CHAPTER 14
Involve the Audience: Wave of the Future
No man would listen to you talk if he didn’t know it was his turn next.
— E. W. HOWE
At this point, if you were to take all the techniques you have learned so far and incorporate them confidently into your presentations, you would find a dramatic change in your ability to connect with and influence your audience, and in your dynamism as a speaker. You would definitely feel, and accurately so, that you had ratcheted up your original rating as a speaker by several points.
We have learned how the brain sends and receives information; how and why our audience blocks out our message; how to connect with our audience and lower its filters; and how to modulate our voices, employ body language, and use the room. We have learned to eliminate weak language; to use strong language to paint pictures, set scenes, and evoke emotions; and to craft strong openings. All of these techniques provide us with a strong and solid foundation upon which we can build our presentations.
Now it’s time to reach for those extra three centimeters and, as a famous chef likes to say, kick things up a notch. Let’s think for a moment. What could you possibly do, as a presenter, that would just about guarantee that the people in your audience would remain focused on you and engaged in your presentation, listening to your every word?
Make them active participants in your presentation. Now we go from just you being a star, to making the audience the star.
Communication can be aggressive, passive, or assertive. Poor communication often creates tension and bad feelings within relationships.
We have already learned one technique for making our audience the star: allowing them to make decisions. There are several other very effective techniques for making your audience an active part of your presentation.
Around the Room
Go around the room and ask each person to offer an opinion on your subject, or to give an answer to a question that you pose.
This starter thought can be a very useful opening technique. At the very top of your presentation, ask each person to share a one-sentence thought on the topic you are about to discuss.
Going around the room can be very effective at any point in the presentation: “I want to walk you through three strategies, and then ask each of you to share in one sentence which strategy you think is the greatest priority for our company and why.”
The around the room technique accomplishes several objectives. It engages everyone emotionally in the topic, it drops filters, it gives the presenter and the rest of the audience data about the audience members’ opinions on the topic, and it gives the presenter a break, time to think ahead.
Body Polls
Most people know standard ways to engage your audience, like conducting a poll.
“Raise your hand if you have kids.”
“How many people here are from out of town?”
Standard polls like these are good, but they are binary questions, meaning that there are only two possible answers; they don’t require too much thought or inspire too much creativity.
Body polls use body parts to query the audience with a range of answers falling on a spectrum. Participants are asked to indicate their answers by using, perhaps, a body part that harmonizes with the question.
For example:
Show me with your fingers, on a scale from zero to ten, how concerned you are about climate change. Ten means, “I can’t sleep at night worrying about it,” and zero means, “Not one bit.”
Or:
Show me with your thumb which direction you think the economy is headed over the next five years: straight up means through the roof, straight down means the opposite, level means stays exactly the same, or anywhere in between.
Another example:
Stand up. When I say “go,” act out, with your body language, your favorite vacation activity—swimming, skiing, hiking, sleeping. If you see someone who appears to be acting out the same activity as you, move toward that person.
Body polls are a lot of fun, create a lot of energy, and mark you as a creative and different speaker. Most importantly, they can be used for silly or serious purposes because they collect a lot of data quickly. They can be straightforward, like the first two examples, or they can be wildly creative, like the third example, with plenty of room in between. You can use body polls throughout your presentation by simply changing the question and the body language you want the people in your audience to use to indicate their answers.
Again, a body poll is providing you with data about your audience. Once you have these data, you must react to them somehow. If you put your audience through a body poll and then just move on to something else, people will wonder about the purpose of the poll and begin to think that this really fun, creative idea was pointless and wasted their time. They will question why you polled them and why they had to perform the exercise. The filters that the body poll lowered so effectively will be on the rise.
Think of the data as clay. You have to build something with the clay. Do something with the data generated by the body poll. Ask for or point out the average opinion in the room. Point out the outliers— the people whose answers formed the extreme deviations from the norm—and ask them about their answers. Make a comment or a joke. Allow the audience to make its own observations. We get asked a lot how to bring more humor into presentations. Half of your humor can come from the audience by creating opportunities like this.
Of course, your body poll question should be related to the topic of your presentation. If you use the data your audience provided to strengthen or illustrate the next point you are about to make, the people in your audience will feel that they assisted you, and they will feel good about this. Their filters will be down.
Here are some examples of body polls, ranging from serious to creative, that our participants created during our classes:
Looking at this investment opportunity, show me with your feet, what you think we should do. Stand by this wall if you think we need to sign the term sheet now. Stand by the opposite wall if you think we should stay far away from this opportunity. Or, stand anywhere in between. Now, tell me over here, why you think we shouldn’t invest. Over here, tell us why we should.
Show me with your smartphone, way up here being the highest, down by your knees the lowest, how much you, ten years ago, used your smartphone for banking and finance (most were very low). Five years ago? One year ago? Now? Three years from now? Based on that trend, what should our business be doing?
Show me with your fingers how many devices you can think of that you use on a regular basis that had not yet been invented when you started high school. Okay, let’s go around the room and each say one of them.
Let’s make this room a map of the world. Up there is north, where Santa Claus lives. This is North America here. Everyone point to New York City. Good. Point to Los Angeles. South America. Europe. Asia. Okay, now everyone go to the place in the room where your mother’s, mother’s, mother was born.
Body polls are a simple but powerful technique, but like all the techniques we will learn in this book, they are just raw techniques until you infuse them with your own ideas and personality. As the previous examples show, the technique doesn’t really come alive until then.
My friend Joi Ito, director of the MIT media lab, went through our training and said he liked the body poll concept, but he kept forgetting (or chickening out, he said) to use it in his presentations. Then he e-mailed me a link and said he did his first body poll, in front of 4,000 people, and it went great. It’s easier to show you than tell you, so let’s do Joi’s body poll together now.
Show me with your fingers, with 10 being the highest, how good an artist you thought you were when you were four years old. Ten means you thought you were great at art. Go. (The average in the group was pretty high.) Now show me how good an artist you think you are today. (The average was now pretty low.)
Joi then asked the group, “What happened?”
The point Joi was making about how our attitudes change as we get older is brilliant, but by flipping it into a body poll and involving the audience in making that point, he makes it more personal, and more powerful. When the body poll is done, pivot to your next section.
Assign Jobs
You can engage your audience very effectively by assigning audience members specific jobs or roles in your presentation. Some of these jobs can be assigned at the start of your presentation, while others can be assigned during the course of the presentation. Some jobs to consider are:
Timekeeper
Recorder
Prop holder
Subject of a demonstration
Participant in a role-playing exercise
When individuals do a task or job for you, thank them. Thanks is their pay. In real life when we work, our employers pay us. If they don’t pay us, we all get cranky. When individuals volunteer for you, your thanks is their pay. Offer small thanks for small tasks (head nod and thanking them by name), and bigger thanks for bigger tasks.
For example, let’s say you have 1,000 people in the audience and you want to do a group exercise. You say, “When I say go, but not till I say go, everyone form into groups, five people in a group. Whoever’s birthday is closest to today is the team captain, and you have x time to do y task.” When the exercise is finished, say, “Let’s give a round of applause to all the captains.”
Note Cards/Sticky Notes
Hand out sticky notes and markers to the people in your audience, pose a question to them, and have them write an answer to that question in large, bold letters on the sticky notes. You can then have your audience members either group themselves by similar responses or form arbitrary groups and decide among themselves which is the best answer in the group. Finally, have audience members stick their notes on a board in the front of the room or another central location. Use the answers as a jumping-off point for discussion.
One- and Two-Word Check-Ins
This is a variation of going around the room. Ask your audience a question that people can answer in one word. For example: “Say the first word that pops into your head when you think of your last vacation.” Then go around the room and have each person give his answer. As each person shares his response, he is engaged in your presentation. This technique can be used at any point in the presentation:
“If you think about PowerPoint presentations, what is the first word that comes to your mind?” Good? Bad? Ugly? Whatever word comes to mind. We are not judging.
The key to this technique is encouraging your audience members to answer. Assure them that there are no right or wrong answers. Persuade them to be honest. Make them feel safe. Observe their body language and their eyes to make sure that they understand the question.
“I am going to go around the room, and I want you to say the first word that comes to mind when you think of today’s topic. I am going to start with Judy in one second, and we’ll move around the room very quickly. There are no right or wrong answers. Just say the one word that pops into your head. Okay? Judy?” Give her a second to answer, and then move on to the next person. “Bill?”
Even in a group of 20 people, a one- or two-word check-in takes only a minute, but the technique allows you to accomplish those same important objectives in that short period of time:
It involves everyone in the audience. People can’t not participate.
It drops filters. People have to drop them in order to answer the question.
People hear, and are influenced by, what the other audience members are saying.
It gives you, the presenter, data on what your audience is thinking. And, audience members get data from one another.
It gives you the opportunity to focus on reading people’s body language.
It gives you a break, time to take a sip or think of what you are going to do or say next.
Pair Up
For this technique, the speaker pairs audience members into teams of two (or another number) and assigns them a thought-through task. In our training sessions, we will sometimes assign each group a topic or ask each group to choose a topic, then have the groups prepare a one-minute presentation or a 60-second commercial on their assigned or chosen subject. Establish the parameters of the task, such as the length of time, before you define the task, or the teams will be off and running to complete the task and will not hear the parameters.
When the time allotted for the task is up, have each team present to or share with the whole group. You can do the pair-up technique with groups larger than two. I like to mix it up, sometimes with groups of three, four, or five people.
For practicing presentations, we do a drill called “Star, Coach, Paparazzi.” The audience divides into groups of three, and each group has an iPad. Each person in the group takes a turn as the star, the paparazzi, and the coach. The “star” does a 30-second presentation on topic X. The “paparazzi” films the star. The “coach” provides feedback to the star. After the star has given her presentation, the paparazzi plays it back, and the coach gives the star tips on what the star did well, what she could build on, and how she could do better. (Paparazzi can give comments too.) The “star” then does a second take, followed by a second round of feedback during playback to note improvements. The group switches roles until each person in the group has had a turn as “star,” “paparazzi,” and “coach.”
For this particular exercise, the ideal number for a team is three, but in general, teams and groups can be any size. We have found that two-person teams are the most effective, because this format maximizes the amount of time that the team members will be speaking, listening, and participating in the task. With a two-person team, you eliminate the nonparticipation option.
Around the Room at the End of the Meeting
This technique is similar to the starter thought, but used at the end of a presentation. Pose a final question to your audience, and ask each participant, as you go around the room, to offer an answer. While starter thoughts are often used to gauge feelings and emotions, the closing question should center on action.
“What is one hope you have for what this project will accomplish for the client?”
“What is one thing you will do to help the plan we have developed succeed?”
“Name one thing you commit to do based on what we discussed.”
None of these audience involvement techniques require much time or preparation, yet by using them, you can involve your audience in your presentation several times even in just a few minutes.
I am from Michigan, but I have been living in New Jersey for more than 20 years because I fell in love with a Jersey girl and have been trapped here ever since. A couple of years ago, a freak snowstorm hit two days before Halloween. The trees—which are usually dry and bare by the time snow arrives—were still lush with fall foliage, and they collapsed under the weight of the snow, taking the power lines down with them. The streets of my town were ensnared in a maze of electric wires, forcing police to cancel Halloween trick-or-treating and leaving much of the area without power for several days. Until the utility crews could get those electric wires off the ground and back up on their poles, life pretty much ground to a halt.
Think of your presentation as those electric cables and the audience involvement techniques we have learned throughout this book as the poles that keep the wires up in the air. If one of those poles is missing at the proper interval, or if the poles are spaced too far apart, the cables will sag or fall to the ground. This is also true of your audience’s attention. It will sag and lag if it is not propped up at regular intervals. You must continuously employ different techniques throughout your presentation to keep the audience engaged.
Once the people in your audience realize that you are going to be engaging them actively in your presentation, their filters will remain down as they anticipate the next exercise.
When you start your presentation with an audience involvement technique, audience engagement goes high, maybe not to 100 percent, but pretty high. If you do one audience technique in the beginning, one in the middle, and one at the end, this boosts overall engagement quite a lot. You need that engagement to get your content back and forth. So all this stuff is not just about being clever or confident in front of the group, or showing off. It’s about math. These techniques help you get a lot more done in less time.
Sometimes, people ask me if the audience gets tired of the techniques. People who have gone through the Own the Room training, and know how the techniques work, are especially concerned about this. If you do an audience technique every minute for an hour, yes, it will wear out the audience. But if you do one every 10 to 15 minutes, it will feel fresh because you will apply the techniques a different way each time. It’s like getting Novocain or an anesthetic. Even when you know it’s coming, it still works. The smarter your audience is, the more they will want to show you how smart they are, the more they will want to participate. Life is not a spectator sport. People want to play.
I have seen this over and over. People get the idea behind the techniques and practice them, but that only gets them halfway across the bridge. The first time you apply them in real life, it does feel weird. But, it comes to feel natural very quickly. Go boldly across the bridge. The other side feels terrific.
SUMMARY
Involving your audience members in your presentation prevents them from becoming distracted and lets them know that they are important to you.
Audience involvement techniques can provide you with important data about who the people in your audience are and how they feel about your topic. Do something with the data.
A technique such as a pair-up gives you, the speaker, a break.
You can use audience involvement techniques to open and close your talk, as well as throughout the presentation.
Plan out your audience involvement techniques. You don’t want to stop during your presentation to think of a creative body poll.
Practice
The best people to practice on are the innocent people in your private life. The next time you are trying to make a decision with your family or friends, think of the most creative body poll you can to reach a consensus. Are you trying to decide what type of food to order, what movie to see, or where to go on vacation? Have people act out their choice and move toward the people with the same choice. If you experiment in fun situations—on the waiter, someone on public transportation, or a coworker in an elevator—using the techniques during a business presentation will become easier.