Print This PostAcademia is a career built on milestones. Your first research project, your first big result, your first talk or poster at a conference and your first paper. They all represent progress along your path and act as a sign that things are going in the right direction. Recently I had my first milestone in quite a while. I received my first invite to deliver a keynote talk at a conference. By that, I mean my first genuine invite. We’ve all had at least 5 of those spam invites asking you to give a keynote in a conference which is 100% a pyramid scheme.
It’s a very different scenario to preparing the kind of conference talk I am used to. Instead of preparing a 10-minute talk about a specific topic based on an abstract, I now find myself with a 40-minute slot within which I have to tell a story about my research. I’ve learned quite a lot during the process of this so I thought I would use my blog this month to drop some top tips for anyone preparing their first keynote. Hopefully they are useful!
1. Capture your audience – This first tip isn’t completely about the preparation of your talk but it is a principle you should withhold throughout your whole prep. Remember, you are going to be speaking for anything up to 40 minutes and you want to keep your audience engaged throughout. Having lots of interesting and exciting visuals in your slides will get you so far but, in order to get people to pay attention to your talk, you need to get them to pay attention to you. Practice your talk extensively. You need to be comfortable and relaxed. Your audience need to sense that you are speaking… not reading. Get to a stage where you barely need to look at your slides. That makes your delivery natural and engaging. Speak with passion and deliver your message, balancing a professional approach with genuine expression. Basically… Imagine the speakers you enjoy listening to and emulate! If you aren’t sure, watch some of the top rated TED talks and take note of how the speakers approach their lectures.
2. Tell a clear story – With a long talk, it is easy to deliver something confusing and unconnected. By the time you deliver your first keynote you will have conducted a lot of studies and generated a metric boat load of data. You have to connect all of that into a narrative with an underlying theme. A keynote is as much an exercise in storytelling as it is data communication. Simon Sinek famously said, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”. It’s sometimes known as the why factor and it’s critical to a good talk. You need to start by setting the scene about what has driven your research. Everyone has an underlying theme to their work… even if you have no theme your theme is that you have no theme… ‘I have set out to develop as diverse a research portfolio as possible and here is why’. If you nail your narrative, your audience are on board. Regularly draw upon your research theme as you move through your talk, detailing how each study or piece of work aligns with what you set out to do. Doing so transforms you talk into ‘another study’ to a journey that engages your audience and leaves a memorable impression.
3. Make your opening strong – Key to crafting that narrative I just spoke about is nailing your opening. Cynthia Ozick famously said, ‘Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression’. People often decide whether or not they will listen to a talk based on the opening 30-60 seconds. If you don’t captivate people in that time limit, you will lose a lot of the audience before it gets really interesting. Nobody likes a labour intensive opening talking through a load of papers from other people. State your purpose; your goals and what impact you want to have in the field and then dive into the interesting data that prompted your invite in the first place. Something like a surprising fact that underpins your work or a rhetorical question grabs your audience.
4. Know your audience – This is quite a short and simple one but tailor your talk to the audience, especially if your work is interdisciplinary. Don’t labour on the principles your audience will already know and explain the ones they won’t. Your talk needs to be relatable and understandable. A simple principle but one not to forget.
5. Make your talk attractive – This goes back to capturing your audience. If you are going to be up there presenting slides for 30-40 minutes make them look nice. Treat every slide like it is a poster. Slides filled with blocks of black text are interesting to nobody. Why use 200 words when a picture can tell the same story. The words come out of your mouth, they don’t need to be on the slides. Include words only in slide titles and annotations on images. Maybe the odd bullet point every know and then to illustrate your take homes. But when it comes to results, make your images and graphs big and bold. That is what people have come to see and, wherever possible, include moving visuals like videos and renders. Look at your slides with an objective view and say “does this LOOK exciting?” My last presentation contained 600 words across 15 slides. That’s 40 words a slide, most of which were titles and acknowledgements.
6. Drive it home with your conclusion – The closing of your talk is the final chance to leave a lasting impression on your audience. You need to summarise the key take homes and relate it back to the why factor you started with but make sure you also look to the future. People want to know where you are going next as it is likely to be even more exciting than what you just showed. More importantly, tell the audience how this impacts them. What does your story tell them? And how does its message benefit them? You are there, in part, to inspire the audience. That sounds cheesy but it is true. Your closing should be the thing that keeps the talk in the minds of your audience. You need to essentially say to your audience ‘this is what I discussed, this is why it’s exciting and this is how it can apply to projects like yours’.
If you incorporate all these factors, you are sure to deliver something that will be remembered by your audience. A well-told, narrative driven keynote can be the highlight of a conference. Nail it, and you never know who you might inspire in the process!
Dr Sam Moxon
Author
Dr Sam Moxon is a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. His expertise falls on the interface between biology and engineering. His PhD focussed on regenerative medicine and he now works on trying to develop 3D bioprinting techniques with human stem cells, so that we better understand and treat degenerative diseases. Outside of the lab he hikes through the Lake District and is an expert on all things Disney.
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