Sometimes it does. Sometimes it does the opposite.

Recent research highlighted by Knowledge at Wharton found that teams performed as much as 60% better than the strongest individual on some tasks. But on others, teams performed three times worse.

That’s a huge difference. The question, then, isn’t whether teams outperform individuals. It’s: When do teams make us better, and when do they make us worse?

The answer appears to depend heavily on the nature of the work and the conditions under which people are asked to collaborate. And that closely mirrors something I’ve been teaching for years through Personality Poker: before deciding who should do the work, understand the environment in which the work will be done.

In other words, rules before roles.

Rules Before Roles

We tend to focus on putting the right people on the right tasks. But performance depends on something else that is often overlooked: the environment in which we ask people to do the work.

Think about two extremes. Some work is highly structured. There are clear rules, established processes, defined expectations, and perhaps even an objectively correct answer. Other work is much more open-ended. The destination may be unclear, the process needs to be invented along the way, and there may be many possible answers.

Those environments require very different ways of working.

This is one of the most interesting findings from the Wharton research. Teams tended to perform particularly well on problems where the correct answer could be recognized and verified. Under those conditions, adding people increased the likelihood that someone would discover the answer and that the group could recognize its validity.

But collaboration became less beneficial on open-ended tasks where there was no objectively verifiable best answer. Additional people could introduce more uncertainty, disagreement, and inefficiency rather than improving the result.

In other words, teamwork itself isn’t inherently good or bad. The environment changes the value of the team.

Red Cards vs. Black Cards

Years ago, a leadership program at Eckerd College in Florida conducted an exercise that demonstrated a similar principle. They tested people to see whether they liked working within rules or preferred breaking them.

In Personality Poker, red cards tend to prefer flexibility and doing things differently. Rules can feel limiting and restrictive. Black cards, on the other hand, tend to prefer structure and doing things better within rules.

You might therefore assume that the obvious approach would be to put the red cards in creative roles and the black cards in implementation roles. But the answer isn’t that simple.

Participants were divided into designers and builders. The design task was highly structured, with seven rules that had to be followed. The build task was almost completely unstructured.

One team followed the conventional wisdom: red cards designed and black cards built. Another mixed the two styles together in both roles. A third did what seemed like the opposite of what should make sense: black cards designed and red cards built.

Which combination was most effective?

The third team won by a mile.

The reason was that the environment mattered more than the label attached to the task. The design activity sounded creative, but it operated within a highly structured environment. The black cards thrived because the rules were clear. The build activity sounded like execution, but it was actually wide open. The red cards thrived because they had the freedom to figure things out as they went.

The lesson wasn’t that black cards are better designers or red cards are better builders. It was that our conventional categories of “creative people” and “execution people” can cause us to miss what really drives performance.

The task tells you what needs to be done. The rules tell you the conditions under which it will be done.

And those conditions can completely change who is best suited to the work.

The Personality Poker Connection

This is where the Wharton research and Personality Poker become particularly interesting together.

The Wharton researchers didn’t study Personality Poker, and their research shouldn’t be presented as scientific validation of the methodology itself. But their findings provide independent scientific support for a central principle behind it: You cannot determine the best way to organize people without considering the nature and conditions of the work.

Personality Poker gives leaders a practical language for doing exactly that.

The four suits represent four different orientations. Diamonds are creative and like ideas and experiences. Spades are analytical and like facts and data. Clubs plan the work and work the plan. Hearts focus on relationships and people.

But there’s another dimension that is equally important. The red suits, Diamonds and Hearts, tend to prefer more flexibility and freedom. The black suits, Spades and Clubs, tend to prefer greater clarity and structure.

This means simply matching people to tasks isn’t enough. A Diamond may be highly creative, but they can excel at execution if the usual constraints that limit their flexibility are removed. A Club may be known for execution, but put them in a brainstorming session with a well-defined process and they can be incredibly creative.

Same person. Same capabilities. Different rules. Different performance.

Stop Trying to Fix the Person

This has another important implication for leaders. When someone struggles, we often assume something is wrong with the person. Maybe they lack the necessary skill. Maybe they aren’t motivated. Maybe we gave them the wrong assignment.

Sometimes the problem is none of those things. They may simply be operating in an environment that fights against the way they naturally work.

I experienced this in my own business when I hired Sean, a black card with deep project management experience, to run a complicated client engagement. On paper, it was a perfect match. Project manager. Complex project. What could go wrong?

Quite a lot, as it turned out.

I gave Sean the kind of environment I personally love. I gave him freedom, stayed out of his way, and expected him to figure out the best approach. I thought I was empowering him. Instead, he struggled.

Eventually he told me what was missing. He needed clearer milestones, decision frameworks, expectations, and success criteria. I had given him a black-card role in a red-card environment.

Once I added the structure, his performance changed dramatically. I hadn’t changed the person or the assignment. I changed the rules.

More People Aren’t Always Better

There is another lesson here that connects directly with the Wharton findings.

One of the central principles of Personality Poker is that people who think differently from us can compensate for our blind spots. Cognitive diversity matters. But that doesn’t mean the solution to every problem is adding more people to the room.

In fact, in the Eckerd exercise, the team that mixed red and black cards in both roles performed the worst. Without the tools to understand and leverage their differences, their diversity created conflict instead of value.

That’s an important distinction. Diversity is potential. It isn’t automatically performance.

The Wharton research demonstrates something similar at the level of collaboration. Adding more minds to a problem can dramatically improve performance under the right conditions. Under the wrong conditions, the team can actually perform worse than an individual.

So the goal isn’t maximum collaboration, and it isn’t maximum diversity at every moment. The goal is the right people, working in the right way, under the right conditions, at the right time.

What It Really Means to Play with a Full Deck

This helps clarify what I mean when I tell organizations they need to “play with a full deck.”

It doesn’t mean every meeting needs an equal number of Diamonds, Spades, Clubs, and Hearts. It doesn’t mean everyone should participate in every decision. And it certainly doesn’t mean that teams are always superior to individuals.

It means recognizing that no single way of thinking or working is appropriate for every situation.

Sometimes you need the Diamonds expanding possibilities. Sometimes you need the Spades scrutinizing assumptions. Sometimes the Clubs need to stop the conversation and move everyone toward a decision. Sometimes the Hearts are essential because even the technically correct solution will fail if people don’t embrace it.

And sometimes the best thing you can do is let someone work alone.

The Wharton research gives us compelling evidence that team performance depends on the characteristics of the work and the conditions surrounding collaboration. Personality Poker adds a practical framework for understanding the people inside those conditions.

So before your next project, meeting, or important decision, don’t start by asking who should be on the team. Start with the rules.

How structured is the work? How ambiguous is the problem? Is there a verifiably correct answer, or are we exploring possibilities? Do we need collaboration at this stage, or would individuals working independently produce better results?

Only then should you move to the roles. Who thrives under these conditions? Which perspectives do we need? Who should lead? Who should contribute? And perhaps just as importantly, who doesn’t need to be involved right now?

Because playing with a full deck doesn’t mean playing every card.

It means knowing which cards to play, and creating the right conditions for them to perform at their best.

The post When Teams Make Us Worse appeared first on Stephen Shapiro.

And then you discover you’ve been reading them completely wrong.

That happened during a recent speech I gave on Personality Poker. I paired people up and asked them to do something that sounded simple: Figure out the other person’s personality style without looking at their cards.

Some of these people had worked together for years. After the exercise, I asked how they did, and one person immediately shouted, “Awful.”

That got a laugh, but it also exposed something important. Knowing someone is not the same as understanding them. We make assumptions based on the role they play, the work they do, and the version of themselves we happen to see.

And often, we get it wrong.

The Cards Are Usually Hidden

Personality Poker uses four suits to represent different ways people think and work. Spades are drawn to facts, data, and evidence. Clubs focus on plans, action, and results. Hearts pay attention to people and relationships. Diamonds are energized by ideas, possibilities, and what’s new.

When someone has five Personality Poker cards in front of them, understanding their preferences is relatively easy. But most of life doesn’t work that way.

Your customer doesn’t walk into a meeting holding five cards. Neither does the person you’re interviewing, your boss, or the employee you’re struggling to motivate. So how do you know what they need?

You read the tells.

In poker, a tell is a clue that gives you information about the hand another player might be holding. People have tells too, and they reveal them through the questions they ask, the words they use, what excites them, and what they pay attention to.

You might not see their cards. But if you know what to look for, you can often see their hand.

We’re Constantly Speaking Different Languages

Before introducing the tells, I gave the audience another challenge. I asked whether anyone spoke a language other than English as their first language, and one woman said Spanish.

I asked her to imagine that the rest of us were potential buyers and she needed to sell us something. There was only one condition: she had to make the entire sales pitch in Spanish.

She did. She was animated, enthusiastic, and persuasive. When she finished, I asked the audience how many were ready to buy.

People laughed. A few joked that they might buy because they liked her energy, but most of us had no idea what she had actually sold.

That was the point.

When someone doesn’t understand us, our instinct is often to explain it again. We add detail, speak more slowly, and sometimes practically shout. But speaking louder doesn’t help if you’re speaking the wrong language.

The same thing happens when we communicate with people who think differently from us.

Listen to the Questions

The strongest tells are often verbal. Pay attention to the questions people ask because those questions can reveal what matters to them.

A Spade tends to ask for evidence: “What’s the evidence?” “How do we know?” “What does the data show?”

A Club is more likely to focus on action and results: “What’s the plan?” “When will this be finished?” “How are we going to implement it?”

A Heart brings the conversation back to people: “Who needs to be involved?” “How will this affect the team?” “What does the customer think?”

And a Diamond starts exploring possibilities: “What if we tried this?” “Has anyone done this before?” “What else could we do?”

People rarely hide their style. They announce it. Repeatedly.

There can be physical clues too. Spades may become contained and analytical. Think of Rodin’s The Thinker. A skeptical Spade might sit with arms crossed while quietly evaluating everything being said.

Diamonds often have more movement and energy. They gesture, jump between ideas, and come alive when the conversation moves toward something new.

Clubs often show a focused intensity. One of my favorite Club tells is the karate chop: “We’re going to do this, then this, then this.”

Hearts tend to create connection. Some do it quietly through listening and steady attention, while others become highly animated when talking about people and relationships.

But this is where reading tells can become dangerous if we oversimplify it. Someone crossing their arms does not automatically make them a Spade. Maybe they’re cold.

A tell isn’t proof. It’s a clue. Look for patterns, especially in the language people use and the questions they repeatedly ask.

The Audience Made the Same Mistake We All Make

During that first exercise, people were trying to identify the suit of someone they knew, and the results were surprisingly poor. One reason quickly became obvious: we tend to confuse someone’s job with who they are.

A person may have learned how to behave in a certain role because the job requires it. That doesn’t necessarily mean the behavior is natural, and being good at something doesn’t mean you enjoy it.

I once worked with someone who was extremely good with spreadsheets. Everyone knew it, so whenever a new spreadsheet needed to be created, guess who got the assignment?

She did. Again and again.

The problem was that she hated spreadsheets. She could do the work, but it drained her. What energized her was creative work.

Her colleagues were reading her résumé rather than reading her.

That distinction matters. Capability isn’t preference. Just because you can play a card doesn’t mean you want it in your hand.

One Question Changed the Conversation

During the debrief, one participant mentioned a question his partner had asked: “What do you do when you’re not working?”

I loved that question because outside of work, some of our learned behaviors disappear. We aren’t performing a job, trying to satisfy a boss, or playing the role the organization expects us to play. Our natural preferences can become much easier to see.

Sometimes the person you know at work is only one version of that person.

Then we moved into the second round of the exercise. This time, instead of relying mainly on what they thought they already knew, participants became more curious.

They asked questions like, “What kind of projects do you most enjoy?” “What are you most proud of?” “When you start something new, what do you want to know first?” And, of course, “What do you enjoy doing when you’re not working?”

The second round went much better.

That may have been the biggest insight of the exercise. Reading tells is not about becoming better at labeling people. It is about becoming better at understanding them.

Why This Matters When You’re Trying to Persuade Someone

Once you start recognizing tells, communication changes. Imagine you’re selling an idea to a Spade. They may need evidence before they are willing to move forward.

A Club may want to know exactly how it will be implemented. A Heart may want to understand how people will be affected. A Diamond may become excited by what is new or possible.

Same idea. Four very different conversations.

I’m a Diamond. If you spend twenty minutes showing me spreadsheets, technical specifications, and statistical models, I might understand your argument perfectly well, but you probably haven’t captured my interest. Odds are, I will have fallen asleep halfway through.

Instead, tell me, “This is new. No one has tried this before. You could be one of the first.” Now I’m listening.

That isn’t manipulation. It is simply recognizing that effective communication is not about saying what you want to say. It is about saying it in a way the other person can hear.

The Real Skill Isn’t Reading People

The difference between the first and second rounds reinforced one of the most important lessons of the exercise. The real skill isn’t simply learning to recognize Spades, Clubs, Hearts, and Diamonds. It’s curiosity and learning to stop making assumptions.

Pay attention to the questions someone asks. Listen for the words they repeat and notice where their energy increases. Notice what they care about when nobody is telling them what they’re supposed to care about.

Then test your assumption. Because the biggest danger isn’t that we don’t understand other people. It’s that we’re convinced we already do.

In poker, you rarely get to see the other person’s cards. You watch, listen, look for patterns, and read the tells.

Maybe we should do the same with people.

P.S. It was correctly pointed out that the image has the suits in the wrong place. The photo used is a paid stock photo, not an AI generated one. For the purposes of the blog, I wanted to use the original image, not a doctored version. The correct format of the suits: Spades top left. Diamonds top right. Clubs bottom-left. Hearts bottom right. 

The post You’re Probably Misreading the People Around You appeared first on Stephen Shapiro.

I once worked with Rick, a city manager in Texas. When he chose his Personality Poker cards, he had a flush of Hearts: caring, people-focused, and motivational. But when his team gave him cards, they were all Clubs: disciplined, process-driven, a manager’s manager.

Their perception wasn’t wrong. But it didn’t match how Rick saw himself. Rick had adapted to what his job required and was showing up as a Club, even though that wasn’t what energized him. Once he recognized the disconnect, he shifted some of the process-heavy work to others and spent more time doing what came naturally to him.

The result? He reduced his stress, became more effective, and helped his team see a side of him they hadn’t been seeing.

Your intentions don’t determine how people experience you. Your behavior does.

But sometimes the gap reveals something positive that you don’t see in yourself.

I once did a Personality Poker gifting ceremony with a group of construction workers. One of these big, burly guys gave another the “self-sacrificing” card and explained how he was always the person who stepped up, took responsibility, and put himself on the line for everyone else.

The recipient’s eyes teared up. He thought of himself as a results guy. He had never recognized this quality in himself, but everyone else had.

That’s why one of my favorite parts of Personality Poker is “gifting.” It’s not really about giving someone a playing card. It’s about saying, “This is how I experience you.”

Sometimes that confirms what you already know. Sometimes it reveals something you’re projecting without realizing it. And sometimes someone sees a strength in you that you’ve never recognized in yourself.

Here’s something you can try today. Ask three people who know you well: “What’s one trait or strength you see in me that stands out?”

Don’t tell them how you see yourself first, and don’t defend or explain their answers. Just listen, then compare what they tell you with how you would describe yourself.

The gap is where things get interesting.

See Yourself Through Other People’s Eyes

Gifting is now built into Full Deck IQ. You create your Personality Poker hand based on how you see yourself, then invite other people to gift you cards based on how they experience you.

Now you can compare the two. What do you see that they don’t? What do they see that you don’t? And what might you want to do differently because of it?

Want to see yourself through the eyes of others? Full Deck IQ (FDIQ) lets you compare the hand you create for yourself with the cards others gift you. FDIQ is included with certification. Learn more about FDIQ.

Want to Bring Personality Poker to Others?

For years, I’ve been the one facilitating these kinds of conversations. Now, for the first time, I’m teaching others how to do it.

I’ve opened Personality Poker Facilitator Certification for trainers, consultants, facilitators, and internal leaders who want to bring Personality Poker to their own teams and clients. The first facilitators are already going through the program, and I’m offering the founding group certification for $995.

Learn about Personality Poker Certification

The post How Does the World See You? appeared first on Stephen Shapiro.

On one page, he connected ideas from several of my books into a surprisingly cohesive philosophy of innovation.

But one theme jumped out at me:

We don’t need more answers. We need better questions.

AI can generate answers in seconds. Best practices give us answers that worked for someone else. Experts have answers based on what worked in the past.

The real opportunity is to step back and ask:

Are we solving the right problem in the first place?

Pekka does a great job connecting that idea to differentiation, collaboration, blind spots, and even the people who drive us crazy.

Worth a read, and not just because he wrote nice things about me.

READ THE ARTICLE HERE

The post Innovation Begins Before the Idea appeared first on Stephen Shapiro.

Compressing the talk was its own puzzle.

My first instinct was to trim. Take the hour, cut the weakest sections, talk faster. That instinct is wrong, and it produces the twelve-minute version nobody remembers.

The better question is: what is the short version FOR? My hour-long keynote delivers a transformation. My twelve-minute showcase had one job: make a room of buyers experience the product and want more. Different job, different design.

I redesigned rather than trimmed.

Once I knew the job, the cuts made themselves. Content that taught got cut. Content that demonstrated was kept. The audience trading cards to Kenny Rogers is the experience. The framework lecture is homework. I kept the trading and compressed the lecture into a taste.

A short talk is not a small long talk. It is a different animal with a tighter skeleton.

But compression is not the reason I am writing this. The deadline forced me to invent a rehearsal process I will now use for every talk I ever give, at any length. Over three weeks and more than fifty rehearsals, I turned my phone into a speech coach that never gets tired, never flatters me, and catches things no human coach can hear in real time.

YOU CAN LISTEN TO THE RECORDING, BUT YOU STILL WON’T HEAR IT

Here is the entire process, and it costs almost nothing.

Every rehearsal, I hit record on my phone using the voice recorder. I AirDrop it to my Mac and upload the audio file into MacWhisper, which transcribes it into an SRT file. Every phrase I spoke is timestamped to the tenth of a second. Then I give that file to Claude, along with my script, and ask it to tell me the truth.

It told me things I could never feel from inside the talk. One early run clocked a section at 192 words per minute. I thought I was being energetic. I was being unintelligible. In one dress rehearsal, I politely waited for the audience to return to their seats after an activity. That politeness cost 39 seconds of dead air. The fix went straight into the script: start talking the moment the music stops. It knew when I rushed certain sections yet dragged in others.

It measured my pauses. The dramatic hold before my closing line was 2.7 seconds one night and under one second the next. Same speaker, same line, completely different moment for the audience. You think you paused. The file knows. It caught every time I stepped on a punchline, because the timestamps show exactly how much air a laugh line got before I spoke again.

And it caught the single words that kept slipping. I led the project 30 years ago. I created the game 20 years ago. Under pressure, those numbers swapped, and every slip became a drill item until it stopped appearing.

YOUR FAILURES PROVIDE CLUES

Two nights before the showcase, I had my worst rehearsal and could not tell why. The analysis found it in minutes: I was saying my key lines twice. The thesis, twice. The big closing line, twice. Under nerves, I had stopped trusting lines to land once, and my insurance copies added 40 seconds and muddied every big moment.

A few nights earlier, the opposite failure: I skipped lines, and the ending felt hollow. Skipping and doubling turned out to be the same disease. Both showed up in my newest, least-practiced material. The prescription was not another full run. It was ten clean repetitions of one sixty-second passage. The talk was fine. One sixty-second section was the problem, and the data found it.

A human coach might have felt something was off. The file showed exactly what, exactly where, and exactly how much it cost.

THE QUESTIONS ARE THE COACHING

The transcription is not the magic. The questions are. After every run, I asked: Where am I rushing compared to yesterday? How long was the pause before my closing line? Which sections are growing? Did I give the punchline room, or did I step on it? What did I skip? What did I say twice?

Each answer came back with timestamps, so I always knew whether a problem was a feeling or a fact. And because the AI had every previous run, it caught drift I could not: my slowest rehearsals were all after midnight. Tired delivery stretches. The data taught me to trust my daytime tapes and stop panic-editing at 1 a.m.

BUILD A COUNTDOWN, NOT A SCRIPT

For a timed talk, the data also let me engineer the landing. I built gates: when the story ends, the clock should read 7:45. When the trading music starts, 5:55. When I say “Twelve minutes ago, I made you a promise,” 1:15. I rehearsed two endings, a full close and a shorter one, with a decision point at a specific timestamp. On the day, I glanced at the clock at the promise line, took the short close, and landed at 11:50 with the music hitting at 11:55.

That is the difference between hoping you finish on time and engineering it.

TRY IT ON YOUR NEXT TALK

You do not need a showcase or a twelve-minute slot. Take any talk you already give. Record one full run on your phone, or one portion of it. Transcribe it, hand the SRT and your script to an AI, and ask three questions: Where am I rushing? Where is my dead air? How long are my pauses at the moments that matter?

The answers will surprise you. Mine did, even after 30 years on stage. My live talk landed within seconds of the plan, and the audience got my best delivery in years, because for three weeks my phone told me the truth. Over and over again.

Your phone already knows where you are stepping on your punchlines. You just have to ask it.

P.S. The 12-minute video of my showcase will be posted soon!

The post How My Phone Became My Speech Coach appeared first on Stephen Shapiro.

Seventeen hundred rocket scientists filled the audience. My talk was called “Rocket Science. It’s Always Rocket Science.” The premise: the best ideas rarely come from within your own area of expertise. They come from connections to other fields.

I had six minutes.

Compressing that idea into six minutes was one of the hardest things I have ever done as a speaker. The structure was simple. An opening. Three very short stories. A conclusion. Every word had to earn its place. Anything that did not serve the idea got cut.

When I walked off stage, the clock read 5:59.

This Friday, I face something harder.

On paper, it looks easier. I have twelve minutes. Twice the time. But at TEDxNASA, I stood in one place and talked. I controlled every second. This time, I am running a Personality Poker session. The full experience normally takes an hour.

In those twelve minutes, the audience will trade cards with each other. I will step off the stage and into the crowd to demonstrate a trade myself. Loud music will play before, during, and after. I cannot script how long a conversation in the audience will last. I cannot predict how quickly people will finish trading and sit back down. I have to build in cushion for the unpredictable while still landing every key moment.

A six-minute monologue is hard because you must cut everything that does not matter. A twelve-minute interactive experience is harder because you must do that and surrender control at the same time.

There is a quote often attributed to Mark Twain, though it probably belongs to Blaise Pascal: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
Short is hard. That is exactly why it works. The constraint forces clarity. You have to know precisely what you want the audience to think, feel, and do. Everything else goes.

Give me sixty minutes and I can improvise, my preferred style as it feels natural. Give me twelve and every second counts.

Wish me luck on Friday.

And I am curious: what is the hardest talk, pitch, or presentation you have ever given? I would bet it was not the longest one.

Watch the 6-minute speech on the TEDx site.

The post The Hardest Speeches I’ve Ever Given appeared first on Stephen Shapiro.

The post Full Deck Reflection appeared first on Stephen Shapiro.

That recognition meant a great deal to me. 800-CEO-READ had long been one of the most respected voices in business books, and it has since become Porchlight Book Company.

That is why I am especially honored that Porchlight has published my new ChangeThis manifesto, Is Your Organization Playing with a Full Deck?

This manifesto is the latest evolution of an idea that has been central to my work for decades: organizations do not fail because they lack smart people. They fail because they narrow the range of thinking they allow to flourish.

We naturally gravitate toward people who see the world as we do. We hire people who fit in. We promote people who communicate in familiar ways. We reward the behaviors that have worked in the past.

Over time, though, this creates a dangerous blind spot.

Some organizations become great at execution but lose their ability to experiment. Others become idea factories but struggle to turn anything into action. Some have plenty of data and expertise but too little curiosity, empathy, or willingness to challenge conventional wisdom.

The people who make us uncomfortable are often the people who bring what we are missing.

The manifesto explores why teams need the full range of thinking styles, creative thinkers, analytical thinkers, people-focused thinkers, and action-oriented thinkers. More importantly, it looks at why simply having those people on the payroll is not enough. Leaders need to create an environment where each of those perspectives can actually shape the conversation.

This matters now more than ever.

AI is making information, analysis, ideas, and even prototypes easier to generate. Soon, nearly every organization will have access to similar tools and capabilities. The differentiator will not be who has the best AI. It will be who has the strongest ability to use it well.

That requires people who see different possibilities, question assumptions, understand customers, and make things happen.

In other words, it requires playing with a full deck.

Read “Is Your Organization Playing with a Full Deck?” at Porchlight Book Company.

The post Is Your Organization Playing with a Full Deck? (ChangeThis) appeared first on Stephen Shapiro.

A great speech is not the goal. Creating something that continues to matter after the event is over is…

A few years ago, I gave a 90-minute keynote for 400 engineers in the U.S. Air Force.

The first 45 minutes were great. People were laughing, participating, and clearly having a good time. The room had energy. Then, somewhere in the second half, everything changed.

The room got quiet.

The laughter stopped. The energy dropped. It felt as though all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room.

Afterward, people came up to tell me the session was amazing. I was confused. I asked about the second half because I assumed that was where I had lost them.

They told me, “The first half was fun. The second half hit us in the gut. You said things we needed to hear, even though we did not want to hear them.”

That experience has stayed with me because speakers are often taught to measure success by the response in the room. Did people laugh? Did they participate? Did they give you a standing ovation? Did the evaluations come back with high scores?

Those things are nice. But they can also be misleading.

A standing ovation is not an outcome.

Interactive, Memorable, and Impactful

I think about audience experiences in three levels.

The first level is interactive. People are participating rather than simply listening. They may answer questions, discuss an idea at their tables, vote in a poll, or take part in an activity.

For me, an interactive experience is one that cannot be fully replicated by watching a video on YouTube. If someone can get essentially the same experience by watching your keynote online, there is little reason to bring everyone together in a room. The value of a live event is that people are part of it. They are reacting to one another, making choices, having conversations, and experiencing something together in real time.

The second level is memorable. People talk about the experience afterward. They remember a story, an activity, or a moment that made them see something differently.

The third level is impactful. Something actually changes after the event. People use a tool. They make better decisions. They have different conversations. They approach their work together in a more useful way. The event creates something that continues after the speaker is gone.

That third level is harder to achieve, but it is also where the real value lies.

The Woman in the Hotel Lobby

I was standing in a hotel lobby when a woman approached me. She asked, “Are you the guy who created Personality Poker?”

Nobody ever recognizes me in public, so I was a little surprised. I said yes.

She told me that she had participated in one of my sessions a decade earlier. Since then, she had moved to five different countries. Out of everything she had accumulated over those years, one of the things she had kept through every move was her Personality Poker cards.

That night, she sent me a photo of them.

That is what a memorable experience looks like. It is something people continue to talk about, remember, and carry with them long after the event is over. In her case, one keynote experience stayed with her for a decade and across five international moves.

That matters. But memorable is not the same as impactful.

The CEO Who Kept the Cards on His Desk

Last year, I did another event for an organization where I had led a Personality Poker session over a decade earlier.

The CEO and I had barely spoken in the years since that event. When we reconnected, he told me that Personality Poker had been the single most important business tool he had used during his 13 years as CEO.

He said there were only four items on his desk. Two were personal. One was business-related. The other was a Personality Poker deck.

Whenever someone came into his office, he would use the cards to begin a deeper conversation.

That is an impactful experience. The session did not just create a good memory. It introduced a tool that became part of how the CEO led the organization, how he engaged employees, and how people had conversations about their strengths and missing perspectives. They recently bought thousands of decks of cards to further drive impact throughout the organization.

The difference is important. A memorable experience is one people talk about for years. An impactful experience is one that changes something, creates value over time, and can be measured.

In this case, the CEO could point to over ten years of using the tool in his organization. He could describe its role in conversations, leadership, and decision-making. That is a far more meaningful measure than whether people enjoyed the original keynote.

Do Not Think of the Speech as an Event

Most speakers, and most clients, think of a speech as an event.

There is an agenda. A room. A stage. A time slot. A speaker. Applause. Then everyone goes home.

That is too small a way to think about it.

A speech should not be the event. It should be the launch.

The question is not simply, “What will happen during the speech?” It is, “What are we launching with this speech that will continue to create value after the speaker leaves the stage?”

An event gives you something difficult to create any other way. It brings a large group of people together at the same time, focused on a common issue. It gives an organization shared language, shared energy, and a shared starting point.

That makes it the ideal moment to launch something.

It might be a new way for teams to talk about a challenge. It might be a framework leaders use in future meetings. It might be a tool that helps people make better decisions or work together more effectively. It might be a set of conversations that need to continue long after the event is over.

The speech is not the destination. It is the starting point.

The Conversation Before the Event Matters Most

That is why the most important conversation may be the one that happens before the event.

When a client says, “We want to hire you for a keynote,” the conversation should not end with what you will say, how you will say it, the audience size, or the AV requirements.

It should include what they want to launch.

What needs to be different afterward? What conversations need to continue? What challenges are they trying to address? What will people need in order to apply the ideas once they are back at work? How will the organization know whether the event created real value?

Without that conversation, even a powerful keynote can become a pleasant memory that fades by the following week.

With that conversation, you can design the speech around something more meaningful than audience reaction. You may decide the audience needs a common language they can use in future meetings. You may introduce a tool that managers can use with their teams. You may create discussion questions that leaders can continue using after the event. Or you may help the client identify one or two measures that will show whether the message led to something useful.

The speaker does not have to own all of that work. In many cases, the client is perfectly capable of carrying it forward. But it is much easier for them to do so when the next steps are considered before the audience ever enters the room.

Giving People Something They Can Use Afterward

For me, Personality Poker became one way to extend the value of a live experience. It gave people something tangible they could take back to their teams and use to have better conversations.

More recently, I developed Full Deck IQ for a similar reason. It helps teams see where they are strong, where important perspectives may be missing, and where those gaps may be affecting collaboration, innovation, or decision-making.

The point is not that every speaker needs to develop a card deck, a diagnostic, a platform, or a certification program.

The point is to think beyond the event itself.

What can people use after you leave? What will help them apply the idea in a meeting, a decision, a conversation, or a project? What will keep the message alive after the energy of the event fades?

Sometimes the answer will be a tool. Sometimes it will be a question, a habit, a framework, or a series of conversations. The format matters less than whether it helps the client convert a moment of insight into something useful.

The Real Measure of Success

Today, information is cheap. Anyone can watch a video, read an article, download a framework, or ask AI for an answer.

What they cannot get from a video or an AI-generated summary is a shared live experience that creates momentum, emotion, connection, and commitment.

That is the opportunity for speakers.

But an amazing moment in a ballroom is not enough. The goal is not simply to create an interactive experience or even a memorable one.

The goal is to launch something that keeps working after the room is empty.

The next time you are preparing for a keynote, do not just ask, “How can I make this more engaging?”

Ask, “What are we launching with this speech, and what will still be happening long after I leave the stage?”

The post A Standing Ovation Is Not an Outcome appeared first on Stephen Shapiro.

That may sound strange coming from someone who writes books, gives keynote speeches, and teaches people how to innovate. But the rise of AI has reinforced something I’ve believed for a long time.

Information is not the same thing as implementation.

And implementation is where the real value lives.

For decades, experts created value by providing answers. Today, answers are everywhere. Business books compete not only with other books, but with podcasts, newsletters, YouTube videos, online communities, courses, and now AI. When people can get answers instantly, information becomes less scarce.

The challenge is no longer finding knowledge.

The challenge is turning knowledge into action.

No matter what business you’re in, you want leverage. Leverage means creating the greatest value with the least amount of effort. Throughout my career as a consultant, speaker, and author, I’ve always looked for ways to package expertise so it can help more people without requiring more of my time.

When thinking about products and services, I find it useful to place them into three categories: Tell Me, Enable Me, and Do It For Me.

These categories are not determined by the format of the offering. They are determined by where the work happens. In Tell Me, you provide information. In Enable Me, the client applies that information using a tool, process, product, or system you have created. In Do It For Me, you perform the work on the client’s behalf.

In an AI-driven world, understanding the difference between these categories has become more important than ever.

Tell Me

Tell Me products explain what to do.

Books, articles, courses, webinars, podcasts, speeches, and training programs all fall into this category. Their purpose is to transfer knowledge.

For years, these products were the primary way experts scaled their expertise. Write a book once and sell it thousands of times. Record a course once and distribute it indefinitely.

The challenge is that knowledge has become easier to access than ever before.

Today, anyone can ask an AI system how to launch a product, improve team performance, write a proposal, build a marketing plan, facilitate a meeting, or solve a business problem. Within seconds, they receive a reasonably good answer.

This doesn’t make expertise less valuable.

It changes where expertise creates value.

Information alone is becoming less differentiated. People don’t struggle because they don’t know enough.

They struggle because they don’t act on what they know.

Enable Me

This is where things get interesting.

Enable Me products help people apply knowledge.

Instead of explaining what to do, they make it easier to do it.

A game that generates insights is an enablement tool.

A platform that highlights what is missing and what needs attention is an enablement tool.

A system that helps you see what to do next is an enablement tool.

The value comes from reducing the effort between knowledge and implementation.

Years ago, I created Personality Poker, a deck of specially designed playing cards that helps people understand how they contribute to innovation, collaboration, and team performance. The cards don’t simply provide information about personality styles. They create conversations, insights, and actions.

More recently, we’ve expanded this concept through Full Deck IQ. Rather than producing another report for people to read, the platform helps teams identify what is working, what is missing, and where they should focus their attention. The goal is not to provide more data. The goal is to help teams make better decisions.

Both examples reflect the same principle.

The goal is not to provide more information.

The goal is to help people do something with the information they already have.

Enable Me products create exceptional value because they bridge the gap between understanding and action. They embed expertise into a process, product, or system, making it easier for people to achieve results.

They are also harder to copy. Competitors can duplicate information. It is much more difficult to replicate a well-designed experience, tool, framework, game, or platform.

As AI continues to make knowledge more accessible, organizations and individuals will place greater value on tools, systems, experiences, and platforms that help them turn knowledge into results.

Do It For Me

The final category is Do It For Me.

This is where you perform the work on behalf of the client.

Consulting, outsourcing, agencies, and managed services all fit into this category, although some consultants who simply create PowerPoint slides may be closer to Tell Me.

Traditionally, this has been the highest-value offering because clients receive outcomes without needing to do the work themselves.

The challenge is that it offers the least leverage. Every additional client typically requires additional time and effort. And the cost to the client is reflected in the amount of work required.

Even this category is beginning to change. AI agents can increasingly perform tasks that once required human intervention. Some work that previously fell into the Do It For Me category is becoming partially automated.

But there will always be situations that require judgment, experience, creativity, and human insight.

Where the Opportunity Lives

For many businesses, the biggest opportunity lies between Tell Me and Do It For Me.

People don’t need more information.

They need help turning information into action.

That’s why the future belongs not only to those who possess expertise, but to those who can embed expertise into tools, systems, frameworks, games, platforms, workflows, and experiences.

In a world overflowing with answers, the greatest value comes from helping people achieve outcomes.

The winners won’t be those who tell people what to do.

The winners will be those who make it easier to do it.

Click on the graphic below to see a full-sized version

The post Stop Telling Customers What to Do appeared first on Stephen Shapiro.