AMA Panel Discussion: Failure Is the Gift of New Information
- May 25
- 4 min read
Introduction: Meet The Panel
An Ask Me Anything session with Florian Mueck, Margareet Jacobs, Cynthia Zhai and Cliff Kennedy.
Moderated by Minna Taylor — Present to Succeed Conference.
You've all just delivered full sessions. Now the audience gets to ask the questions nobody asked during the day. Where do you want to start?
Mina: One thread that ran through today was the relationship between failure and preparation. So let's pull on that.
Q: How do you actually prepare when you're presenting with someone else?
Florian: Structure first. For me, structure is the big bang of rhetoric. When I co-present, I distribute blocks — each speaker owns a complete section. That way there's no overlap, no confusion, and each block has its own integrity.
Margareet: I'm an improviser, so my answer is different. Beyond the preparation, what matters most in the moment is paying attention to the other person. You're not just waiting for your turn. You're fully present with what they're saying and what the room is doing. Co-presenting requires you to be even more present than when you're up there alone.
Cynthia: I never sit down to prepare a presentation — but that doesn't mean I don't prepare. Preparation is a daily practice. I'm always collecting: a quote, a story, something from a conversation. Today I spoke to someone before the session and I thought, that story is going into a post. On the day itself, I observe the audience. I watch how they respond to other speakers, read their energy, and calibrate from there.
Cliff: For me it's about process. If you have a repeatable, adaptable process for every presentation, you're never starting from scratch. And when co-presenting, that same principle applies — structure the talk like chapters, rehearse each chapter individually, and rehearse them out of order so nothing goes stale.
Q: Tell us about a memorable failure. A real one.
Cliff: For me, the biggest failure isn't a meltdown or forgetting your words. It's a neutral presentation — one where the audience feels nothing. That's the real risk. You didn't create anything of value for the people who gave you their time.
Margareet: Early in my career I was so afraid of not being worthy of people's time that I would pack everything in. Idea after idea, tool after tool. I would literally overwhelm my audience — and when people are overwhelmed, they remember nothing. It took me a while to learn that less is almost always more.
Florian: Mine I remember very specifically. Nine years ago. Berlin. 350 lawyers. My first four-thousand-euro speech. I wrote it out word for word — fifteen pages — which was mistake number one. And I wrote it for the managing partner, not the audience — mistake number two. Then I asked a man in the middle of the room who hated karaoke to come up and sing. The room froze. The managing partner stared. For the remaining thirty-three minutes, I was jumping around on stage going nowhere. Lessons: don't script your speech. Know your audience. Don't make lawyers sing.
Cynthia: Two for me. The first was presenting content I wasn't passionate about. You can always tell, and so can your audience. The second was not speaking up when people were chatting at the back of the room. I didn't want to cause conflict. I got terrible feedback. I learned that staying silent to protect yourself is actually a disservice to everyone else in the room. Now I address it — always with humour.
Q: What do you do when rehearsing feels boring?
Margareet: If rehearsing feels boring, that's information. If you're bored, your audience will be too. What I do is find the moments in the talk that genuinely excite me and use those as anchor points. I rehearse sections — not the whole thing end to end — and I move between them in different orders to keep it alive.
Cliff: Push your boundaries. If you normally perform at a five, rehearse at an eleven. Exaggerate the emotion, the pace, the volume. You'll scare the neighbours, but when you pull back for the real thing, you'll have so much more range available to you. Rehearse to failure — that's where growth is.
Cynthia: I only rehearse the opening. That's the part where nerves hit hardest, so I say it over and over until it flows. The rest I work from a mind map — three clear points, with notes on how to expand each one. I don't rehearse the whole presentation because I don't want to stop feeling it.
Florian: I gamify it. I take a single sentence and find every possible way to say it differently. Intonation, metaphor, rhythm — I challenge every syllable. I do this in the shower, mostly. My wife says I'm wasting water. She's not wrong.
Watch the Conversation
Watch the full Ask Me Anything session on the Present to Succeed YouTube channel.
Comments