How do you choose the right innovation speaker when the future of your organisation might be in the balance? Or more honestly, when a significant fee is in the balance and nobody will refund it.
What follows comes from years of conversations with hosts, journalists, event organisers, agency heads, chief executives and directors of communications, human resources and sales. All of them ask me the same thing, which is how to be certain they are picking the right expert.
They want someone who lifts the room above the day to day, adds real value, shows the first steps to take, and does all of it in a way that teaches, engages and involves people rather than merely entertaining them.
The question is legitimate, because fees rise every year and there is still no satisfaction guarantee in this industry. That absence is defensible too, since a speaker sometimes has to unsettle a room to be worth the money, and you cannot serve chips at every meal.
Working out how to choose an innovation speaker comes down to eight questions, all of which a weak candidate can fail. That is the difference between this and most buying advice on the subject, which offers no criterion anybody could fall short of.
| The usual advice | Why it cannot help you | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Define your objectives and check the reviewsBuying guides for speakers recommend clarifying goals, knowing the audience, setting a budget and watching a showreel. Almost all of them are published by bureaus or by speakers writing about themselves. | No criterion anyone can failAdvice that only tells a buyer to be clear about their aims cannot separate two candidates. A useful test has to be answerable with evidence and capable of disqualifying somebody, which is what generic guidance carefully avoids. | Eight questions with checkable answersWorking out how to choose an innovation speaker means testing for a reproducible method, documented failures, first-hand experience, transferable content, and examples that are current and actually true. Each one has a right answer and a wrong one. |
Why this decision is harder than it looks
Booking a speaker is one of the few significant purchases an organisation makes with no trial, no return and no measurable specification. The structure of the market makes it worse, because almost every piece of advice available to a buyer has been written by someone with an interest in the outcome.
There is no satisfaction guarantee in speaking
Fees rise year on year and no clause anywhere offers your money back. You commit before you have seen the thing you are buying, in front of an audience you cannot rehearse with, on a date you cannot move.
That absence of a guarantee is not entirely a flaw. A speaker sometimes has to unsettle a room to be worth the fee, and a guarantee tied to satisfaction scores would remove the incentive to say anything uncomfortable.
The advice available to you is written by sellers
Search for guidance on this decision and the results are speaker bureaus and speakers. Both have a commercial interest in a buyer feeling confident rather than becoming discerning, which is why the advice converges on the same four items and stops there.
I am a seller too, so treat this article the same way. The test of a buying guide written by someone inside the market is whether its criteria could disqualify the author, and several of these would.
Four questions about what the speaker actually has
The first four questions test substance. They ask what this person can give an audience beyond the ninety minutes, and each of them can be answered before you make contact, using material the speaker has already published.
One, do they have a reproducible method or only a message?
A presentation on innovation should do more than inspire. For tangible results it has to hand over a method the audience can start using quickly, which means something with steps, an order and a first move somebody can make on Monday.
The exception is deliberate. If you are trying to emulate a TED talk, then look for the message and the craft of its delivery, and stop reading this question.
Everywhere else, the test is what your people can do differently the following week. After a session they should want to change, create and collaborate, and they should also know where to begin.
How to check it without asking: read three of their articles. A speaker with a method describes the same sequence in all three, and one with a message describes the same feeling.
Two, do they share what they experimented with or only what worked?
Remember what the audience is asking itself throughout: how do I apply this in my team or my organisation? A speaker who only presents outcomes leaves everybody admiring rather than planning.
Documented failures are the strongest signal available in this market, because nobody invents them. A speaker who can describe an approach that did not work, and why, has been close enough to real decisions to have been wrong in public.
This is also where the industry’s incentives run against you. Failure is bad for a showreel and good for an audience, so the speakers with the tidiest highlight videos are frequently the ones with the least to transfer.
Three, have they actually innovated anything themselves?
This sounds too obvious to state and it is the question buyers skip most often. Unless you specifically want a survey of the state of the art or an academic framework, choose someone who has had their hands in the engine and came away with stories, advice, failures and a working amount of judgement.
Ask what they built, when, with whom, and what happened to it afterwards. A speaker who has genuinely built something answers that question with dates and names, and one who has not changes the subject to a client list.
Four, is the content transferable or is the achievement irreproducible?
A double Olympic gold medal, discovering a vaccine or founding a company worth billions is extraordinary, and extraordinary is exactly the problem. The more remarkable an achievement, the fewer people in the room can repeat any part of it.
Notice what that does to the pricing of this industry. Fees track fame, fame tracks the rarity of the achievement, and rarity is the inverse of transferability, so the market charges most for the content least likely to be applied.
I am not arguing that those speakers have no value. An extraordinary story transfers as permission to attempt something hard, which is a real product and worth paying for when that is what you need.
Four questions about how they will work with you
The second four test the working relationship rather than the content. A speaker with excellent material and no interest in your organisation delivers a good session to the wrong room, which is the most common way this purchase disappoints.
Five, are they known in your sector, or deliberately outside it?
Both answers can be right and you have to choose on purpose. A speaker from inside your industry brings vocabulary, credibility and benchmarks, and arrives carrying the same assumptions everyone in the room already holds.
If you are after genuine outside thinking, pick someone from another sector entirely and accept the trade. It becomes your job to work out what transfers, filtered through your own culture, rather than theirs.
Reassuringly, the biggest subjects travel. Transformation, the difficulty of recruiting and the behaviour of younger colleagues are cross-sector and international, so an outsider is rarely as far outside as they first appear.
Six, do they take themselves too seriously?
Self-seriousness is a reliable predictor of a session nobody remembers. A speaker who cannot be lightly wrong on stage will not risk the sentence that makes the room sit up, because that sentence might not land.
Humour is the visible symptom rather than the point. What you are testing is whether the person can hold a strong position and still be questioned, which is the same capacity that decides whether the question and answer session is any good.
Seven, will they learn your organisation before they arrive?
Choose a speaker who wants to understand your organisation, its culture, the path its leaders took to get there, the challenges in front of it and the values people actually share. That interest is visible in the first conversation and impossible to fake for long.
They are not there to explain your business to you. They do need your values and your working vocabulary, so that for the length of an evening your organisation is their organisation.
A useful test at the briefing stage is whether they ask you anything difficult. A speaker who takes the brief without a single uncomfortable question has decided to deliver the session they already had.
What they are listening for is the shape of the place, which is roughly what I describe elsewhere as reading an organisation’s innovation DNA before deciding what will work there.
Eight, are the examples current, and are they true?
If there were a bingo card for innovation conferences, several squares would fill themselves in: transformation, Kodak, big data, quick win, disruption. Beyond the tired vocabulary, look at whether the examples themselves are worn, predictable or false.
- Worn, and sometimes finished, like Kodak, Polaroid, Nokia or the standard Steve Jobs anecdote.
- Predictable, like Apple, Tesla or Pixar, which are true and tell an audience nothing it has not heard four times this year.
- False, which is the category that should end a conversation.
Slides matter least, right up until you spend ninety minutes watching bullet points read aloud by someone facing away from you. That still happens, and it is a symptom of the other seven questions rather than a problem in itself.
The false example problem, and how to test for it
Two examples appear in innovation keynotes constantly and neither is what the speaker thinks it is. Both are easy to check, both have been publicly corrected for over a decade, and a speaker still using them uncorrected has told you exactly how they prepare.
The Ford quote that Ford never said
If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. It is a wonderful line, it appears in an enormous number of innovation presentations, and there is no evidence Henry Ford ever said it.
Patrick Vlaskovits went looking for the source in Harvard Business Review and could not find one. The quote does not appear in Ford’s autobiography and no newspaper or book archive supports the attribution.
The dating is the part I enjoy. Ford died in 1947, and the earliest known link between him and the saying appears in a cruise industry trade publication in 1999, speculating about what his customers might have wanted.
So a line invented by a ship designer half a century after Ford’s death is now quoted from stages as evidence that customers cannot be trusted. That is a better story than the quote, and it makes the same point more honestly.
The Google twenty per cent that was never a policy
The second regular is Google’s twenty per cent time, presented as a formal entitlement letting staff spend a day a week on their own projects. The reality is considerably messier and has been on the public record for years.
Laszlo Bock, Google’s head of people operations, wrote in Work Rules! that around one in ten Googlers were using it when the company last checked, that its use had waxed and waned, and that it carried no formal management oversight or written guidelines.
Marissa Mayer, an early Google executive, put it more bluntly to a Yahoo audience, describing the arrangement as really being one hundred and twenty per cent time. Other Googlers disputed her account publicly, which tells you it was never a single thing to begin with.
A speaker citing it as a policy your organisation should copy has skipped a check that takes four minutes. The interesting question is why it persists, and the answer is that it is a lovely idea and nobody in the room ever asks.
How to test an example in four minutes
You do not need to fact-check a whole keynote. Take the two or three examples a speaker leans on hardest in their published material and run the same short check on each.
- Find the earliest source. Who said it first, in what words, and where was it published?
- Check the date against the person. A quote that first appears decades after someone died is not theirs.
- Check whether the practice still exists, rather than whether it once did.
- Ask what the example is doing in the argument. A worn example doing real work is fine. A worn example standing in for evidence is not.
The point is not accuracy for its own sake. A speaker who has never checked their own material will not have checked the advice they are about to give your organisation either, and staying current is the whole subject they claim to teach. Reading what is actually moving is a discipline in itself, which is why I keep a framework for where change originates rather than a folder of anecdotes.
Field note
The brief nobody wanted to write down
This is a pattern across bookings rather than one client, and I would rather label it honestly than dress a composite up as a case study.
The preparation call reveals more than the event ever does. Somewhere in it, usually late, the person organising the session tells me what they actually want said, and it is almost never what appears in the brief. The brief says innovation and future readiness. The real request is that somebody from outside says the thing about the restructure, or about the two departments that will not speak, or about the leadership team’s own behaviour. When I ask whether I can say that on stage, the answer arrives after a pause, and the length of the pause tells me how the session will go.
What I take from this is that the eight questions in this article test the speaker, and the pause tests you. An organisation that cannot name what it wants said has not chosen a speaker badly, it has not finished writing the brief. The most useful hour you can spend before booking anyone is deciding what you are prepared to hear out loud.
Choosing against the slot rather than a universal standard
Most disappointment in this market comes from judging a speaker against criteria that had nothing to do with the job they were hired for. Three slots buy three different things, and applying the transferability test to all of them produces a programme with no energy in it.
Three slots, three different purchases
Work out what the session is for before you shortlist anybody. The same speaker can be an excellent choice for one slot and the wrong choice for another on the same day.
| Slot | What you are buying | The questions that matter most | The mistake to avoid |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opening keynote | Energy, framing and permission to attempt something hard | Six and seven, since the room has to trust the person quickly | Demanding a method and getting a lecture instead of a lift |
| Working session or masterclass | A method people can apply the following week | One, two and four, since transferability is the entire product | Booking a famous story and expecting steps at the end of it |
| Closing or provocation slot | A named problem the organisation has been avoiding | Three and six, since only someone with real experience can say it and survive the room | Briefing the discomfort out of it in the preparation call |
How to choose an innovation speaker for the slot you are filling
Start by writing one sentence describing what should be different in your organisation a week after the session. If the sentence is about how people felt, you are buying an opening keynote. If it is about what people did, you are buying a working session.
Then apply the eight questions weighted for that answer. A speaker who fails question four is still a strong opening keynote and a poor masterclass, and knowing that in advance saves the fee rather than the disappointment.
Want to run these eight questions on me?
Ready to test a speaker against something harder than a showreel? See the talks I run and the method behind each of them, then put every question in this article to me before you decide.
Applying these questions to me
A buying guide written by a seller is worth nothing unless the author answers his own questions, so here are the ones that count against me as well as for me.
Where I fit and where I do not
On question three I have built things, in start-ups in France and then Australia, and I have run organisations rather than only advised them. On question four I have no extraordinary achievement to sell you, which is a weakness in a showreel and the reason my material transfers.
Question five cuts against me for anyone wanting a sector insider. I work across industries deliberately, so I arrive without your benchmarks, and you will have to do some of the translation yourselves.
If your room needs a household name to fill the seats, I am the wrong choice and you should book one. Attendance is a real problem and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
How I prepare
I ask what you would rather I did not mention, and then we negotiate which of those subjects the organisation is ready to hear named out loud. That conversation is the preparation, and everything on the slides follows from it.
I also ask for your vocabulary, your recent history and the two or three decisions people are still arguing about. Without those, an outside speaker delivers a good session to a room that does not recognise itself in it.
If you want to test any of this rather than read about it, the fastest route is a conversation. You can tell me what you would rather I did not say on stage and we will find out quickly whether I am the right speaker for the slot.
Conclusion: ask the questions that can produce a no
The speaking market is built to make buyers feel confident rather than to make them discerning, which is why almost every guide stops at objectives, audience and budget. None of those can tell you which of two plausible candidates to book.
Eight questions can. A reproducible method, documented failures, first-hand building, transferable content, a deliberate position inside or outside your sector, a person who can be questioned, genuine preparation, and examples that are current and true.
Weight them against the slot rather than applying them uniformly, because an opening keynote and a masterclass are different purchases and judging both by the same standard guarantees one of them disappoints.
So the short answer to how to choose an innovation speaker is to ask the questions a weak candidate can fail, and to notice how long they pause before answering. Then write the brief properly, because the speaker is only half of what you are buying.
Frequently asked questions about choosing an innovation speaker
What questions should I ask before booking an innovation speaker?
Ask whether they have a reproducible method or only a message, whether they share failures as well as successes, what they have built themselves, and whether their content transfers to an ordinary team. Then ask what they want to know about your organisation, and notice whether anything they ask is uncomfortable.
Should an innovation speaker come from my industry?
Either can work, provided you choose deliberately. An insider brings vocabulary and credibility along with your industry’s blind spots. An outsider brings questions nobody inside would ask, and it becomes your job to work out what transfers. Brief them either way.
Why do famous speakers not always deliver useful sessions?
Fees track fame, fame tracks the rarity of an achievement, and rarity is the opposite of transferability. An extraordinary story is worth buying when the room needs permission to attempt something hard, and it is the wrong purchase when the room needs a method.
How do I know whether a speaker’s examples are out of date?
Check the two or three they lean on hardest. Find the earliest source, check the date against the person quoted, and check whether the practice described still exists. The faster horse quote attributed to Henry Ford and Google’s twenty per cent time both fail that test routinely.
What makes a keynote actually change anything?
A clear brief matters as much as the speaker. Write one sentence describing what should be different a week later. If it is about how people felt, you want an opening keynote. If it is about what people did, you want a working session with a method attached.
