Transcript
Hi, Jan-Jaap, welcome to the studio.
Hi.
I've invited you here because you did send a press release. Your moderator agency celebrates twelve and a half years. And it kind of drew my attention on the twelve and a half years. Not many companies celebrating that. Why is that?
Well, there's a few reasons. The main reason is it is something typically dutch, and we are based in the Netherlands, so we do it the Dutch way. And in the Netherlands, you celebrate the copper marriage, which is twelve and a half years, which means that you're halfway to go towards 25. Two other reasons we forgot about ten years. We at some point have said, shouldn't we celebrate ten years? And then we look back, oh, no, but we missed that. It's almost twelve already. So then we decided 12.5. And the final one is. It kind of is typical for the way we act and do business and moderate. We do things just a little out of the ordinary. So the twelve and a half year kind of fits that. And I think our next celebration will be 17 years and seven months or something. It will be random.
Nevertheless, congratulations on that. It is a good moment, I think, to look back in how the job of a moderator changed over the last 20 years, I should say, because you're already active as a moderator much longer than the twelve and a half years. So in your opinion, if you look back, what has changed.
A lot, because society has changed a lot, and events are a reflection of what happens in society. And when I started 20 years ago, and even when I started the agency twelve and a half years ago, the main focus, the main character of events was get a speaker on stage, tell people to sit and listen, and that was it. But in the meantime, people have changed, and people are no longer happy with just sitting and listening, want to participate. If you look at society, people are no longer just listening to their manager, their government, and just saying, yes, we will do whatever you tell us. People want to be heard, people want to be able to share their story, people want to cooperate and co create and participate. So that is something that you see on stage, because meetings and events change, become more interactive, and because of that, moderation is different than it was twelve and a half or 20 years ago. We've evolved from the classical MC, a person just introducing speakers and being very hyped about speakers, into a moderator who will constantly be interactive with the audience, with the speakers, with different formats on stage, etcetera. So the profession became more complicated and therefore more interesting.
And therefore there's better reason to hire moderators than there was 20 years ago. Yeah, but doesn't it all start with the meeting design?
Because that's something we didn't talk about 20 years ago. Absolutely. And now it is really a thing where you start thinking about, okay, what effect do I want to have? How can we integrate that into our event?
I can imagine that's also part of your job, that you're involved in that track. Before the event even.
Absolutely. When I started and when the agency started, we were just a place where you could hire a moderator. And now the last few years, more and more people come to us saying, hey, we have an event. Can you help us design and build the event? And more and more, or the moderator is just a part in that. I mean, we had the COVID time. There was a shift in that people knew, okay, online, we really have to design, otherwise people will be bored to death and they just leave. Online, it's so easy to just click the presentation away. Absolutely. In a room that's more difficult, you need to stand up and leave. That is a statement. When you stand up in a room like this and just say, sorry, sorry. Leaving. No, boring. Sorry. But still, we should be aware that if the event or the conference or whatever is not appealing enough, is not about those people in the room, it might be that 80% of those people are there physically, but not listening. But not listening. Being on their mobile or just thinking about other stuff, or just switching off mentally. And it is our job as a moderator and as a moderator agency to make sure that not only the message is sent, but that the message is received and incorporated, and that something changes. If you do a meeting or an event and nothing changes, why have you done it in the first place? But isn't it also a balance? Because what I sometimes hate in moderators, to put it like that, is that they want to make it interactive, but it's a fake kind of interactive. Sometimes as a listener, when there's a very good speaker, I just want to listen. Leave me alone. Don't come with me. Absolutely. Absolutely. A brilliant speaker, programmed at the best time within an event is gold. And interaction, just for the sake of bloody interaction, will ruin everything. So what we need to do, in my opinion, is back to design and ask ourselves constantly why, why the event and why these elements within the event. So we should go away from defaults. We should go away from the default speaker speaking, people listening. But we shouldn't replace one default for another default being everything should be interactive. No.
And doesn't it also depend on the speaker? Because some speakers are so good. They can keep an audience engaged for an hour, 2 hours. And others, they have very interesting stories, but you put them better in a panel discussion because they can't. Or interview them or find another format.
Yeah. And it has to do with the quality of the speaker. It has to do with. Does the quality of the speaker resonate with the audience? Because we could find a topic together that we don't care about and then go to the best speaker on that topic, and we would still be bored because we don't care about it. And it has to do, again, with where do you program which speaker? It can be a very distinct difference if a speaker is opening or closing the conference, and the same speaker might be keeping attention as an opener and bore people to death as a closer. So we should constantly think about, yes, quality, but also, when do we use which quality? And it also goes from moderators. I mean, all my moderators, I can vouch for them, are brilliant moderators, but not for every event. But not for every event.
And where is the difference then? Is it topic, is it kind of audience, or more the kind of event?
It's a bit off topic, but hardly. It has to do with skills. Some moderators excel in interaction, others in interviewing, etcetera. And I mean, any of my moderators will never score a five on a scale of ten. But if you have a day full of debate, you take me as a moderator, I will score a six on debates because I'm okay, but I'm not the best. Get a different moderator. So it's skills. It's also personality, because every audience has a personality, and with some crowds, people will love me, other crowds will hate me. So you have to have this. Fingerspitzingevil. The Germans say gut feeling. The English say, about what personality of a moderator would have a click with the personality of people in the room. So those are the main elements of. Yeah, you talked before about it's society who's changing. So events are changing. One thing that's also changing a lot is focus on diversity, inclusion, that kind of topics. Does it also has an effect on your job? Absolutely. Because if you have a diverse group of people in the room, not everyone will be happy with the same stuff. So you have to constantly be aware of the fact that you have a diverse audience. I mean, for instance, if I ask a group of 400 people, does anyone have a question? It's always the same people that will stand up and come up with questions. Am I happy that they do that? Yes, of course. But there is a 40 50 60% people in a, for instance, introvert spectrum that do not feel very comfortable with just standing up and expressing their opinion in a group of 400 people. So we should also work with formats and design for those people to feel happy and to be able to express what they think. And that might be in working with smaller groups. If you and me are in a small group and I'm the introvert, very bad example. In a small group, I maybe will feel comfortable talking to you. If then we report back from our group to the whole room, you could bring in my perspective, because you are the extrovert and have no problem with talking to everyone. So we constantly need to think who's in the room, how do we make everyone feel at home comfortable, and then how do we involve everybody? It has to. I always call it as a moderator, you are building a temporary tribe. Everyone in the room should feel we are together here and then work from that. If we jump back to the interaction and meeting design for a second. One of the things a lot of organizers like to do, but I'm very curious on your opinion on that, is things like energizers, entertainment in between speakers. How do you look at it? My main mantra is, if you need energizers, your program sucks. Because if people are falling asleep and you then need to re energize them, you did something wrong. They fell asleep for a reason. So the energy should be in the program itself. You should think about formats that energize people if you do interaction, and if you do an energizer, make sure that it has a connection with the actual topic. I mean, asking people to turn around and massage each other's shoulders, unless you are at the annual meeting of physiotherapists, people hate that. I once was asked to engage in belly dancing for no apparent reason other than to wake us up before drinks. I don't do that, and people hate that. So first of all, make sure that your program is energizing in itself. Second of all, make sure that if you plan for energizers strategically, that they have something that people understand why they are doing it. And then thirdly, you said entertainment. People often think that energy means fun means entertainment. Hard work can be very energetic. If you give people an assignment to work on a problem that they all struggle with, you can get this very, very strong atmosphere of people, real drive, and that's also energetic. Is it fun? Is it people shouting? No, but it is energetic. And the same thing goes for entertainment. If the only reason to plan a piece of entertainment is to reward people for not going away or to wake them up before they go to the network dealer. That's wrong. Entertainment, make entertainment incorporated in your whole overall idea of what is happening and then comes back to the meeting design. Absolutely. We keep on coming back to that again and again and again.
Another thing that changed in society is that we in these times need to be more careful about what we say. There's a whole woke movement. How do you deal with that? Because part of your job is pushing here, pushing there, finding out the more difficult spots to talk about. But on the other side, people are more sensitive about those things.
Yeah, it is. The funny thing is, if people trust you and they know that you will push everyone, they're okay with it. We always say we have to be radically neutral. The reason why people fight wokeness is because they do not feel that their side of the story is heard, and everyone wants to be seen, heard and loved. And if as a moderator, you find a way of including all and showing people that you're open to listening to any opinion and that you are open to bringing in any perspective, then the whole problem with people fighting you is gone. And that's the only way, because we have a very polarized society. Right. People very black and white and against each other. You are crazy. No, you are crazy. As long as we allow people to keep on shouting at each other that they are crazy without listening, we will never go into dialogue again. So what we need to do is show both sides that we don't take position, but that we want to be there to listen to their story. And then through us as a moderator in the middle, it might happen that this side will listen to that side. Will they agree? At the end of the day? Probably not. Probably not. No. But will they have listened to each other and understands why the other one has an opposite opinion? Yes, probably. That's already a very big step. And that's a very big step. Absolutely. You already gave some treats of a good moderator. As a profile, you need to be neutral. You need to have certain skills, and that changes the type of event.
What profile does a moderator needs to have?
First and foremost, you need to love everybody. And that may sound a bit very over the top, but I'm really serious about that. Even if somebody has an opinion 100% contrary to your own, as a moderator, you need to love everybody in the room, because only if you do, people will connect to you. So that's one thing. Another thing is being radically neutral. A thing is you have to be it's a lot of seemingly contradictions. You need to be very flexible, but goal driven. The road to an end goal hardly ever is a straight line. So that's what you need to do. You need to be very. It's ego less charisma, which you need. That's also. It seems like a contradiction, because in most cases, someone with a very big ego has a lot of charisma, and someone with a very small ego does not have charisma. The best moderators are the ones that have ego less charisma, and you need to be able to lead without pushing people in a certain direction. People need to be willing to listen to you and follow your lead, but they need to feel that if they want to go in a different direction, you might be open to it. But it also has to do with the trust you mentioned before. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And what I hate in many moderators that I see online, for instance, is that they kind of act the role of the moderator. They do what they think a great moderator does. Sometimes they even have these little talks that clearly are scripted. As soon as I feel that you are scripted, I will not trust your questions to me anymore, because they might be scripted, too, and that will keep me away from completely opening up to you.
But do you start with building that trust before the event? Do you, for example, as a moderator, speak with speakers or panel members before?
Absolutely. Preparation is everything. Speak with your speakers, with your panelists, with your clients, and, if you can, with some representatives of the people that will be in the room, because that will give you an idea of who they are, what they struggle with, what they want in life, etcetera, etcetera. And then the second step is on the day itself. You become the moderator as soon as you get out of your car and open up to everyone. Talk to people in the lobby, connect on stage, please do not go into opening statements yourself. And then speakers, etcetera, and wait until after speaker number three to interact with the room immediately make them feel that this day revolves around them. So I hardly ever open with a long statement by myself. Most cases, I open with a question or a small idea and then see people's response to that, to immediately make them feel this day revolves around you. And I'm here to listen to you. That's, again, that ego. That's. Yeah, a lot of moderators do this because they think they feel important and they want to give that statement. Yeah, absolutely. But you feel that immediately, if that's the case, okay, we look back now.
What do you expect for the future, you've seen your job, your role in an event change dramatically over the last 20 years. What do you expect for the next 20 years?
That's hard to say, because when I started 20 years ago, you could look ahead for ten or 15 years. Now things change constantly, and that also has to do with the change in my profession. Nothing is sure for several years, but what I see happening right now is there is this online offline paradigm. There is this artificial intelligence that will change our life dramatically. And what I think will happen is that group sizes will be smaller, we will see more events with smaller groups. And what I think will happen is that as a counter effect to digital and AI, etcetera, the urge for meeting in person will be growing. But what we will do in person will be different. The presentations of the results of the company over the past year, or the plans with the company for the upcoming years, that will be online, that will be digitalized. People can watch it whenever they want. They will come together physically to discuss that. They will not come together physically to listen to the CEO talk for one and a half hour. Most CEO's aren't even good at it. Yeah, absolutely. And they will come together because they already received the CEO story in some other form. And then they will come together physically to discuss with the CEO to pick his brain on what it would mean for their daily job, the ideas to discuss amongst the team. Okay, now, we had a presentation. What does that mean for our job? Where do we need to change? What do we need? What demands do we have to management? Hey, if you want us to act differently, fine. But this is then what we need from you. Okay? That's the future for the profession, for your own agency. Normally, I don't allow a lot of because it's your celebration. How does the future for your company look like? Here we go with a commercial break. Right, but this is the last part of the interview, so if you want to switch off now, you can also still cut it out. Yeah, you can still do that. What we are doing as a company is in the past, dutch moderators would travel around the world to moderate due to Covid and due to market, et cetera, et cetera, due to sustainability. That is not the best format anymore. So what we are quickly doing now is taking our way of moderation, introducing that to people all over the world so that we have moderators in every region. We now have moderators in the eastern part of Europe, in Scandinavia, in England, in Spain and Portugal. We are working on the United States, which means that the dutch way of moderating will be present locally or regionally. And that might even lead to us not having one office in the Netherlands, but having offices spread over Europe or in the United States, even in touch with Australia. So we're kind of expanding the idea, our idea of moderating and bringing it to other markets.
Okay, sounds great. Good luck with that. And hopefully in twelve and a half years, we're sitting back here to discuss how that went. Thank you, Jan-Jaap, for coming over.
Thank you for having me.
Are you at home? Thank you for watching our show. I hope to see you next week.
