Culture Karaoke
A live, unrepeatable keynote experience where the audience sets the agenda.
The audience request and vote for the culture questions they most want answered. Whatever they push to the top is what gets tackled, live, in that order, every question paired with a song. A different experience every single time.
The problem
Six frustrations every delegate has felt, and quietly accepted as the cost of a conference.
Sixty-seven slides and a mountain story that could have been an email.
Half the room checked out, because the format gave them no reason to stay in it.
Interesting enough, and nothing to do with the work anybody does on a Tuesday.
On for the slot, gone before the coffee. No before, no after.
A one-hour island. Nothing follows it, so it evaporates.
No energy in the room, just blank faces pointed at a big screen.
The idea at the heart of it
Improvisation is not the absence of skill. It is the highest expression of it.
You can only be spontaneous if you have a plan. You can only improvise if you have the expertise. What is prepared is the material: every question in the songbook is written, researched and ready. What the room decides is which of them get answered at all, in what order, and which of its own questions join them.
The running order
Not an hour on a stage. A build-up your delegates are part of, a session they steer, and something that is still working when they get back to their desks.
Delegates submit the culture questions they care about, the ones they would only whisper about in corridors, and vote the best ones up. The heat rises to the top. That is the agenda.
It tells you where the room's real tension sits, before anybody arrives.
The details
Most keynotes are made to pick one. The details are where this one refuses: a moment that makes it safe to be honest, and a moment that makes the room laugh. Neither is an accident, and both are the reason a format built on karaoke is more than a metaphor.
The moment of honesty
Parental AdvisoryThe explicit stickerNobody signs their name to anything, so the honest questions turn up. If somebody flags one as blunt, it goes up on the screen wearing a parental advisory sticker, exactly like a record that earned one.
It is a joke and it is also permission. The question people were only ever going to ask in the car park gets asked in the room instead.
The moment of playfulness
This one goes out to…DedicationsEvery question can carry one, the way a request has done on the radio since the 1950s. For everyone on the third floor. For my last manager. For the team who had to sit through the values workshop.
They are read out with the question. It is the single most reliable laugh of the session, and it is entirely written by the room.
A real one, on the screen. The sticker is the format telling the room it is safe to be honest, and the COVER tag means somebody in the audience wrote the question.
House rules
When a question somebody wrote gets answered, their phone tells them it was theirs. Nobody else in the room can see it. It is the difference between watching a keynote and having written one.
A code and a browser. No app, no account, no email address, no name attached to anything. The questions worth asking are usually the ones nobody wants their name on.
It cannot be irrelevant to the room, because the room chose it. Not a topic guessed at from a brief six months ago.
One action, and a page they can send to the people who were not there.
Who takes the mic
Two people who have earned the right to do this. Book either of us on our own, or both of us on the same stage.
Shane Michael HattonAuthor of Let’s Talk Culture and Lead the Room. Featured in Harvard Business Review and Forbes. London based, Australian at heart.
This guy is really funny, really clever, there are a million take outs, he’s absolutely brilliant.Maz Farrelly
Colin D EllisFive-time best-selling author and creator of the Culture Dial. Thirty years an employee, fifteen of them as a senior leader.
Easily the best speaker I have ever seen. His unwavering energy and razor-sharp wit create a force that is unmatched.Nick Bartlett
Two of us answering the room in real time, with a combined seven books and four proven frameworks behind every answer. Twice the range, so more of what the room asks lands inside work one of us has already done.
Trusted by
Some of the incredible organisations Shane & Colin have partnered with.
Culture Karaoke runs on its own platform, built for the format: the songbook, the voting, the chart on the screen, the run sheet behind it and the page that lands afterwards.
