The Time Knock Knock Jokes Saved My Keynote

In October, I had the privilege of giving the product keynote at LinkedIn’s 2015 Sales Connect at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. My job was to represent a hard-working Research and Development team building LinkedIn’s flagship sales product, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and to walk the conference attendees and a livestream audience through the product’s newest features.

Prepping for a keynote is all about practice, and I had worked with our product marketing team on plenty of that. But as the event date drew closer, I also imagined a few problem scenarios—what would I do if I completely lost my place or if I needed to grab water—and how to handle those situations.

But on the actual day, one problem scenario I had not planned for was a major technical glitch. Just 11 minutes into my 30-minute presentation, the audience and I were looking up behind me at a blank screen. The computer driving my presentation backstage had lost power and crashed. How long could a reboot take? Five minutes.

I’ll admit it; I felt a burst of stress. This was wedding toast territory, but with more guests and no sip of champagne. Completely free form. 

When a keynote runs into any issue like this one, the main goal is to keep everyone seated while the presentation gets back on track. With the benefit of hindsight, I realized I’d used three steps to help me get through that stressful situation, from the second I noticed the blank screen to managing the audience until the technical issue was resolved. And really, these steps have broader applications in any stressful situation. Here are the steps I took from the stage:

1. Take a breath. The first thing I remember doing right when the presentation crashed was to take a breath. I walked across the stage to grab a water bottle. The breath, the stroll to grab the water, and actually drinking the water had the effect of slowing the situation down a beat or two. It ended up helping me view the moment as an observer rather than as a participant. The net effect was relaxation––immediately. I had some perspective: this technical glitch was less of a problem and more of a need to kill a little time while the presentation was rebooted. 
2. Revert to the familiar. The second thing I did, likely unconsciously, was to simply revert to the every day. In the context of day-to-day work in the office, a big part of time is spent in meetings. A big part of meetings is waiting for everyone to be ready to go...to arrive, to dial in, to get video working, and then the meeting finally starts. All those things end up creating small pockets of dead time, and for years I have made a habit of filling those pockets of time by asking if anyone has any jokes they can tell for the 60 seconds we need to wait. In the context of that stressful situation on stage, I immediately went to this same mental space. Now not only was I relaxed, I suddenly felt like I was in a familiar place.
3. Get others involved. Now that I felt mentally under control, I still had to do or say something to kill the time. There was no way I was going to entertain the audience myself. Based on what was familiar to me––getting people to tell jokes during meeting lulls––I asked the audience to share their best knock-knock jokes. A few audience members rose to the occasion and offered some material. And when they ran out, I just started asking more questions, starting with the basics: “Is everyone having a good conference?”

Lesson: When you are in a stressful situation, get others involved.

The end result of these three steps was a five-minute break in the middle of a keynote presentation where no one left their seat. Stress was minimized, jokes were told, and it all seemed to work out.

Here’s the full keynote with the full 5 minute break edited out.

Bonus points: Please help stalled keynoters everywhere by leaving one of your favorite knock knock jokes in the comments below. 

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Thanks to Derek Pando, Diana Kucer, and Charlene Prince for reading drafts of this. Short form Jeff Birkeland can be accessed at @jbirk.