A single rule for better talks

Pablo Rodríguez-Sánchez
Netherlands eScience Center
5 min readJun 30, 2022

If I had to take a single lesson from event managing, it would be this one: enforce the timing of your events. It can be awkward at times, but it is worth it.

A sand clock
Photo by Alexandar Todov on Unsplash

A bit of context

Since a decade ago, I am part of a scientific communication society. We gather every year, at least once, in a big theater in Northern Spain in order to perform short, 10-minute talks about science. Each one of these pitches is targeted at a general audience, ranging from professionals to children.

These events include around 50 talks, divided into 4 sessions, spread over 2 days. This averages to around 12 talks per session. Roughly 2,000 people attend these talks, so it is also important to take regular breaks. Summarizing: an organizational nightmare. Because of this, one of the most remarkable aspects of these events is that we manage to keep the timing under control. In more than a decade of history, the event never had an accumulated delay of more than 5 minutes. How did we do it?

The answer is simple: every speaker is given 10 minutes and not a second more. And we mean it: there is no way the speaker is going to take more time. This is true regardless of how prestigious the speaker is, how engaged the audience seems to be or how interesting the talk some moderator thinks is. No need to say that the talks start exactly on time, even if part of the audience is late (actually, the doors are closed and nobody is allowed in between talks). Summarizing: the 10 minutes rule is not advisory, but strictly enforced.

How do we enforce it? Firstly, the 10 minutes rule is enforced by an inanimate, irrational and ruthless clock. A timer, usually on a tablet that the speaker can continuously see from the stage, that will start loudly ringing an alarm after 10 minutes. An alarm that nobody will switch off until the speaker is gone. What will be switched off, instead, is the speaker’s microphone.

To make things even more interesting, the inanimate, irrational and ruthless clock is in the hands of a very animate, rational, but equally ruthless bouncer, that will not hesitate to jump to the stage and make a very clear cue that the talk is over. Even gently (but firmly) pushing the speaker out of the stage in case of need.

Implementing this at your talks or meetings

I know this feels rude. Timing and bluntly interrupting each other’s interventions is certainly unacceptable in a conversation with a group of friends. But this is the cornerstone here: a scientific pitch (and the same applies to a professional one, a meeting, a project presentation, …) is not a conversation with a group of friends. It’s a completely different situation that requires a different format and different rules.

In contrast with a talk with friends, a professional talk is planned and scheduled in detail. People made the effort to adjust their agendas to be able to be there, either as a speaker or as an attendant. When someone takes too much time, they don’t take it from thin air: they take it from other people. And it escalates with the size of your audience: 5 extra minutes in a small audience of 12 people amount to a whole person-hour. Not sticking to an agreed schedule is also a form of rudeness that, in its most dramatic form, leads to the cancellation of the part of the program planned for later in the session. This is certainly more rude and undesirable than clearly notifying everybody in advance about the time limitation and enforcing it.

It requires, of course, an extra effort from the organizers. To begin with, the rule has to be communicated in advance and enforced equally and fairly. Additionally, the organizer should do as much as possible to make sure the process goes as smoothly as possible. For instance, collect the slides in advance, test them (also in advance, not five minutes before the talk, but with time enough to react in case something goes wrong), and have them ready on the same laptop. Using a clock alarm (I agree that a bouncer may be too much 😅) is a good way of transferring the responsibility of interrupting the speaker to a machine incapable of feeling awkward.

Unexpected side effects

There are extra benefits of this, perhaps, radical approach. When we applied this to our event, the first surprise was that all the speakers accepted the rule without complaint. Furthermore, the clock almost never rang, and the bouncer very rarely had to stand up.

But our biggest surprise was that the quality of the talks improved massively. Why? Because the stick-to-the-time requirement forced speakers to rehearse their pitch at least once. After this, most speakers had to polish their first draft into a much more depurated and neat final version.

Rehearsing a couple of times feels strange, but it is incredibly powerful. It works (and feels) better if you do it in front of a tiny audience, but you can also do it alone. You will clearly notice the parts that work well, the parts that don’t, and the parts that can be shortened or, even better, removed (see Post scriptum below).

That’s my personal advice. Let a clock chair your meetings. And let me know in the comments how it went.

Post scriptum: remove or not remove?

Removal. Omission. Simplification. Probably these words don’t sound like something positive to you (especially if you work in academia). Certainly, you shouldn’t deliberately omit information on a report or an academic publication… but a presentation at a meeting is a different thing. Actually, I have a rule for myself: whenever my presentation slides start looking, sounding and feeling too much like a rigorous academic paper, I take it as a serious warning signal. Because they shouldn’t! Only a paper has to feel like a paper.

The purpose of most talks is either to persuade, to inspire, or to provide some introductory information about a topic. None of these goals requires high amounts of rigor. Actually, rigor and details often ruin the whole thing.

If the message you want to communicate actually requires details, then a talk is not the best format to provide it. A report, a paper, or a master class with the active participation of your listeners certainly would be a much better way of conveying your message. But if you are giving a talk, give just a talk. And in this case, less is more.

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