Three arguments,
twelve keynotes.
Programmes do not need another talk about leadership. They need a position the audiencecan argue with on the train home. Every keynote in my portfolio is therefore built as a claim — aboutvoice, about judgement, or about the craft of being understood — and each claim can be heard as aforty-five minute keynote, a ninety-minute working session, or a half-day masterclass.
The First Ninety Seconds
The claim: authority in any high-stakes room is granted, tested or lost in its opening moments — andthat grant is structural, not charismatic. We unpack what rooms actually measure in the first minute anda half: preparation signals, the shape of the opening sentence, whether the speaker's posture matchestheir purpose. Then the practical core — four openings that reliably earn attention, two that reliablyspend it, and the rehearsal method that makes the good ones automatic. Built for leadership conferencesand partner retreats; sharpest with audiences who present for a living.
Why it lands: every person in the room has, within the last month, sat on theother side of the decision — watched someone else open badly and formed the verdict in real time. Thekeynote hands them their own recent behaviour as evidence, which is the fastest route a position hasfrom the stage to the habits of an audience. The working-session variant puts the method to workimmediately: attendees rebuild the opening of a live document — theirs, not a case study — and rehearseit in pairs before the hour is out. Organisers should warn the front rows that participation is real;they should not warn them that it is enjoyable, because sceptical rooms enjoy discovering thisthemselves.
Write Like the Decision Depends on It
The claim: most professional documents fail not from bad writing but from bad argument architecture —evidence before position, background before ask, thirty pages where one page would have decided it. Thissession rebuilds the anatomy of a persuasive paper live: claim first, evidence second, recommendationthird; the ask before page two; appendices that answer rather than decorate. Audiences leave with achecklist they can apply to whatever is sitting in their drafts folder. For firms whose people live inboard papers, client proposals and regulatory submissions.
What happens in the room: we take a genuinely bad paragraph — one I havecarried around the country for years, from a real institutional paper, anonymised to its bones — andfix it in public, twice. The first fix is what most organisations would do: polish the sentences. Thesecond fix is the argument: reorder it, front the ask, kill the throat-clearing — and the room watchesthe same information become twice as short and five times as hard to dismiss. The demonstration doesmore than an hour of principle; people remember what they watched improve. Delegates receive thechecklist afterwards as a printable one-pager, and several firms have told me it now hangs, laminated,above actual desks — the highest honour this craft can bestow.
Judgement, Explained Out Loud
The claim: the professionals who progress furthest are rarely the ones who think best — they are theones who can show their thinking while it happens. Judgement that stays invisible reads as luck;judgement made visible reads as leadership. We work through the small, learnable moves that externalisereasoning — narrating the option you rejected, naming the trade-off you accepted, stating the positionbefore the hedge — and why firms that teach these moves promote differently. A favourite for talentprogrammes and high-potential cohorts.
Why firms book it twice: the argument quietly reframes a conversation theaudience was already having with itself. Nearly every professional services firm is running someversion of the same worry — that its rising talent is technically flawless and commercially invisible.This keynote names the mechanism (judgement that cannot be seen cannot be rewarded) and hands theaudience a practice, not a personality change. Talent teams report the same after-effect: within amonth, the phrase "narrate the option you rejected" has entered the firm's internal dialect, whichmeans the idea has outlived the applause. That survival — argument becoming vocabulary — is the onlyreturn on a keynote worth invoicing for.
The Craft of Being Understood
A lighter, story-led keynote that braids the three arguments into one narrative hour: why thesmartest room you will ever join runs on the simplest sentences, and what a decade of marking up otherpeople's drafts taught me about the economics of clarity. Designed for annual conferences with mixedaudiences — technical and commercial in the same hall — where the safe option is usually the forgettableone.
How it differs: the three argument-led keynotes assume a professionalaudience that wants its method straight. This one assumes a mixed hall, some of whom did not choose tobe there, and wins them the honest way — stories first, one laugh per few minutes, the method smuggledin under the narrative. Programme chairs sometimes worry that "lighter" means "shallower"; the workingsessions that follow such keynotes suggest otherwise. The stories are load-bearing. They exist becausea mixed audience remembers a story's conclusion and repeats it, and the conclusion of every story inthis hour is one of the three arguments wearing better clothes.
How a keynote gets made.
The process behind every booking is the same, whether the room holds forty orfour hundred. It starts with the programme call: thirty minutes with the organiser, establishing what theday needs the talk to do — open the conference with energy, close it with resolve, or middle it withsubstance. Then the brief: a short written document I work from, including what the audience is worriedabout, what the day has already told them, and the one sentence the organiser hopes people repeat in thebar. Where clients permit it, I interview two or three attendees beforehand — not for testimonials, forvocabulary. A keynote in the audience's own words travels twice as far as one in mine.
The script is then built the way the keynotes themselves recommend: position first, evidence second,staging third. It is rehearsed properly — aloud, standing, against a clock — with special attention tothe silences, because a pause that is merely written is not yet a pause that can be performed. Slides,where they exist at all, are built last and kept quiet: a dark stage, a plain screen, occasionally onenumber large enough to make the point without narration. On the day, the talk is tuned once more fromthe green room: the morning's speakers said things, the room has a mood, and the opening sixty secondswill acknowledge both. What arrives at your podium is an argument that has been prepared like a case andstaged like a play — and what leaves the stage is a position your people can use on Monday withoutcrediting me for it, which is the point.
Keynote · 45 min
Main-stage argument with Q&A. Slides minimal, staging rehearsed,content tuned to your programme in a preparation call.
Working session · 90 min
The argument plus live practice on your organisation's own material —real papers, real openings, real stakes.
Masterclass · half day
For groups up to sixteen. Drafts submitted in advance, worked insession, each participant leaves with a rebuilt document.
Every format includes thepreparation cycle — programme call, written brief, audience interviews where permitted — and closes withwritten notes on what the room pushed back against, which programme teams tell me outlasts the applause.
What conference organisers ask
Preparation is part of the product: every booking includes a programme call, ashort written brief I work from, and post-event notes on what the room pushed back against — often themost useful ten minutes of the day for the organising team. Travel across the UK and Europe is plannedaround your timetable, not mine. Technical needs are deliberately modest: a stage, a screen if you like,and a room where the back row can hear the pauses.
The commonest questions, answered here so your inbox does not have to. Will the talk be customised?Tailoring is the product — the argument stays constant, but its evidence and stakes are rebuilt for yourroom in the preparation cycle. Do we need to brief the audience? No; sceptical audiences are the mostrewarding, and the method assumes them. Can we record it? Yes for internal use; external publication bywritten agreement, because several of these arguments have future homes in books. What about a panelafterwards? Gladly — moderating the disagreement a keynote starts is half its value. And the fee?From £7,500 main stage, fixed in writing with preparation included; the detailed practicalities live onthe speaking page, and the calendar, as ever, answers availabilityquestions faster than this one.