Objective Overload: When Your Speech Needs to Cover Too Many Concepts

“What’s the theme for your event this year?” 

It seems like such an innocent question, but this query can actually open the gate to a minefield full of trouble.

BOOM!

That’s because event organizers sometimes have a (really) hard time limiting their objectives for a session down to a reasonable number.

Just imagine, you’re on a client theme call with a prospect, and you ask them about their theme. You learn it’s “Better Together.”

Okay, well, that sounds great! 

But then you start chatting about the objectives they’d like to meet with your opening keynote.

“We want content that will inspire our audience.  It should help them break down silos within their organization and help them increase revenue…

Oh yeah, and our people are dealing with a lot of burnout, so we want to discuss ways to build a better culture….

And don’t forget to include some strategies for attracting new talent because we have a talent problem in our industry… 

One more thing… we want to learn about AI and help our people do more with less.”

They want all of that in your ONE KEYNOTE!?

Crazy, right?

I’ve even had event organizers tell me how much they love my Loyalty Loop speech and my Cube of Creativity speech and then say this...

“Could you maybe just mash those two up together into a single one-hour session.” 

Yikes!  

Instead, you’ll need to tread carefully and gently help them find some focus.

What Causes Objective Overload?

Now, honestly… I understand why this happens.  

Event organizers are dealing with a lot of input and pressures from a variety of sources.  

And, just like we want to people-please our way to a happy client… they want to people-please their ways to what they perceive will create happy audiences and stakeholders.

I see four main reasons why events end up with WAY too many objectives.