Speaker 1: Ever been in an event or meeting where there's this major sage on the stage dynamic where somebody is standing perhaps literally above everybody else speaking at a group for a long period of time? Drives me nuts. In this video I'm gonna unpack and share seven ways to interact with an in-person audience or to create more engagement and interaction, break down that sage on the and Sage Dynamic and design for contribution, not just consumption. This video is inspired by an increased demand for my Connected Conference package. And so this is not stuff that I read about in a book somewhere or thought, oh, this would be a good idea for a YouTube video. This is stuff that I've practiced every year with tens of thousands of people. In fact, a couple days after filming this, I'm gonna be down in Asheville, North Carolina, working with a group of CEOs and CFOs, Very serious people using some of these techniques to spark more interaction, more engagement with them. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. First one I'm gonna tell you about, second one I'm actually gonna show you a video from a couple years ago, back when lots of in-person events were happening. And show you a clip of this actually happening live so that you can repeat it because it's better shown than told. The first technique I'm gonna share with you is something that I've done with literally over 100,000 human beings and never had it flop. There's something about the mechanics of it that just make it work. It's very simply a question swap. So I've created these We Engage cards that have questions on them. You could either create your own or pick up decks in the link in the description. But the point is, and the mechanics of it are, and you can do it with or without the cards, is that everybody gets a card and item, they pair up with one other person, They ask their question on that card, they listen to the person's response, their partner does the same, and then they swap cards, toss their hand in the air, signaling that they're looking for somebody else. So you can imagine how this looks, right? A couple years ago I was invited to speak at Convocation for the University of Wisconsin. 8,000 students, and we did an 8,000 person question swap. So just because there was 8,000 people in auditorium-style seating does not mean that you can't interact and engage with a group. But that's also a little bit more time intensive, right? The minimum amount of time that I would give to an exercise like that would be 15 to 18 minutes, because you want people to have enough time to swap and have some really good conversations. I like to pause in the middle, add a layer or a lens to it. So that's a little bit more. The second method that I'm gonna show you is really just a framing exercise. And you can, there are lots of different examples of this. It actually took me less than two minutes to do with a group. I'll let the video roll through to the end to see how I framed it. One thing you need to know for context is, as a part of this connected conference offering, sometimes I'll go kick off with some connection before content, but stick around throughout an event and help weave the thread of engagement and connection throughout. Whether the event's remote or in person, this idea of a connected conference is not about me just coming in and doing a session, but me saying, okay, what's the next keynote I'm gonna talk about, and how can I take their ideas and turn them into an experience that really makes a point? In this particular case, Janet Mock, Google Janet Mock if you want to, a very, very powerful trans speaker, was about to get on. And so I was there. My job was to get the audience and the group in a mindset to be able to really hear and take in the perspective shift that she was about to offer. I'd like to spend about two minutes just arriving into the room. And to do that, to help our brains arrive into the room a little bit. I'd like to invite, if you're able and willing, to stand. And go ahead and take your right pointer finger and point it up toward the sky, toward the ceiling. It'll work better if you stand. If you really want to sit because you hadn't have coffee,

Speaker 2: that's OK. And go ahead and start rotating your finger clockwise. Rotate your finger clockwise. Yeah, OK, we figured that clockwise out. Now, start lowering your hand. Lowering your finger, keep spinning. Lowering your finger. Lowering your finger.

Speaker 1: Low. Look down. Which direction is your finger spinning? Wow. What happened? It shifted. Your perspective flipped. Your brain didn't trick you. You didn't start. You can go ahead and have a seat. Your brain didn't trick you.

Speaker 2: The only thing that happened was that your perspective flipped.

Speaker 1: So what I'd like to do is share a very quick story that I think that had a powerful impact in shifting my perspective that I think will be a really timely reminder as we jump into Janet's perspective. So it was about 15 minutes before I got married five years ago. I'm sitting outside, and people from different chapters of my life are coming up and saying some version of, congratulations, it's good to see you, some nicety, except for one person. His name was Jeff, and he was a mentor of mine, and he came over to me and he put his hand on my shoulder, and he looked at me and he said, are you present? Because you don't want to miss your own wedding. And if you didn't ask that question, it's likely that I would have missed my own wedding. The next 45 minutes look like me weeping. But my question to you now is, are you present? Because we cannot afford to miss this perspective. Third method, which if you're subscribed to the channel, you may have heard me say before, it's this idea of the popcorn method, where even in a large audience or a small group, I'm not a fan of, you know, you've had a table discussion and now we have one person stand up and report out what they heard, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm much more interested in a little bit more energetic form of sharing. And so the popcorn method really simply, if you think about popcorn, is when you put it in the microwave, it's quiet for a little bit, so you give the group a little bit of silence. And then one pops out, one person responds, and then another person responds, and I might even be using hand motions like this to invite a group to just popcorn reactions to what you heard Janet just hear. So I give them 30 seconds of silence, popcorn on a handful of perspectives from around the room. You hear lots of different voices rather than Bob droning on about his on to wobble, right? Popcorn has a little bit more life to it that's especially useful in a larger group. Fourth method is a collective curiosity harvest. Oftentimes in a presentation, we do Q&A at the end. First of all, never do Q&A at the very end because it's just like the biggest buzzkill on the planet because you're letting somebody else who didn't do any prep decide how to end your presentation. And so a collective curiosity harvest, it might be the second to last thing that I do. There are a number of variations on this, but essentially you get people to talk to each other first about the questions they wanna ask, and then they agree as a pair or a truple or even a small group at a table about the one question they're collectively curious about, and then you pick out some people to share that one question that represents people's collective curiosity. Sometimes I'll even coach people to say that really great questions tend to begin with how or what to avoid the Q&A dynamic that typically happens where somebody walks up to the microphone and grabs it, tells you a three-minute story about something related or unrelated, forgets to ask a question, and leaves the presenter wondering what's next. And so this really avoids that dynamic, not only avoids it, but creates a really fun, engaging experience that serves everyone because you're not speaking to one rabbit hole curiosity, you're speaking to what most people wanna know or talk about. Fifth one, so simple yet extremely powerful. Use space and invite people to vote with their feet. So I was working with this learning and development team at one point, helping them create more engaging, more enriching trainings. To use space, right, I was taking their, I love taking content and plugging it into this side of my brain and popping it out as a more interactive, engaging experience. And so they were talking about some personality test kind of stuff, reviewing results, and it was the somewhat typical form of training where you have people get down, they're writing about what they learned, they're getting into discussion groups. That's all fine, I'm not saying don't do that, but we also know that brains tend to learn better when they're moving around, right? Our brains are most active when there's movement associated. And so I'm saying, okay, this wall represents people who are introverted, who tend to recharge when they're alone. This wall represents extroverts, extroverts, people who tend to recharge when they are around people. Stand where you would fall on this spectrum. The moment I do that, I'm gently forcing engagement because nobody, even a reluctant somebody is not going to be caught dead standing in the wrong place. And so their brain's going to turn on, they're going to say, okay, what are we doing? And they're going to re-engage. And so you can do that on a spectrum. You can do a two by two matrix, a scatter plot, comfort zones. Here's where you're comfortable. Here's where you're stressed or learning. And if you're up against the, or your hands on the wall, that represents panic zone. Stand where you would fall if a six foot black rat snake slithered by your left ankle. You see people scatter, right? So using space, allowing people to vote with feet, that can be a little bit more limited with audience or theater style seating, but in almost all other contexts can work really well. Method number six. It's a very formal assessment that I developed in grad school called the Themometer. And it really simply is, I ask a group to say, it's my way of visually checking in with everybody in less than 12 seconds. So even in the middle of a keynote, in the middle of a workshop, in the middle of a meeting, Anything that you're doing can just say, hey, I don't know actually how to read the audience, there's too many people here, so I just wanna check in on a scale of, this is really interesting and it's making my life a little bit better to I think I walked into the wrong room and I'm just figuring out when I can appropriately leave. Where are you at? And oftentimes I'll actually give a bit of a goofy spectrum like that because it creates a little bit of humor which injects life back into the group and I also get a bunch of thumbs to see like if we're on an average of like right here in the group, I'm not gonna go any further. I'm not just gonna push forward with my content. I'm gonna pause and check in and say, whoa, my intention is to leave us here. Can you just spend 60 seconds talking with the person next to you? What could you do or what would you do to raise that thumb up? What could change in the next 30 minutes that we have together or the next two hours that we have together to make this a 10 out of a 10 and not a five out of 10. Seventh one, you know, I love this idea of an unofficial start that comes from Mark Collard, the founder of Play Me Out, starting with immediate and purposeful engagement a few minutes before the official start time. I'm adding to Mark's work by saying, I think the unofficial end is a really great idea too, by saying, by closing really deliberately, by closing in a way that invites people's contribution, but also saying, if you wanna continue chatting, I'll be standing over here. One of the biggest benefits of meeting in person above virtually is that you get to go up and talk to presenters after a conference. And so after I speak, I get down and there is a line of people that I get to chat with and go deeper with, and those turn into little mini coaching sessions. We get to personalize, we get to dive a little bit deeper, answer some of their questions that they didn't want to ask in front of the group. It's magical, magical time. And so I like to designate a space to say like, that corner, I'm renaming the Connection Cafe and I'm just gonna be hanging out there. If any of these sound fun and you want to offload the worry of making an event really connected, really engaged, this is what I do. You can reach out to me. I got info below. Would love to chat about our Connected Conference offering and see your agenda, talk about what you're trying to create. And we'll get some time on the calendar, jump on Zoom or a phone call and have a chat to learn more about what that could look like. Have an awesome day.