6 steps to get the best our of your thought leadership panel debate
Here is the situation: you have been asked to organise a panel discussion for a thought leadership conference, even though this isn’t something you have an awful lot of training or experience in. Nevertheless, this is a unique opportunity for your clients, colleagues, and peers to come together and talk about the future of your industry and the challenges and opportunities it will bring — and you need it to go well. So, what do you do?
Conventional wisdom dictates that you give your discussion a hot topic that will draw in the crowds before selecting a panel of respected industry experts to share their opinions and answer some questions.
The end result may well be a very interesting discussion, but the limitations of this approach mean it may not be a very useful one. There are a few reasons for this: expert panels tend to reflect expert consensus, so many of the panellists have similar views. Topics designed to fire the imagination end up being so vague or broad that the discussion lacks definition or direction. Audience members leave fascinated, but also confused.
So, I would like to suggest a new approach, one that I have been applying and refining myself for the last nine years, along with a few simple steps for implementing it: turn your panel discussion into a panel debate.
Identify the most important decision your audience needs to make
What makes challenges scary and opportunities risky is that they require us to make big decisions about how to respond to them. The circumstances and consequences of our choices fluctuate with each decision, but the basic options remain the same: make a change or preserve the status quo. Whatever is the biggest decision your audience will need to make in the future, therefore, is what you want your panel to talk about.
So, when I worked with advertising agency, Vizeum, last year, before we decided on a topic, we established that the decision their audience would need to make was whether to fundamentally change their business models to adapt to the changing norms on the collection and re-selling of personal data.
Express your topic as a proposal (or motion) that must be accepted or rejected by the audience
Questions are useful for starting discussions when you don’t know what your options are, but not for making decisions when you do know what they are. Requiring your audience to officially accept or reject a proposal during the debate itself is not just much more interactive than your average panel discussion, but more importantly gives them a space to explore their options and confront the difficult trade-offs they present.
Returning to the example of the advertising agency above, the proposal we presented to their audience, which included execs from Google, was that the public should be paid for the use of their personal data.
Recruit a panel of speakers to make the case for and against the proposal (aka the tricky part)
The reason this is tricky is that your speakers will need to leave their own opinions at the door and faithfully defend whichever side of the debate they have been assigned. This means they will potentially need to say things they don’t believe to be true as people rarely sit decidedly on one side of the fence, but rather maintain a precarious balance directly on top of it, awkwardly leaning towards one side or the other.
This can be a problem for some speakers — and even audience members — who think it compromises their authenticity, so it is important to remind them of why it is worth doing this in the first place when qualifying your speakers and promoting your event — that reason of course being that it will allow your audience to interact with their options as if they were people, bringing them to life in the same way as a play or a film.
Just imagine for a second if in every big decision you had made in your life, you had been able to turn your pros and cons list into people who could answer your questions, address your concerns, and cross-examine each other to make sure neither one was misleading you. How much easier would that decision have been?
Hire an experienced moderator to chair the debate
Chairing a debate — especially on a topic people really care about — is one of the most understated jobs there is. Don’t make the mistake of giving it to someone who’s never done it before and hoping for the best. It may help to think of the debate Chair as more of a judge than a moderator — in the same way that it helps to think of a discussion moderator as more of an interviewer.
This is because the Chair’s job is not just to keep time and order, but also to make sure the debate stays on topic and that as many members of the audience as possible are given the chance to participate. In other words, they have to be the most focused person in the room and possess the confidence to wield their authority as and when they need to. So, be sure to give this job to someone who knows what they’re doing.
Make plenty of time for audience Q&A
It may sound obvious, but unless your audience is actually given a chance to interact with the speakers, then they will miss out on what is arguably the biggest selling point of the entire exercise. Be sure to take one question at a time too and give both sides the right of reply. If you start taking three of four questions all at once in a vain bid to save time, most will be ignored and your audience will be understandably frustrated.
In the monthly public debates I host, the audience is given 20 minutes to directly cross-examine the speakers and a further 20–30 minutes to offer their own comments on the topic without receiving a reply. This is normally just enough time to hear from everyone with our average attendance being around 50 people.
Finally, don’t forget to call a vote
It may sound gimmicky and if you just take a vote right at the end, it probably will be. However, take one vote before the debate and another after, then ask a few of those who changed their mind to explain why and you could learn something truly valuable and collect some helpful feedback for your speakers.
A recent review of the data from the last 2 years of public debates I have curated — about 40 in total — showed than an average (median) of 20% of the audience changed their mind in each debate on topics ranging from Brexit to animal rights, gender equality, and the gig economy. This was obtained by conducting short post-debate focus groups that took a maximum of 10 minutes and the reasons given by audience members for changing their mind has been instrumental to the development of my debate training programmes.
Want to know more?
You can download a free copy of my guide to organising panel debates, which includes a case study of the Vizeum personal data debate and a side by side comparison of discussion and debate formats to help you work out which is best for you and your audience.
Tony Koutsoumbos is a debate curator and trainer and the Director of the Great Debaters Club — a year round training programme for adults
