The Keynote Itch

I’ve long been uncomfortable with keynote speakers who fly in, speak for an hour or so, and then fly out. This format of information delivery is a download, often without confirming the download is the right download, let alone if the download is complete and meets the needs of the audience. Some keynote speakers pontificate, with demanding instructions about the right or wrong ways to think or act. Some are even violent in their delivery. Others simply lecture, while we sit and listen for hours.

There is a time and place for this kind of download delivery. the best example is unfolding right now: a virus is spreading and people need clear and precise instructions on best practices. Infectious disease experts have critical information to download into front line heath practitioners. Public Heath professionals have critical information to download into citizens. (The message I am receiving: wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands, don’t touch your face, stay at home if you can.)

The keynote speaker, for the audience, is an experience that offers minimal learning for individuals and offers no collective learning. To know what we are learning, we need to pause and notice what we know and understand differently. While I may do this as an individual learner listening to a keynote speaker, we do not do this as a group. The speaker ends, we part and go on our separate ways.

In a keynote setting, the individuals and the audience are reading in parallel, side by side. This is not collective learning, or community learning, or city learning. It is independent, individual learning.

Yes, the collective learns and grows as we each learn and grow, but we don’t notice our shared understanding of who we are and where we are going. To do that, we need cauldrons instead of conferences, with a supportive container to be in the heat of new understanding as individuals and as communities.

“At a keynote presentation we don’t notice our shared understanding of who we are and where we are going. To do that, we need cauldrons instead of conferences, with a supportive container to be in the heat of new understanding as individuals and as communities.”

The itch I have to scratch: Is it possible for a keynote speaker to talk about community and allow community building at the same time?

“Is it possible for a keynote speaker to talk about community and allow community building at the same time?”

Talking about, and creating the conditions for, community and belonging are not the same thing. A speaker relays ideas, their thinking. As individuals, the audience hears the ideas and has minimal opportunity to process those ideas. And the group listening to the ideas has no opportunity to investigate what the ideas mean for the community because their is no room (or insufficient) for people to talk to each other, instead of passively listening to the expert speaker.

We do not create the conditions for community when we do not talk to each other.

I believe this is possible both face to face and online .

All we have to do is design for it. It might look how we visit on the street corner, with time to notice what we are all talking about…