Opinion Science
Opinion Science
SciComm Summer #23: Alison Fragale on Giving Keynote Talks
Alison Fragale is an organizational psychologist who gives keynote talks and leads workshops outside academia. She talks frankly about what it takes to book speaking engagements, design powerful talks that make a difference, and juggle a speaking schedule with other commitments. She also just released a book -- Likable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve.
You can find the rest of this summer's science communication podcast series here.
For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/
Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.
Oh man, I forgot what a weekly release schedule was like. Hi, hello, welcome back again to Hot SciComm Summer, a special informal podcast series helping people explore ways to help get good science into the hands of the people. This one is a long time coming. We've dabbled in many media in this series, YouTube videos, podcasts, radio, books, written journalism, TikTok, consulting, but I realized that we never really featured anything on giving talks outside of academic settings. It's something that I've become interested in, but it can be a really opaque industry, so I wanted to see if I could find someone who would be up for introducing us to the particulars of science communication in this sort of setting, giving public talks. And I think we've got the perfect person. Alison Fregale is an organizational psychologist who's been at the business school at the University of North Carolina, but in addition to her academic work, she's also been an in-demand keynote speaker, giving talks on negotiation and influence based in behavioral science. She also just came out with a book, Likeable Badass, How Women Get the Success They Deserve. She was down to talk openly about building keynote talks and navigating the logistics of booking them. So let's get into it. What is the academic background that brings you to the kinds of topics that you're sharing on stage and with groups and through the book?
Alison Fragale:My PhD is in organizational behavior, so psychology applied to business. And for over 21 years, I've been a professor at the University of North Carolina, teaching to a variety of audiences, which we can talk about. And I've taught everything. You know, when you teach long enough, you have to teach everything. But in my degree teaching, I've taught everything from leadership survey courses that include motivation, decision-making. I've always taught a negotiation elective, which is a lot of how I came into doing speaking to non-academic audiences because negotiation is a topic that a lot of practitioners are interested in. And now with the release of my book that's oriented toward women, I do a lot of work related to power, status, influence for women. And anything that falls under human behavior, people that is relevant to how we work can fall in the area of things that I will speak about.
Andy Luttrell:Did it always seem... I guess, was there ever a point at which you were thinking like, I will be very content just to like while away my time looking at data and forming research questions and sort of just going like a 100% I'm a scientist just doing science and getting it out in the world? Or was it always like, yeah, but this is only ever useful to the extent that I can share it with people? Sort of where does the public engagement side of what you do, when did that come into the story?
Alison Fragale:Yeah, it was not an explicit goal that I had when I entered academia, but I think there were a couple of things that influenced me. One was being an academic was not my childhood dream. I came to it once I was already a management consultant working for McKinsey and finding that Although I like the idea of answering questions, I didn't have enough autonomy in what questions I was answering and how thoroughly I was answering them. And that's what caused me to look for and then find this academic path in the first place. So I'd had an industry background as a professional speaking to people in industry. That's one thing. Second thing is when I go to Stanford, which is where I got my PhD, and I start to work with my advisor, who's amazing, she herself also had a very robust speaking career for working with external audiences. And so, you know, just like you kind of do the things your parents did because that's all you know, there's no doubt that having her as my advisor of somebody who was both a very, very, very rigorous academic and also had a very booming business speaking and bringing research to practitioners, that that was something I started to see and model. Now, that said, I didn't, from my very first days in graduate school, think, oh, I'm totally doing that. I was, like you said, just trying to survive doing my own research and figuring out how to teach my degree classes. That was more than I could handle. Then the third thing that happened, I think, put me on this path, was my first and only faculty appointment is at the University of North Carolina. The University of North Carolina, like many schools, has a developed executive education program. And as it was growing, the demand is often from my academic area that people come back for these experiences as professionals to learn more about the leadership component, not as much about the accounting or the finance. So there was an incredible amount of demand in my department. And while young academics are often protected from those things, in our case, we didn't have enough people to staff them. So if not my first year, definitely my second, I did one or two days of executive education, professional development work. And then I did three or four days after that. And then maybe the next year it was eight days. So it was a slow build, but it did start from the moment I was an academic, but it was a very small piece of my life. So it didn't derail me from the things I was normally doing. So it was a third thing that happened was I got exposure to doing that because my university, my school needed people to do it. And then you start to realize, oh, I like doing this. To me, what I enjoy about it, I always joke, is it's all the cool things about being a professor without any of the annoying stuff. You don't have to write a syllabus. You don't have to grade. You don't have an awkward conversation where someone disputes their grade. You just get to go into a room and talk about the science that gets you excited about the field to begin with and how people could use that. So that's what I really liked about it. So I liked it. I was good at it. So then I started to do more. And then the fourth thing that happened that escalated it for me it was a pure life circumstance which is although i've been at the university of north carolina for my entire 20 plus years for the past 10 years i have resided in chicago for family reasons my husband had a work opportunity here and it's also his hometown so we decided that we were going to relocate our lives here with our three kids and i started to commute and What that meant for me was that it put me in a unique professional situation where I started to think more about doing external facing work, recognizing that this dual career thing that we were managing might make my academic career challenging. So I started to do a little bit more of that when I was faced with that move. So put all those things together, and it was a ramp up of that type of work added to my portfolio.
Andy Luttrell:So I'm curious if you think that being in a business school has facilitated this so there's there's some of me that thinks that like there's there's maybe the kind of a unique conceptual fit between like what you're expected to be as a business school professor and these sorts of um external activities and and i really this is more of an opportunity to talk about like how do you juggle all these things which you sort of have hinted at um I think even though a lot of scientists really ought to spend more time in these public facing positions, right? As people in positions of like expertise, we are so overburdened with a million other things. And so I'm curious whether you have found navigating this kind of multidisciplinary way of going about your job is sort of facilitated by the kind of place that you've happened to end up.
Alison Fragale:Well, I would say yes to no. I've only ever been in a business school, but in my field, social psychology is a very dominant discipline. So I talk to a lot of people who are in psychology departments. I do think that yes, if you're in a business school, the idea that you are doing work that is speaking directly to people in practice is not foreign to people, but also let's be clear, it's not really rewarded. It's definitely not rewarded at UNC. So business academia is having a really challenging time between knowing they have to stay relevant to practitioners and having no mechanism to reward that because they're still operate just like any other arts and science department of research and teaching. And so we have stood up committee after committee after committee about having impact on practice. And at the end of the day, nothing you do on practice gets you rewarded. It just doesn't. So when people who do it decide that they have the luxury, and I think this is where I got to be in my career, I had the luxury of deciding I'm going to just do what I want. And I don't necessarily need a star or a pat on the head from my dean for every single thing I do, this is the life I want to build. And I think it's challenging because they secretly need people to be doing this. They need someone to do it. They don't have a mechanism to reward it. So if you say, my goal is to be seen as the best possible academic in my school, business schools are no different than any other arts and science department. You're probably strategically better off publishing more papers and doing more service and internal things than you are doing external stuff. I will also say that when I talk to a lot of people about this, who do a lot of external work, is that you will get some active hostility from internal people. Normally not the people who matter, but people in other departments. And as one of my female colleagues at a different institution who does a lot of external work said, that people's anger is inversely related to their ability to do what you do. And so when people don't have that kind of commercial voice and they can't talk to a non-academic audience in a way that's compelling, they are the people who are the most angry about it because they don't have the opportunities to do it. I don't know a world, I have not yet to find a person in academia who says doing something external like this has really advanced my career in terms of the internal rewards that we offer. No. But it's not unheard of. People aren't confused as to what you're doing. They get it, but we don't have a mechanism to reward it.
Andy Luttrell:It seems surprising still that that is the vibe. I think you're right that recognition and familiarity with this has clearly evolved. Uh-huh. but that there are still no tangible mechanisms in place to encourage academics to reach beyond the tiny little office that they occupy on a college campus. Yeah, I don't know. It sounds like you don't see that changing very rapidly either. I
Alison Fragale:mean, again, my sample size is limited, but talking to people, no. And honestly, anecdotally, I don't think... it helps if you do that and you're a woman. I think that my friends who have written popular books like I have who do a lot of external work and are women definitely feel like they get a lot more subtle criticism for it again it's subtle but no i haven't seen anything that suggests that it's changing which is why i think that business academia has has lost its edge a lot in terms of it's not growing like it used to and it's shrinking and i don't know that's that's not solely because of this but it's not helping
Andy Luttrell:So let's say someone says, internal politics be damned, I'm going to do this. What actually, I'm curious about like tangibly, concretely, what are the kinds of activities that you're doing that are beyond the institution? So like, even just like what sort of venues when you're doing speaking engagements, where are they tending to happen? And who are the audiences that you are seeking to reach in this domain?
Alison Fragale:Yeah. So I really like this work, but to be clear, because it's not something that advances my career, I find it intrinsically interesting. But the vast majority of things I'm doing are speaking live. Now I'll do some of that virtually post-COVID. Thank you very much. But pre-COVID, it was all in person. So now it's a blend, either in-person or virtual, live sessions to either members of a single organization. So that could be like an ERG or a team, an intact team where the leader wants training. It could be a conference for the organization where they bring everyone together and they want to have a thought leadership component that's not just about the financials of the business, that kind of stuff. So for an organization is one. And the other one that I do is, uh, conferences that are multi-industry. There will be a healthcare conference or a food service conference or an electrical distribution conference where they bring people together and people can be members and sign up and do those larger multi-industry events. Most of what I do is corporate. I may do some non-profit. I did for a long time do a lot of military and government. I do a little bit less now. I have done everything from longer facilitation, so single day, multi-day things. That's where I started my work. Half day, where you are, again, facilitating, because it's a lot of discussion, a lot of active learning. Now, over time, I've shifted more of my work to what I call keynoting, which is more the shorter lecture, anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes, where you're talking at an event, maybe with some Q&A. I do a lot, lot more of that, and I have... backed away from doing the longer facilitation, mainly for variety for me and just stamina. As I get older, I find the shorter things easier to manage than the longer things. And I enjoy them a little bit more. They fit my style on a stage a little bit more than the longer facilitation. So that's typically what I'm doing. And I was saying, I do it for pay. That's my motivation to do it. Not that I don't love the people I talk to, but I always say if I'm not doing it for pay, then it's called volunteering, which is a great thing to do. And if I'm volunteering, there are a lot more needy beneficiaries than insert the name of your Fortune 500 company. So I don't volunteer for you. I've got better sources of that, uses for that of my time. So I do it for pay. And that's my motivation. That said, I like it a lot, which is why I am willing to do it.
Andy Luttrell:So I think it's the keynoting that both versions are interesting to me, but it's the keynoting that I kind of had in mind when I reached out to you. And so- In terms of the before, during, and after, what does that day look like? You're engaged to speak for, let's say, an hour. This is sort of like the kind of nuts and bolts that no one would think to talk about, but I'm just very curious about. When are you showing up? How are you sort of preparing ahead of time? What are you doing in the midst of it? And then do you
Alison Fragale:just jump in the car and head home? Or like, what does the aftermath look like? I have a contact form on my website where you can say I'm interested in reaching you. And that comes to my email. So I get an inbound inquiry. I have now, based on my volume, only recently started to engage a speakers bureau. But for 20 years, I did all this myself. So I'm going to answer it as if I did it myself. That inbound inquiry comes, I send the person an email back to say, tell me a little bit more about what you're interested in. So there's maybe one round of email exchange about what they're interested in. At some point early on, I let them know what my rates are. I used to, in my earlier days, want to meet with them first so that they would fall in love with me. And once they fell in love with me, I would then tell them my rates. However, as my circle has opened, particularly with writing my book, and when I now serve organizations that are more oriented toward women. And there's a huge variance in those organizations as to whether or not they can pay. I have now started shifting the price conversation earlier before I actually start getting on the phone live so that I'm not having live conversations with people who at the end of the day are like, oh my God, we love you, but we have no money. And I'm like, I should have figured that out earlier. So now I'm shifting that earlier. But the idea is at some point I would get on a live Zoom with them and say, tell me about what you're trying to achieve in your event. Tell me about the whole thing. Let me see how I can plug in. And if I feel like I'm a good fit, then I present, here's what I could do for you. Here's what's typical. And I essentially, it's like a sales conversation. If they say, yeah, we want to go forward, then it would be, I would generate a contract. I now have an assistant who helps me with that. I had a I, for the longest time, I just used a contract I found off the internet, which is probably not, you know, I modified it, probably not worth very much. Wasn't going to stand up. I wasn't going to sue them. They weren't going to sue me, but it made it all sound, you know, kind of formal. Then I had an employment attorney who was actually a friend of a friend actually look at it and give me some editing. So now I have what I think is a legally binding standard contract. We fill in the specific details. My assistant does, it would go off via email. They would, you know, sign it. I would, and then We have to work out payment. So I have QuickBooks account. I send them a QuickBooks invoice for them to pay. I will tell you, I've shifted a lot of this to having people pay me before events. I used to not do it that way. There's a lot of time spent chasing people down for payment, not because they intend to defraud you, but because the person who hires you knows nothing about the accounts payable process in the organization in which they work. So they're like, yeah, yeah, it's no problem. Like I have the money. I'm the boss. I have the the budget. But then when you go to pay, they're like, how do I do that? And they go to accounts payable, and there's 733 forms that need to be filled out. So there's a process of that that is definitely frustrating. So I ship that. There's normally a pre Once they know we're going to, the early conversation, contract, money, et cetera, then there'll be some time. We'll set the date. We'll book it. But some time will pass. These things are normally booking for me months out, sometimes a year. But anywhere I would say from two to six months is where people are talking to you about these things. So I have events that I was talking about that are on the calendar for September. Um, so then some time passes and then you get closer to the event. Normally a touch base of all kinds of stuff. We need your headshot to market it. We need your bio. I have all that stuff on my website now, so it can just be a link. Um, we need your slides. We need to talk about the AV stuff. All AV stuff is different. What do you want? What do you need? What's going on, et cetera. Uh, normally send them my slides. Um, And then the events are all over the place. So I currently am based in Chicago. I speak in Chicago at most three or four times a year. I probably do 50 to 80 events a year. Again, some are virtual now. So then it's just like we are talking where I'm running around my house doing whatever. And then I just slide in to my computer five minutes beforehand. And then as soon as I'm done, headphones off and back to what I was doing. And a I'm on a plane a lot. I have, I, I'm an, I'm a loyal American airlines flyer and I have achieved like the alter the super secret high status on American airlines that you can get, um, just from how much I travel for this stuff. So, uh, and then the event itself is normally like go to a place, get in an Uber, look on my phone, figure out what hotel they've put me up in, um, get there. It's normally the place there close to where I'm presenting. Go over to the event site in the morning, generally a few hours before I have to talk, depends on what it is, just to make sure that I know where I'm supposed to be. I can connect with the event organizers. They're not freaked out that I'm not there. And then once I'm there, I either am listening to something if it's a conference and there's interesting other speakers beforehand, or I'm just somewhere in a corner on my laptop, just clearing out emails till It's time to talk. They, you know, 10 minutes before, mic you up. I go up on a stage. Some of them are set up really well. Some of them are horrific, like lights in your eyes. You can't see a thing. The stage is super tiny. There's random furniture on it. Some of them are beautiful, like you're winning an Academy Award. So you just get used to working in all kinds of environments. And up there in front of a group speaking, Q&A, a lot of them will ask to have these things videoed for people who can't attend, things like that. So there's some of that. There are some hybrid events where they have people piped in from other locations. They have people asking questions. So there's those kinds of differences. Up for an hour, generally at most. And then thank you very much. Clap, clap, clap. Here's how you can stay in touch with me. You know, mic off, et cetera. And then now that I have a book, I'm often hanging around for some book signing. Didn't have that until fairly recently. Hang around for some book signing and then I'm out of there. It's normally I head off and my at the end of my commitment and I'm back to the airport for the soonest flight home or to my next destination. And on the backside, normally just some thank you emails either way. Sometimes there's payment stuff to chase down. And that's it. And I would say one thing I should do a better job of that I don't do is actively following up with people that I've worked for. in terms of what's next. But I don't, that's like a growth area for me in my work.
Andy Luttrell:That was great. That was the level of detail that I was looking for, too. And it's super helpful for just kind of fleshing out what that could be. It also seems very helpful that you're in Chicago because O'Hare is like probably an incredible resource for you.
Alison Fragale:Yeah, I mean, Chicago has its downsides from travel, but the good news is if you could survive the snow and get to the airport and your flight's actually taking off, you can go anywhere. So that does make it easier relative to coming out of Raleigh-Durham.
Andy Luttrell:So you sort of teased this idea of like, where are these coming from? I have to imagine like you mentioned there a lot of it is coming inbound so people just like know that they are looking for someone and they find you they've heard of you they've heard from someone else who've had you was there something else in mind you had in terms of like where they're coming from these engagements
Alison Fragale:yeah so it's Inbound from people who have a prior point of contact with you is the most. And I was talking to another fellow academic and speaker who I consider to be a lot more successful in this space than I am, judged by number of events and price per event, and years that she's been doing this. She's a good decade ahead of me. She basically says, even still... the vast, vast majority of what she has is someone who knows her. And they know her in a couple different ways. Same for me. This is where business academia does help you. Your students are often great future clients because those students all go into business. Those students eventually all run things. When they run things, they have a problem and they think, who could help me? I remember my professor talking about this. So I do a lot of work for former students. And now when you have 20 years, I have thousands of them everywhere. So that is one resource. They know me, they like me, and they run stuff. So it's weird a little bit to then come serve them in this capacity, but it is useful in that regard that there's just a constant new surplus of people who run stuff. Then there's people who have seen me at a prior event. And that's where the events that cover more than one organization are particularly useful. So when you do a conference, as opposed to a meeting for a particular organization, a conference could have two or 300 organizations represented there. So when I think about negotiating, I come from the world of negotiation. When I think about negotiating rates, for example, I think about what's the potential future benefit beyond this event. And if I have a conference where two or 300 different organizations could see me and I think, okay, not all of them will hire me, but out of every single one of those events I do, I get a handful of people who go back to their company and say, we should bring Allison here. I think about that in terms of it's essentially free advertising. But so those are people, they've seen me and now they're a representative back to their organization. Then there's some word of mouth. of nobody knows me, but their next door neighbor says, who do you know that does this? And they recommend me. And then social media is one where it's inbound, but it's inbound from people who don't really have a relationship with me. And I would say, so if you want to build this kind of business, I would advise people to be on social. It's a long game. So you can't just be on social and think you're going to generate client after client, but it's mere exposure to letting people know you exist, what you do, you're a speaker. And if they like you and like your content, I do now get more people reaching out through social. So those are going to be my coldest inbound in that they've never maybe seen me speak or have a relationship with me, but they know I exist. And I think there are people who do more active outbound in terms of, you uh, you know, reaching out to people through social, through, through networks, et cetera. I haven't done a lot of that. I do have a speakers bureau now, just as of the past four or five months. Um, there is a little bit of outbound that comes from having a speakers bureau, but I would say in my experience with a lot of friends who have a lot of people who use speakers bureaus, it's still mostly managing your inbound. So speakers bureau is not, in my opinion, a, a thing that is going to magically get you events. Uh, I think it is a good partner to manage the events that you have, to negotiate them better, to get you more money for the events that are already interested in you, to take a lot of the logistical work off your plate so you don't have to think about it until the event is sold, and a little bit of outbound, but it's not primarily a source for outbound.
Andy Luttrell:You mentioned rates a couple times, and you're welcome to speak in generalities about this, but I find that that's like a particularly opaque part of this process. In the few times that I've had opportunities like this come up, it's like I couldn't even guess at the number I should quote to a person. And so I wonder, sort of having done this for a long time and sort of seeing how trends have changed, what the current landscape is, what the sort of diversity of rates might be out in the field, Could you sort of ballpark kind of like at stage of experience, what kinds of rates in the domains you're talking about, what those look like?
Alison Fragale:So, yeah, I mean, I will. I'm not sure that it matters as much about experience as you. think in the sense that I'll tell you, I'm happy to talk about what are rates that I'm quoting now, but when people tell me no, it's not normally the idea of oh no for that money we could go get somebody better than you it's more we don't have that money we're nowhere close to having that money and so if i'm going to recommend someone to them someone who would be cheaper who would choose to be cheaper and that person might choose to be cheaper because they're just starting out and they don't have then they're willing to do it for less because they just want to get enough people who have seen them to tell their friends. But what I always tell people is when people tell their friends, they're also going to tell them what they paid for you. So it's not as necessarily as easy to then do it 10 times for $5,000 and then say, I'm going to up my rates. This is how I think about it, and everybody is different. You know, I now am the point where this is, there's wear and tear to this. I mean, I just got back from March. I only slept in my bed in Chicago two nights in March. Now, two weeks of that, I took my family on my kids' spring break. But the first two weeks of that were city to city to city to city because it was Women's History Month, and I just packed it all in. And it's a lot, like, taking one suit and just, like, hauling yourself all the way across the country. It feels just like a Tom Hanks movie. And it's like a wear and tear. It's hard on my family. It's hard on me. And so I feel like if I'm going to do that, It has to be worth my time. And the way I think about it is half the people should tell me now. My goal is not to close every person who's interested in having me speak. If I were independently wealthy and retired and my kids were gone, maybe that would be a fun way to spend my time is just going. I mean, I get hundreds of inquiries and most of them go nowhere because they don't have the budget. So I think half the people should turn me down. So I kind of price myself at least that way. And I mean, the numbers that I... Like what I'm doing right now is generally $30,000 for in-person, about $15,000 for virtual. There are reasons I will deviate from that, higher or lower, based on what's going on. But those are typical numbers. I did up them since the book. I was very cheap when I was in pre-sale for the book because I was trying to get the word of the book out there. So I was speaking almost for free in exchange for advanced purchases on the book. And so I can change it based on what I want to do. But my feeling of where I am in my life with having three kids, um, other responsibilities is if I'm going to get on a plane and go somewhere. And there are often, um, like you have to account that the story I told you about how it works is the best case scenario. Like there's all kinds of other stuff, right? Your flight gets canceled and you end up spending an extra two days out of town. You end up with a client who has a a very difficult legal department that wants to legal review everything and have a conversation with you about every single word on every single slide. And now you've spent two days reworking everything. Things like different things. So there's always these headaches that come in and the headaches are essentially priced into thinking about the work. So that's how I think about it. And there's lots of people who cannot pay that. But I generally don't get the feedback of, oh, for that money, I could go get, you I don't want you, which they can't. But it's more like my budget was $3,000. And so in that case, if I know anybody who would even do something like it, I'll refer them out. I think what I would do if I were starting out is I would think about a couple things. How much do you want the work? This is just basic negotiation 101, and I'm fortunate that I teach this stuff. If the idea of them walking away is really bad to you, well, then I'd be more conservative in my pricing. But if you think, hey, I'm only willing to do this if it's a win for me, and price it such that I'll be disappointed if they say no, but I'm okay if they say no, because I'd rather have a bunch of no's and do one event for 30 than three events for 10. That's my philosophy. I have other people I know who do not think that way. They think trying to close as many events as they can is the way to go. I would talk to people who have done it before you, and I would think about it and ask them what they do. And Everything's an experiment. I mean, that's one thing I remember talking to Annie Duke about, who's a great academic and writer and speaker. And she said, you know, if I want to raise my rates, I don't have to raise my rates to everybody into perpetuity. I try it a couple of times and see what kind of reaction I get. And she said, that's how I learned to raise my rates because I did it. And I choked on the words a couple of times and people didn't. blink and I'm like, oh, clearly I should be raising my rates. So you don't have to do everything all the time. You try it once, see what happens. So I would call a friend who does something like this, ask for a number and then say, that's my number. And if people don't like it, then that deal is going to go away and you can decide the next one, what you want to do about it. Do you want to try to lower your number? Do you want to hang with your number? So it's, it's a bunch of experimentation, but my philosophy is half the people should tell me that I'm too expensive because I'd rather do half the events at twice the price based on where I am in my personal life.
Andy Luttrell:Are you baking travel and lodging into the rates that you're quoting or those are negotiated as a separate
Alison Fragale:thing? So I do bake them in typically because I hate tracking what I've paid for everything and then having the other problem of reimbursing. So if I need to get reimbursed for my travel expenses, that means I need to do one of two things. Either invoice them for the whole thing afterward, event plus travel, or invoice them for the event and then come back afterward and send them a $633 invoice on a $30,000 bill, which to me feels annoying to me and weird to them. So I personally price it all in and I say, 30,000 gets me to you. Um, I sometimes price in books if I know they want books and do it as a flat rate rather than ask for a book buy on top. And I just say like, you pay me once, the price is this. And I appreciate that. clarity, and I think organizations do too, but I do think I'm unique in that regard. Talking to my speakers bureau, most people invoice for their travel separately. I just don't want to deal with it.
Andy Luttrell:This is all, I want to make sure that we have some time to also talk about like the content, like what you're actually presenting. This has all been super, super helpful. And one thing just to put a pin in is in terms of how you've learned this stuff, my sense from talking to you so far is that most of it has been through experience and through talking to people who do it. It's I mean, that seems to be largely where you're coming to, how you navigate this world. Yeah,
Alison Fragale:I mean, I'm 20, like most of us, I'm 20 years into being an academic. I've never been taught anything about teaching, whether it's degree teaching or professional speaking. You just figure it out. So yes, it is all self, you know, hard knocks, as they would say.
Andy Luttrell:So yeah, so let's talk about developing a talk. You're a very good speaker, having seen, I will say, I mentioned this earlier, that like I started watching one of the talks that you have online, and I was, I kind of felt this moment of like oh I'm invested like I didn't I didn't actually expect to be invested in this talk but you've constructed things and presented them in such a way that it was like it was done very well right so I want to get a sense of like when you're building this what are you thinking about and in particular and maybe we can hold off on this for a moment but but like how the science comes into it because that's ultimately kind of where the interest of this podcast comes in but even just like blank slate, you're going to have to fill 60 minutes. I'm guessing you're not doing this fresh every time you go fly somewhere. But like when you're thinking about, okay, I'm like, I'm going to develop a new 60 minute keynote. Where, what is step one?
Alison Fragale:So I don't, my process, it might be more systematic or might be systematic. It doesn't feel very systematic to me, but here's the things. There's three things I always care about in anything I do. that is like any any education is it has to be evidence-based it has to be very practical and it has to be fun and I think of that it's true for my degree classes but I certainly think that's true for professional development no one has been committed a crime to come to your event right they should leave thinking that was a really good time that was fun and I learned some things that I could use tomorrow that's typically what people want so when I think about people who are kind of so-so or they struggle, I think they struggle on those two things. They don't struggle for the science. Everyone has a ton of knowledge in science, but it's, can I turn that into something you could really use? And can I be practical enough? Because as academics, we're not rewarded for practicality. There's no place in our academic writing where we get to talk about the practical implications of what we're doing to the level that a practitioner would want it. And then is it fun? So I always think about, you know, I'll have my topics. If someone wants me to talk about influence without authority. They want me to talk about negotiation. They want me to talk about my book, whatever. To me, having an opening hook or story or something that is interesting is really, really important. Getting into it, it's like writing the first page of your book is the hardest. What's the entry point? So for me, that'll either be a really entertaining study, an anecdote of mine or someone else's that supports the point, something like that that's going to be generally humorous, make people laugh, but it's then going to end with, here's a lesson from that. And then that is a transition point to thinking about, okay, so that's why we're here today to talk about this topic. And then I tend to be more, here's some science. The A, B, and C are true. If A, B, and C are true, then how could you use A, B, and C to show up? uh in a way that would be helpful to you and hear a variety of examples of what that means with it with stories brought in so opening hook science practical strategies um and then some type of closing i um and like i've seen speakers who i think have much more inspirational closings than i do i don't really have like a you know remember the titans kind of speech at the end of it um but i have a very professorly like here's how you can practice these things here's how you could leave this room and if you were inspired to do more about this here's what you could do outside this room in the next week that that could help you and that's pretty typical format for a talk of of mine but um to me the things that make the talk work are the stories and the practical advice. And once you have some of those, that's why I'm very, very reluctant to ever change them up. I don't change them up all that often because once you know they work, those are the ones that make the talk feel fun.
Andy Luttrell:And how are you cracking those? You're right that those are the two pieces that we're not handed, right? I know how to use Google Scholar. I know how to find the science. In terms of turning that into something practical, And in particular, the stories where it's just like, I mean, where are those coming from exactly? And I'm sure the answer is a million places. But as you think about it, tangibly, like, what are you doing that helps those parts of the process happen? A
Alison Fragale:lot of the stories for the longest time would be stories from my own life. Once I had a book and I did... book research that brought in other people's stories, I can use them. But I'll just give you very specific examples. When I talk about talks on negotiation for women, my opening story is a story about going to one of my kid's friend's birthday parties at Dave and Buster's, the arcade, and seeing my friend's child really upset because he lost his ticket with a card with all his tickets on it, and how my friend was just telling him, don't worry about it, and he was upset. And when I saw that he had lost his ticket, I went into the manager and essentially argued with them until they would give me a replacement card that had the same amount of tickets on it. And the moral of the story is that My friend who was trying to console her child, she is the head of litigation for a national law firm. And so she's a very fierce negotiator, and she's very, very tough and very, very assertive, every bit as much as I am. But in that moment, we had two very different reactions to this problem. She was basically telling her kid, don't worry about it. It's fine. You can go without. And I was saying, that's nonsense. We're not doing that. And we're going to replace this ticket. I'm just going to go in there and make it happen. And that that wasn't a personality difference. The main difference was that it wasn't my kid. And that licensed me to be a lot more assertive. So I tell a long version of this story. Then that leads me to talk about some science. So that's my entry point into saying, okay, what do we know in negotiations that when women are negotiating on behalf of other people, they outperform male negotiators, but when they're negotiating for the for a benefit that pertains to the self, they underperform male negotiators. And so I link that story to that I put up this chart from the researchers, that is the bar chart. And then that's my entry point into thinking about, let's think about how do we make women keep the part where they're really good advocates for other people, but how do we bring them up on being good advocates for themselves? And so now I'm in to let's do that. So it's this story of my own life. The talk that I'm giving a lot now on the book, I start with a post from LinkedIn that I did include in the book that's not my post, but one that cracked me up, that is a woman, and she wrote, women really only want three things, equal pay, respect, and pockets. And so I start with that, it's my opening slide, people laugh, and then I talk about pay and respect as power and status which are the two things I study and the fact that power has long been at the top and status has been second and it's time to flip the order so I always have something that's often from me but not always exclusively about me that I've come into contact with that can give me an entryway to saying what's the thing I really want to tell them so if I have a talk and I want to say power and status are two different things and we've been caring too much about power and too much about too little about status that's the point that I want to make, how do I get people on board with that in terms of a story? So I'll often have to think about those kind of things. But most of them come from me. I'm not a Google searching story. It's something that I've heard of. But over time, you collect those things. And it's the same way you learn to teach. So in this sense, if you've been teaching for a while, you have your stories, the ones that bring the point home or the thing about you that illustrates or whatever. And that's often where I'll start is how do I teach? in the classroom, is there something I could bring in there as a story?
Andy Luttrell:Are you sitting down and writing out the talk? Is it storyboarded or is it just sort of like, I'm going to jazz it for the first three times and then it'll lock in and I just have it?
Alison Fragale:I tend to storyboard through my slides. So I have been over the years spoken without slides, but I never do it if I have a choice because my slides are my... you know, they are my roadmap. And even when I'm in a talk, I don't have to have the whole thing. I just need to know like this slide, I say this, and then the next slide, I say that, and voila, 45 minutes go by. So I use my slides and I block it that way. So as I'm building a talk, I am using PowerPoint. And even if I'm not designing it, I'm like a slide that makes the point that blah blah blah goes here and i put that and that helps me think about the order then i can slide them around in powerpoint and be like okay that's our sequence and then i'll go back and make the slides actually pretty and ready for you know, prime time, but I'll use the PowerPoint and the shuffling of slides. And I've done that in my degree teaching since day one. That was always how I thought about a class was, okay, what needs to be in here? What's the order? How much do we have room for? And then yes, over time, once I've done something again and again and again, I will edit. That took too long. I was really rushed for time at the end. Something needs to come out. That slide is too texty. That story is too convoluted. You know, that stuff gets edited.
Andy Luttrell:Is the feedback for that like are you recording yourself are you are you doing play-by-plays with yourself afterward waiting for people to tell you or just you can just kind of feel it in the moment that like I'm gonna make a mental note that like this is taking too long
Alison Fragale:um now that I've been doing it this long I um can just feel it and remember it. When I first started out 20 years ago, I scripted everything, literally everything. I wrote a full on script as if my talk were a book and I would memorize it page by page. And so that I felt like I was never going to forget anything. And it took me a couple of years of comfort. And now I'm comfortable enough with it that especially if I'm doing something more than once, I'm good without that. But what I normally do when I go give a talk is I take the PowerPoint, I printed out six slides to a I almost always take that with me unless it's a talk I can give in my sleep and I'm on the plane or going over I'm reviewing like is there anything that I've put in here that's new that's a transition that I have to do etc and I'll have that in my And so after a talk, if there's something noteworthy that's happened that I want to do, I'll make a note of it on that slide handout that I have to get to stick it back in my bag. And when I'm back at my desk after all of that, I'll either note it in that PowerPoint document or I'll like if I know I want to make a change, I'll change it. And that way I'll have it for next time.
Andy Luttrell:I'm curious, too, when you have like a brand new something that's like fairly brand new. Yeah. in what way are you like preparing in like a sort of formal rehearsal way? The spirit of this comes from, so in grad school, I did a lot of standup comedy. That was like a hobby that kept me sane through grad school. And the whole like infrastructure of open mics as step one, I like have come to so appreciate that as like part of the process. But it can be hard if you go like, well, I am booked to give a 60 minute talk and it's all like, I haven't done that before. you know, is there anything that you're doing to sort of like get ready or like run it cold in front of someone? Or is it just sort of like, I feel like I know what I'm about to do. So we're just going to do that and see how it goes.
Alison Fragale:So now I'm more of the latter. When I was, before I got a sense, you know, of how much things go, I will definitely, if there's new content, i will rehearse it a little bit my time now i'm not normally having to rehearse a whole talk start to finish because there'll be elements built in that i know really well and then maybe some new elements so i just did a talk last month for a group that was predominantly male, but they wanted me to talk about the book, and it was a little more senior, so I had to talk about the book, but in a different way than I would if I was talking to an audience of women. So I knew the content, but I did put in a couple of, each slide I knew, but each slide was a bit of a surprise of, wait, what order are they in? So I had to prep those transitions a little bit, but I'm now practicing if I can do that generally the morning of. There are definitely times when I get caught, I'm doing something new, and I don't exactly know how much time it's gonna take. I always have afraid like many academics that you're going to run out of things to say. And I think like everybody else, it's never happened once. If any, you know, you get to a class and you're like, there's still 63 slides and I've got four minutes left. So one thing I've learned over time is you always have enough. So don't worry about stuffing it in. And I, you know, keep an eye on my watch as I'm going and I get a sense of where I am. And I definitely don't. you know, I will learn, I've learned how to speed up without making it look like I'm speeding up. So, you know, not to say like, we're going to skip these three things because we're late on time or we're running behind here. I hate when people do that. I just think I need to make it look flawless. Like everything I did was the exact thing I got up and planned to do. Sometimes I'm just like clicking through really fast and then things I'm going to skip because I realized I've overdone it. I've got too much. And then I think about, okay, what's, as I'm talking, I'm like, what do I really need to say here? But all of that comes with experience. So at used to be a lot more, I would time it out, make sure it was going to fit in the allotted time. But I do that less now.
Andy Luttrell:And just by way of wrapping up, I'm thinking of like lessons learned, having done plenty of these. As you think back to the speaker you once were, are there sort of a couple things you can point to as like, oh, I definitely thought this is how you do it. And that's not what people want from a talk like this.
Alison Fragale:Yeah, I think that, um, Personality, confidence, a voice that people can hear and sounds like it knows what it's doing carries you most of the way. I was a lot more tentative. I was looking a lot for reassurance. Audiences are impossible to read. At any given time, there's like someone sleeping, someone on their phone, someone nodding enthusiastically. If you look too much into their eyes, it'll just drive you insane in terms of wondering, are they enjoying this or not? So I've learned to just like almost look at them, but not look at them. But... If you get up and you have energy and you are excited to be there and you are smiling, people are excited and it doesn't really matter what you're talking about. And so that piece of it of realizing that if I get up and I think you're a human being that I'm super excited to be talking to today, just like if I saw you on the street, I can make you interested in pretty much everything. And so the idea of like the talk doesn't win because the science is the best science and the strategy is the best strategies and the tips are the best tips. It wins because you bring a presence that people connect with. And if you can do that, I see lots of people giving talks for lots more dollars than I am. And for the life of me, I don't think there's any content in these things at all, personally. Like as an academic who has academic standards, I'm like, this is nonsense. But people love it because why? The person gets up there and they're just like, ta-da! They tell a great story and they say something inspirational. So what I think about that is that doesn't I don't have to exactly be them but what are they doing that is the people are enjoying that I enjoy when I'm in an audience they're bringing energy they're bringing confidence they're bringing you know some fun and so if you do that I think that's the big transition of like we want to be fun in our classrooms too but you you can get away without not doing that you can't really get away with doing that in this in this context so that I think is the biggest thing if people work on their stage presence like if you're a stand-up comedian You're like, I know what it means. Like stage presence. It's not that the joke. it's not whether the joke is funny, it's how you deliver it, right? So, and you can't make a bad joke good, but you could make a good joke bad with bad delivery. So that, I think that's something that is now I realize is much more and why I've been successful is people are always like, oh, you're so energetic. You're so down to earth. You're so easy to like interact with. None of the things they think they're getting with an academic. And I think that that is something that I under, focused on when I was starting. And now I think that's the thing. I know that I have the academic rigor. I know that I have the advice to offer to people. Pairing it with the stage presence is the big thing.
Andy Luttrell:That's great. I want to respect your time, but also just want to say this was great. I appreciate you getting into the weeds with me on all of this. This is exactly what I was looking for. So thanks.
Alison Fragale:My pleasure.
Andy Luttrell:Thank you. you Thank you to Alison Fregale for taking the time to talk about talking. As always, check out the episode webpage for a link to her website and also her new bestselling book. I'll also link to a recording of one of her talks, which highlights some of the points that she made when we chatted. This series on science communication is a special presentation of my podcast, Opinion Science, a show about the science of our opinions, where they come from, and how we talk about them. You can subscribe any old place where they have podcasts and be sure to check out opinionsciencepodcast.com for links to things that come up in this episode and ways to support the show. And whoever you are, I hope you're enjoying the show. And I'm hoping this summer series will reach folks with a keen interest in science communication. So please tell people about it. Post online, email a friend, make a poster and stick it to a wall. These are wild times, and I think it's more important than ever to help the world understand good science and champion its value. So let's all make an effort to get better at doing that. Okie doke. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next week for more SciComm Summer.
Joe Palca:I have a talk I give called Explaining the Universe in Two Minutes or Less. And what I try to point out is that for the non-specialist, you can explain a lot about stuff in two minutes. You can. There's a aren't aware of. And if I just tell them, oh, did you know that galaxies are moving away from us at incredible speeds? And the further away they are, the more, the further, the faster they're moving. Hmm. What does that mean? What, you know, what does that tell us? What's going on with that? Well, a lot. But I've just told you a factoid that's kind of interesting. It wasn't, didn't take me a minute to to relate that to you, and yet it's fundamentally powerful and thought-provoking. I'm Joe Palca, formerly NPR radio correspondent.