What if someone from your team did the talking?

Sometimes the right person to hold the microphone is not me. It is someone on your side: the person on the front line of the subject, the one whose legitimacy comes from their daily work, the one who will still be in the team when the day is over. What I offer then is to make them strong. I am an expert on many of the contents involved, and just as much on what makes a talk hold together: narrative, rhythm, facilitating participation, handling difficult questions. These skills can be passed on, and I love passing them on.

Why not simply book me?

Because in certain situations, a speaker from your own team will carry the message better than any outside expert. Their authority will not rest on expert status, it will rest on the work behind them, and that is a much stronger position than it seems: you can be junior on a subject and speak accurately, if you lean on genuinely worked-through content and deliver it honestly. Above all, everything built for the occasion, the content, the methods, the confidence, stays with you. It is an investment in a person and a team, not in an event.

How I work

I favour sessions spread out over time rather than one big block, because what makes a talk hold is the time it has had to ripen in the person who carries it. Between two video sessions, they prepare, they try things out, they make it their own; the next session serves to validate, adjust, deepen. I answer their questions between appointments, because ripening always generates questions that cannot wait.

I also produce documents, as needed: a reference document on the content, which sorts through a subject often cluttered with contradictory discourse; a complete narrative script, written in spoken language, ready to say aloud or to use as material for improvisation; a participation kit adapted to the format and the venue; a glossary with a decision tree for questions, including the most polemical ones, so that the person is never left defenceless in front of the room; and a final running order, which keeps the memory of the work for them and for the team.

When possible, I organise a public rehearsal in front of a few colleagues, followed by a collective debrief. Testing a talk in front of a real audience has nothing in common with a dry run, and having already held your talk once changes everything for confidence on the day.

What I really pass on

The content, of course. But also everything that does not show: how to build a narrative that lets someone who arrives midway catch up, how to restate the essentials several times without repeating yourself, how to recap visually by accumulation, how to get bodies moving in a room with three show-of-hands questions, how to hold a participatory moment in ninety seconds, how to keep your energy over four rounds in the same day.

And most importantly: I work towards the person freeing themselves from the document. The material is deliberately rich; it is up to them to take what speaks to them, set aside the rest, change the order if their audience calls for it. It is when you master a subject that you can move; it is when you do not that you stay locked in your plan. My work is done when they no longer need me, and I design the support with that aim from the first session, in the spirit of what I wrote in For an ecology of dispensability and You don’t prepare a creation, you prepare yourself for creation.

A recent example

In June 2026, the Forum des images and TUMO Paris presented at VivaTech a talk on employability in the age of artificial intelligence, given four times in one day on a trade-fair stand, in front of an audience that circulates and arrives midway, one of the most difficult formats there is. The person who carried it co-runs the TUMO Paris Job Center: on the front line of employment support, and a beginner on the specific subject of AI. We worked in sessions spread over three weeks, with a reference document, a complete narrative script, a glossary to hold firm under questioning, and rehearsals. The content came from the AI monitoring committee I had facilitated for the Forum des images for a year, publicly restituted in Webinar presenting the findings of the AI Monitoring Committee of the Forum des images: the authority of the message did not rest on the person speaking, but on the collective work carrying them, and that is exactly what allowed them to speak with assurance. The double objective was stated from the very first proposal: succeed on the day, and equip the team for what comes after, well beyond the event.

What remains

Everything: that is the very principle of this offer. The person has acquired facilitation and construction skills they will reuse throughout their professional life. The team has a running order, a glossary, visual materials, which make it possible to give the talk again, adapt it, hand it on to someone else. And the underlying content, seriously worked through, then serves the department’s daily work, which is often the real reason for the commission.

Formats and preparation

The format is composed according to your needs: three to five video sessions, documents chosen à la carte, one or two rehearsals in person. I always propose a precise written framework, discussed and adjusted together before we start, in which nothing is fixed. The support can concern one person or a small group, for a talk, a lecture, a panel, a professional day to facilitate. In French and in English.