Field notes: Keynote Karaoke

Every month at Equal Experts in London we host a “Network Thursday” event in our offices for staff and associates. There is pizza. There are beverages. And we usually have someone giving a talk about something of interest to the group.

Last night, because it was the last Network Thursday before Christmas (yes, we’ve reached that point in the year where it’s the “last things before Christmas”) we did something a little different – Keynote Karaoke.

I’m not entirely sure where the idea came from, but I think it was from a conversation over the summer with my Evolve colleague Caitlin, who alongside being a software engineer is also a musician. I think we were talking about improvisation. And I think we were talking about building presentation skills.

Alongside that, in the past I’ve been involved with Pecha Kucha-type events where people give prepared presentations but where the slides advance automatically every 20 seconds.

There’s the Embrace the Imposter card from my PlayCards deck…

I’ve also had the joy of conversations with exponents of improvisation like Neil Mullarkey, Phelim McDermott and Steve Chapman. I’ve read Pippa Evans excellent book on the topic (and Neil’s too). And I even went back to the authoritative text on the subject, Keith Johnstone’s Impro.

I have, however, never done any improvisation.

So I planned to get a bunch of my colleagues to do it instead…

Keynote Karaoke: The Game

The game is simple in concept. Game players roll 4 dice which give them a subject for their Keynote presentation. They then make that presentation up as a slideshow presents a series of 15 random images, each displaying on screen.

The audience then gives them spectacular applause for their efforts.

How I made the game – the presentation

I take photos of lots of random stuff. As a result I have a huge catalogue of relatively random photos. I have a box of those photos that I sometimes use as a facilitation tool.

So I created a presentation in Keynote using those photos. There are nine sets of random images. After clicking to go past the title slide, the images will automatically progress for 15 slides until the end of that Keynote.

You can download the Apple Keynote and Microsoft PowerPoint versions of the slides here along with the font Pacifico. Sadly you can’t play Keynote Karaoke in Google Slides because there’s no feature to support automatically advancing slides.

How I made the game – the dice

This is the first time I’ve found using ChatGPT vaguely useful.

I knew I wanted to create four dice, two with verbs on them, two with nouns, which would create a set of dice that would randomly create reasonably silly titles for a Keynote presentation – “How the art of cheesemaking disrupted AI”. So I asked ChatGPT to come up with random dice faces…

Here is the conversation that ensued… https://chat.openai.com/share/8d39d2d0-3f83-40cf-bccf-5883e4f24980

And here’s the Python digital version of the dice that Chat GPT created: https://www.online-python.com/zNgtTr0evw

I’ve had a set of “whiteboard” dice knocking around my office at home (which my wife lovingly refers to as “That Tip”) for ages. They’re something like these. There is a problem with whiteboard dice, though, and that’s that whiteboard markers rub off when you touch them.

So I printed out the 24 sides for the dice, and then used Restickable Glue to attach them to the dice. (Did you know you can get PostIt glue in a stick? It’s fab.).

Playing the game

Up until quite late in the day, I hadn’t intended to actually play the game myself. But by yesterday morning I realised that that was dreadful role modelling, so I volunteered to go first.

As much as I had a strategy for playing the game, it was as follows…

Think in three acts

I’ve learned so much from Marcus Brown’s work in the last few years. And particularly about dramatic structure. So I tried to break down the Keynote into three acts –

• the first five slides would set the scene
• the next five slides would explore the challenge
• the final five slides would bring the story to some sort of resolution

Think Impro

The other tip I gave myself was based on the “Yes, and…” game in improvisation. Rather than thinking about the slides as a slidedeck, I tried to think of them as a partner in an improvisation game, and that each image was an “offer” to be built on over 20 seconds.

That gave me enough of a sense of “knowing what I was doing” to feel reasonably comfortable talking completely off the top of my head for five minutes.

What happened?

It was great fun. Pizza was eaten. Beverages were drunk. And in the end I think 8 people put themselves in front of an audience and made it up as they went along. We learned about space elevators, football-playing llamas, foot-scraping cheeses, a land of dragons and flowers and much more besides.

And I reckon everyone who took part will feel a little bit more comfortable next time they have the luxury of doing a presentation where they actually know what they are going to talk about.