Three Tips For Engaging Your Audience

At our monthly Lean/Kanban Meetup, we discussed how to foster engagement in large groups when smaller group formats (Lean Coffee, for example) are no longer possible. I presented three tips for making presentations more interactive.

Great teachers are some of the best presenters in our society (imagine trying to teach calculus to a group of 18-year-olds at 8 am on a Wednesday), and since I observe college classes and speak with educators nearly every single day, it’s no coincidence that these three tips are all in some way inspired by or relate to academia. We can learn a lot from teachers!

1. Engage with change.

Dirk Mateer, a truly innovative economics educator, deliberately structures a change into his lectures every 5–7 minutes to re-engage his students. We can do the same in our presentations:

1. Pose a question to the audience using software like Slid0 or Poll Everywhere.
2. If you’re presenting as a team, change speakers every five minutes, which changes the rhythm of the presentation and wakes up your audience.
3. Add multimedia to your presentation — a YouTube clip, sound bite, or music video — when you sense a lull in the energy of the room.

If you’re ambitious, work interactive components into your presentation, like Dirk’s “Marginal Utility” eating contest.

2. Make your Q&A more democratic with technology.

Your average Q&A stinks for two reasons:

1. Many of us are too shy to ask a question in front of a large group.
2. Often times, precious question and answer time is wasted on a question that is only relevant to the person who asked it.

Slido is a wonderful tool to solve those problems. You can collect questions from your crowd in real time. Your more introverted audience members can submit questions anonymously. And Slido’s voting feature allows your audience to vote on their favorite questions so that you can address the questions that your audience cares about most in your limited Q&A time.

One of the benefits of using technology like Slido for interaction in large groups is that it fosters a safe zone for colleagues, customers, and listeners who might not feel comfortable participating otherwise. This concept of a psychological safe zone ties closely with the findings of Google’s Project Aristotle, a study on what makes teams effective, and is a key component to an interactive classroom where students are willing to share ideas freely.

3. Empower your audience through “flipping” your presentations.

Most of us learned in traditional classrooms: a fifty-minute lecture followed by hands-on activities (problem sets, analysis papers, etc.) assigned for completion outside of the classroom. Today, many instructors favor the flipped classroom model, in which lectures are viewed outside of the classroom (often via recorded videos) and followed by hands-on activities in class.

The image above illustrates a primary benefit of the flipped model. In the flipped classroom, students engage in basic, foundational knowledge outside of class, while during class they explore higher-level learning and skills with their teacher available as a coach and facilitator.

So too can we flip our presentations. When we ask our colleagues and customers to engage with our topic before our meeting or presentation by watching a background video or reading an online FAQ, we can spend less time covering introductory information in our presentations and more time engaging in nuanced details and discussion.

The audience is the hero.

So why should we exert all this additional energy to engage our audience and foster interactivity?

My favorite quote on public speaking comes from Nancy Duarte, who believes the “presentation audience is the hero.” Our audience is Luke Skywalker, while we must channel our inner Yoda to motivate, mentor, and guide our listeners.

Simply put, when we engage our audience throughout our presentations, we have a better chance of helping them become heroes, no matter how big or small the change that we help inspire.