The last of a six-part series

One of the consistent surprises for me in the keynote speaking world has been the reluctance of speakers to engage in significant audience interaction, despite the real benefits to both audience and speaker in doing so.  Some speakers want to give their canned speech and leave, of course; it saves wear and tear on the speaker.  Speaking can be a grueling profession and minimizes the interaction with audiences is one way to save on the gruel.  Other speakers don’t want to introduce the element of chaos that bringing an audience into a talk will potentially create.  What if they ask a question I can’t answer – or don’t want to answer?  And some speakers want to keep control of timing and agenda and don’t want to relinquish either to an unruly mob.

But those speakers are missing the point.  If you are speaking about a serious topic with the ambition of changing the world – of spreading your message as far and wide as it will go – then allowing the audience to get active in some way will ensure that they buy in to the messages rather than simply hearing it and moving on to the next thing.

So in this final blog post of the six, I’ll identify one additional way in which you can think about engaging the audience effectively for their benefit and for the propagation of your message. Once again, I’ll phrase the interactivity challenge as a question.

How can you invite your audience to play? Perhaps the most delightful way to engage an audience is to invite them to play.  If you (and your audiences) have a competitive streak, then you can introduce competitive games by dividing your audience in half and pitting them against each other.  All in good fun, of course.  I once saw a (desperate) speaker offer an audience a hundred-pound note (in the UK) to answer a trivia question.  The audience was angered, because it was enough money that there was some bitterness and envy of the one winner from a majority of the remaining audience members.  The speaker would have been better to stick with 5 pounds, or at most maybe 20.

For less competitive audiences, invite one member of the audience up on stage to undertake a game-based exercise, and have the rest of the audience coach the volunteer.  That way everyone feels that there’s something at stake, but nothing too terrifying or too high.

The games you ask them to play can range from the absurdly simple – teaching them a brief phrase to relay back, or having the two sides of the audience compete to outshout each other – to the far more complex (having them guess at areas of expertise covered in the talk).  Trivia games of various kinds are easy and uncomplicated to administer.  More sophisticated games are best done in groups of audience members so that they can pool their expertise and responsiveness in ways that take the heat off the individual.

My favorite games use call backs and local lore to make the ‘game’ highly specific to the audience, the field of endeavor, even the particular time of year or day.  The idea is to make as many members of the audience feel like winners as possible.  Do give out prizes freely; don’t make them too valuable.  Oprah can give away cars, to the entire audience, but the rest of us should stick to books, t-shirts, and other such modest (and branded) merch.  The point is to engage in some grown-up play; it brings an audience to life in a way that is a joy to behold.