For every hour of content I put on stage, I spent a hundred hours creating it.
That ratio sounds insane. It probably is. But if you’ve ever tried to build a conference session that actually teaches something - not just fills a slot, not just entertains a room for 60 minutes, but genuinely leaves people with a new way of thinking about something - you’ll know that the time adds up fast.
One hundred hours. For a single session.
I used to think this was a personal failing. Some inefficiency in my process that better speakers had somehow solved. What I’ve come to understand is that it isn’t a failing at all. It’s the cost of giving a damn.
Where Ideas Come From (And Where They Go Wrong) #
My ideas come in the shower. I can’t explain it and I’ve stopped trying to. Something about the combination of hot water, minimal external stimuli, and nowhere else to be seems to unlock the part of my brain that connects things. A concept I’ve been reading about suddenly attaches itself to a problem I’ve seen in client work. A metaphor surfaces from nowhere. A session title arrives, almost fully formed.
From there, the process feels straightforward. Sketch an outline. Identify the key takeaways. Write an abstract. Submit to conferences.
Here’s the problem: submitting to conferences is a commitment. And I got good at abstracts - perhaps too good. There were years where three sessions I hadn’t actually built yet all got accepted at the same time, to events a few months away. The abstract had done its job. The session did not yet exist.
What typically happens next - what I’ve watched plenty of speakers do - is quietly ignore the abstract and build something adjacent. Who reads abstracts anyway? But that approach has never sat right with me. So instead, I would double down. Work harder. Force pieces together that weren’t designed to fit. Try to honor a commitment made before I fully understood what I was committing to. Lots of long evenings and nights spent making content.
It rarely produced great sessions. Forcing is not the same as building.
The Missing First Step #
For a long time I hated writing. Sitting down to produce a blog post felt like something being done to me rather than by me.
That changed when I started working through ideas about LLMs and AI. I had things I wanted to say and no clean way to say them without writing them down first. So I wrote them down. And something unexpected happened: the writing didn’t feel like having my nails pulled anymore. It felt like thinking.
What I realized - slowly, and then all at once - was that the blog had always been the missing first step. Not a place to publish thoughts I’d already finished thinking. A place to figure out what I actually thought in the first place.
A blog post forces you to find the shape of an argument. You can’t hide behind slides and delivery. The structure has to hold on its own. The teaching points have to be made explicitly, not gestured at. If the logic doesn’t work on the page, it won’t work on the stage either - it’ll just be harder to notice.
With a solid post in hand, turning it into a session becomes something close to editing rather than creating. The story is already there. The progression exists. The key moments are identified. What’s left is deciding how to present rather than what to present.
And with a handful of posts-turned-sessions? You have the building blocks for a workshop. Snap them together, add transitions, design exercises that let the audience wrestle with the ideas rather than just receive them - and something coherent emerges.
Like Lego, except the pieces took a while to make, and someone had misplaced the instructions.
When It’s Not Just You #
Solo sessions are hard. Co-created sessions are a different kind of hard.
When it’s just me, any failure is mine. Any success, mine. I control the content, the pacing, the structure, the story. When someone else enters the picture, all of that gets complicated immediately. Now there are two sets of opinions about what matters most. Two different instincts about where the emphasis belongs. Two stories that need to become one, and one that needs to be better than either would be separately.
I’ve done sessions with friends and colleagues, and the upside is real: someone to riff with, someone to hand the thread to when you need a breath, someone who challenges the audience from a different angle. The dynamic changes in ways that a solo speaker simply can’t replicate.
But it’s harder. Much harder.
The Workshop That Took a While to Become Itself #
Last year, Valerie Junk suggested we combine a few of our sessions into a full-day workshop. The theme: turning insights into action. Getting from data to decisions to outcomes.
My honest reaction was somewhere between intrigued and apprehensive.
We spent months on it. A lot of video calls. A lot of disagreements about what belonged and what didn’t. A lot of cutting things we both liked individually because they didn’t serve the larger story. That process is uncomfortable in a way that solo work never is - you can’t just decide. You have to convince.
The workshop ran for the first time at DataMinds Connect in Mechelen, Belgium, in October 2025. More than 50 people showed up. It worked. We’d done everything we could, and we’re both professionals - that combination covers a lot of gaps. But we both knew it could be better.
An invitation to Budapest BI Forum followed. We delivered it again, and came away with a long list of things to change. The success of the first run had given us confidence. The second run gave us clarity.
Which brings us to Utrecht. The Power BI User Days at the end of this week - a sold-out workshop room. We’ve reworked the storytelling section significantly: less about narrative structure as a general concept, more about what clarity looks like when you’re presenting to executives. Freytag’s pyramid is genuinely useful. It is also not something a CFO has ever asked about. We’ve tried to close that gap.
Valerie is coming to Stockholm on March 12th to deliver her session on Power BI tables and matrix visuals. A few seats remain if you’re in the area, sign up here: Swedish Power BI User Group March Meetup
What the Ratio Actually Means #
I’m not spending fewer hours on sessions than I used to. If anything, the blog has added time to the front of the process. A post takes several hours to write well - sometimes many more.
But here’s what’s different: by the time I finish a post, I know whether the idea works. I know what the argument actually is, not just what I hoped it would be. I know which parts teach something and which parts are just interesting. The hundred hours don’t disappear; they just get spent on things that are more likely to survive contact with an audience.
There’s a version of this that most speakers never figure out. They have a shower idea, write an abstract, get selected, and then discover - in the final weeks of preparation, with the deadline immovable - that the idea didn’t have enough in it to fill an hour. Or that two ideas they thought were one idea are actually fighting each other. Or that the thing they found fascinating doesn’t translate into something useful for anyone else.
I’ve been in that position. It is not a good place to create from.
The blog doesn’t eliminate that risk entirely. But it surfaces the problem at the stage when you can still do something about it - before the commitment, before the acceptance, before the clock is running.
Always keep learning. And when possible, learn before you’re in front of 50 people and out of options.
Join the Conversation #
How do you develop your presentations and workshops? I’d love to hear what your process looks like - whether you’re a seasoned conference speaker or someone who just gave their first internal presentation. Find me on LinkedIn or BlueSky.