What AI Can't Write For You: Stories and Structure (Part 2)

Part two of the AI and keynotes series. Last episode covered the tells that give away a keynote written too much with AI. This one goes underneath that, to the parts of a keynote that were never AI's to write in the first place, even for speakers who've already cleaned up the obvious tells.

John draws the line between a personal story and a personalised one: a personal story is something that happened to you; a personalised story is something that happened to you, chosen and shaped to do a specific job for a specific audience. He walks through four questions he uses with clients to audit which stories actually earn a place in a keynote, including a real example from his own experience: the story of being a flight attendant working the flight that turned back on September 11th, 2001, and the communication breakdown that followed.

The episode also covers a practical structural point: why a keynote built to run exactly 45 minutes and nothing else is a commercially fragile talk, and how to identify the load-bearing throughline that has to survive at 20 minutes, versus the expansion material that fills you out to 60 or 90 minutes.

Closes with a brief mention of frameworks, teeing up next episode's conversation with Susanna Reay, author of Framework Thinking.

Find out more about the Known, Booked & Paid Blueprint founding cohort here: https://presentinfluence.com/kbpb

Any questions, you can find my LinkedIn and email info at the end of the show notes.

Chapters:

00:00 AI Tells Aren't Enough

01:35 Personal vs Personalised

03:21 Four Story Audit Questions

06:00 Why AI Can't Write This

07:51 Build Talks That Flex

09:37 Steel Thread and Expansion

10:25 The Real Principle Behind It

11:27 Frameworks and Next Episode

12:50 Subscribe and Program Invite

13:39 Final Send Off

What's the difference between a personal story and a personalised story in a keynote?

According to John Ball, a personal story is simply something that happened to the speaker. A personalised story is something that happened to the speaker, deliberately chosen and shaped to do a specific job for a specific audience. The distinction is what separates a keynote that gets a warm response from one that gets people talking about it afterwards.

How do you know if a story belongs in a keynote?

John Ball uses four questions with clients: did the story cost the speaker something (embarrassment, money, relationship, status), does it have a direct line to the specific argument being made rather than just a thematic connection, can the audience map it onto their own situation, and could literally nobody else on a stage tell that story.

Why can't AI write personal stories for a keynote?

AI has no access to which parts of a speaker's actual life carried real stakes. When prompted for a story, it either genericises the material it's given, smoothing out the specific and awkward human details, or invents a plausible-sounding story that means nothing because nobody lived it.

How long should a keynote be?

John Ball recommends designing the core skeleton of a keynote for 45 minutes, but identifying which sections are load-bearing (the talk stops making sense without them) versus expansion material (adds richness but isn't essential), so the talk can flex to a 20-minute or 90-minute brief without falling apart.

Why does keynote length flexibility matter commercially?

A talk that works only at a specific length is structurally fragile. Speakers either turn down briefs that don't match their fixed version or deliver something that doesn't quite work, both of which cost bookings over time.

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Mentioned in this episode:

The Known, Booked & Paid Blueprint (Founding cohort)

Get all the information on the Known, Booked & Paid Blueprint at https://presentinfluence.com/kbpb to see if it's the right fit for you.