Speaking
Each talk takes something away from the room.
A keynote that leaves a room agreeing with you has cost the room nothing. These are built to remove an assumption the audience arrived holding.
01 / The talks
Four talks.
The Filter
Who edited the account on your desk, and what the edit cost.
The room leaves able to name the mechanism, and with three questions it can put to its own reporting line on Monday.
Fix the System, Not the Pilot
What aviation learned by refusing human error as an explanation.
The room leaves with the distinction between an active failure and a latent condition, and what each one costs to treat.
The First Generation Leader
Leading where your own experience has not been before.
The room leaves with the second channel described plainly, and with the reason an inherited network is a structural advantage rather than a social one.
Precisely Wrong
The governance question a board should settle before approving the next system.
The board leaves with one question written down, and with the standard of evidence it should expect before that question is answered.
02 / Formats
Three shapes. The talk is the shortest of them.
Keynote
Forty-five to 60 minutes, with the questions taken on stage rather than in a green room afterwards.
Closed session
Ninety minutes with a board or an executive team. Off the record by default, and structured around the organisation in the room rather than a case elsewhere.
Executive briefing
A half day, where a leadership team works through the mechanism against its own decisions. Ends with what each person will check.
A room that agrees with everything has been told what it already believed.
03 / What the work needs
Four conditions. They are not negotiable.
- The closed sessions are off the record, and the recording stops.
- The most senior person in the room stays in it.
- A brief conversation with two or three people from the organisation beforehand.
- The talk is not adjusted to remove the part somebody expects to be uncomfortable.
Where a programme needs a session that confirms the existing account, there are speakers who do that well, and I would rather say so at the enquiry.
04 / Enquire
Tell me about the room.
Who is in it, what they arrived believing, and what the programme needs them to leave with.
Speaking, board and advisory enquiries use the same route.