app and goes on to quote me:

Ross Dawson, one of Australia’s most prolific presenters, said the advent of more social presentation tools was timely as people generally wanted more engagement.

“I tend to work in situations where the audience is knowledgable and insightful. This is not about a guru on stage but being able to tap the experience of the audience. You would be getting participation from the one person on the stage but with everyone engaging and contributing to the content,” he said.

These are hardly new opinions from me. An article in News.com.au in 2009 quoted me extensively on the future of events (the original story has been taken down but the quotes are still available online here):

“In a world of instant access to information and videos of the world’s best speakers, it makes no sense to sit in a darkened room and watch a series of talking heads all day,” says Mr Dawson.

“Usually the best ‘networking’ opportunities at traditional conferences are during coffee breaks, where you have to hope you’re standing next to someone interesting in the queue.”

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“There are many forms of unconference, however the basic idea is that participants create the agenda on the day,” says Mr Dawson.

“This leads to highly interactive discussions, and the topics reflecting the interests of the people there.”

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“Over the last year or two Australia has been catching up with some of the world’s most innovative event formats,” says Mr Dawson.

“Offering many opportunities for people to keep up to date on new trends and ideas, plus benefit from being able to connect with their peers. I believe and hope that traditional conference formats will struggle in coming years.”

“Traditional event formats are dry and stultifying. People like interacting and conversations. Unconferences create unparalleled opportunities to meet and engage with like-minded people.”

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“In a world awash with information, it is critical to be exposed to many diverse perspectives and insights,” says Mr Dawson.

“A very few speakers and presentations merit 45 minutes. Most other ideas can be highly condensed with little loss, creating a far more dynamic and stimulating experience for the audience.”

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“Online social networks now allow us to find and connect with people who share interests with us,” says Mr Dawson.

“Very importantly, they also make it easy to keep in touch and develop relationships that people we’ve met.

“Since networking is not about exchanging business cards but building relationships, online social networks are invaluable.”

Let’s hope that more event organizers use the fantastic new technologies that are available to create more engagement and more value for audiences. The future of events will be different and better, but it’s not happening fast enough, yet…