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Thought leadership can be excellent without delivering the envisioned impact when scaling up/out across a broad range of speakers.

What is new: Scaling out thought leadership without access to the principal thought leaders requires carefully crafted speakers’ notes.

Why it matters: Your audience expects stellar deliveries from any speaker who delivers thought leadership presentations.

🔎 The challenge: The thought leaders who develop research and storylines know their content by heart. But they can’t deliver popular themes everywhere and must ensure others can deliver on a stage as exciting as the authors would.

🎙 Common speakers: Beyond the authors, there are a few candidates that great speakers’ notes should target

• A regional or local company executive who presents to major customers, partners, and regulators at an industry event.
• A regional thought leader, a strategy manager, or an account manager responsible for a customer.
• An influential Subject Matter Expert.

Expect all to have a short time to dedicate to preparations and a tendency to start the process late.

⏱ Effortless preparations: A vital goal for the speakers’ notes you create is to make it easy for speakers to prepare. Speakers who are great as speakers but need support to familiarize themselves with the content.

Typical preparation stages that a speaker goes through are:

• Walking through visuals to select what to include
• Reading through notes alone, on a laptop or on paper, to get familiar with the details
• Dry run or dress rehearsal with speaker notes on physical or digital Q-cards
• Leverage Q-cards or speakers’ notes on a confidence monitor or teleprompter at showtime.

Great speakers’ notes for Thought Leadership deliveries support all four steps without rewriting them. Supporting all four without reformatting at any stage in the process also minimizes the preparation efforts of a speaker’s support team.

🧨 It is impossible to “wing it” when delivering thought leadership. If you attempt, the audience will notice the difference.

👍 The 3x3x3 rule: Few speakers, if any, can memorize more than three points or messages per topic or slide, and few, if any, in the audience can pick up more than three points. This reality defines the optimal balance for how much to cover.

All your efforts should focus on connecting the speaker and their audience around these three or fewer points per topic/slide in three minutes or less. Everything else is of lower priority and wastes the speakers’ and audiences’ time.

3️⃣ Examples of influential trios you can consider to cover are:

• Priority 1, 2, and 3
• Problem, outcome, solution
• Before, current, after
• First, next, final

🗒️ Maximize the value of the available real estate for notes: Before writing anything, you want to maximize the writing area size in the slides’ notes section. Ensure it always fits on a page when printed as notes and shown on a confidence monitor.

Key messages and points should be in 12—or 14-point font. All other text should be in font 11 or 12. Smaller fonts are hard to read on a confidence monitor. If you use paper Q-cards, you want to be able to use the printed note text as is without reformatting.

📖 Read up on a session: Speaker preparation styles vary, and speakers tend to memorize either visuals, numbers, or text better than the other two elements. Three different preferences are complicated to combine in one type of note, so you will always work with some compromise.

A few assumptions can serve as a baseline:

• Assume the speakers you write for are your second-best option after the original authors, and you must prepare accordingly.
• Be clear on the three points and what the speaker needs to know to come across as an expert/authority.
• Include sources for all data you use; it is vital to build speaker confidence in using them.
• Consider guiding on questions to expect—speakers who can take questions come across as more credible.

🆙 Reading up is twofold: first, it helps speakers learn, and second, it helps them repeat until it sticks. Delivery confidence comes when messages stick in the speaker’s mind.

🖥️ Confidence monitor: A confidence monitor is a big screen on the floor that speakers see during their delivery on the big stages. The speakers’ notes session in the slides is the source of the text that the speakers will see.

Great speakers use confidence monitors to remind them what to cover and eliminate the risk of forgetting any memorized point by glancing at it when making micro-pauses or when the moderator asks questions in a fireside chat.

It is a terrible practice to read text directly from a confidence monitor, like you read from a teleprompter. Only plan to use confidence monitors in that way as a last resort for a replacement speaker jumping in at zero notice.

📍Note type one: The first fundamental type of speakers’ notes builds around bullets and key messages, which the speaker memorizes and the audience remembers.

Three carefully crafted one-liners, with two to three explaining sentences for each, get the job done. The one-liners can be as short as bullets.

Numbers make a big difference, but be careful not to overload your talk with too many numbers to avoid sounding like you read from a phone book.

📝 Note type two: The second archetype is a storytelling script written as prose, word by word, as the thought leader intended a story to be delivered.

This script delivers more engaging stories but is harder to write and takes longer to memorize—the content and flow of each sentence matter.

Speakers familiar with teleprompters or expected to be on the script through a talk enjoy this approach.

📝↩️ Write or Reverse-engineer: Great speaker notes come from one of two primary sources: excellent original story writing, or reverse-engineering of great storytellers on stage.

The original writing approach is most suitable when your Thought Leaders have strong writing skills. From the start, they focus on formulating the story word by word and sticking to the script when delivering. This model drives rigid and firm stories with predictable outcomes.

The alternative with reverse engineering starts looser and gradually evolves with more deliveries. The Thought Leaders’ deliveries on stage and camera become a source of input for refining the script. Expect multiple deliveries to be required before you can reverse-engineer it into a solid write-up.

⬇️ The bottom line: Define a clear ambition level for your speakers’ notes, and you will enable your thought leadership to scale across various speakers without getting distorted.

Additional reading suggestions

• Speak like a human: Mastering the art of professional speech writing [BLOGPOST – by Kelsey Boudin, Grand River Agency
• How to write a speech that your audience remembers [BLOGPOST] – by Elizabeth Perry, ACC. BetterUp
• Speaker notes: Creating effective presentation notes [BLOGPOST] – by Voice & Speech
• Speaker notes examples guide with powerful tips [BLOGPOST – by TCAA
• Why every presenter should consider a confidence monitor for their next talk [BLOGPOST] – by Jade Mburu, SpeakFlow
• Confidence monitor vs. telepromter, what’s the difference? – by Moman