Speaker 1: How to interact with an audience during a presentation. I love this topic. In fact, one of the first times I was invited to speak publicly was when I gave my first TEDx talk. I was invited to give my first TEDx talk about eight years ago. The talk was on this idea of positive social risks and I actually ended the talk with a whole heap of interaction. The two methods I'm going to unpack are rooted in some really delicious 1950s psychology and they are called the popcorn and ping pong method. Let's get into it. My background is in active and experiential learning. I believe that sage on the stage presentations totally are not as impactful as presentations that invite some level of contribution. Even in this video actually, as I unpack two really tried and true fantastic methods for interacting with an audience during a presentation, I would love for you to interact with this presentation by commenting with either a question that you have about what I'm saying or another technique or idea of how you interact with a presentation so that the longer this video is on the internet, the more valuable the comment section becomes. First of all, let's unpack a little bit of 1950s good old behavioral psychology for how to make really impactful interaction. There's a million ways to get your audience to do things, to interact. You can have them raise their hand for something, for a percentage. How many of you took a shower this morning? You can have people raise their hands. How many of you have got pulled over by the police in the last three months? Raise your hands. There are all sorts of provocative ways that you can invite people to just do something. What I'm after and what I'm more interested in is interaction that really keeps people on their toes. Those are things that we get used to almost. They're like, yeah, we participated. We clicked on the poll in Zoom, whatever. It's not bad. Those are great. Keep doing those. Fine. I'm after what makes an audience forget about the entire rest of their life happening outside of that room or that virtual conference. That's the kind of interaction that I'm after. To do that, I like to think about Mr. Skinner. If you've ever heard of the Skinner box, mice pushing levers to get rewards. One of the learnings from that was this idea of the variable ratio reward schedule, which is basically mice frantically would push on a lever to get their food if they weren't sure when food was going to come out. Sometimes they push the lever, it came out. Sometimes they push it three times and it didn't come out, but the fourth time it did. This might start to sound familiar if you've ever been to a casino because the variable reward ratio, casinos have now taken that and said, ooh, slot machines. Every time you crank that slot machine, you could win. You could be a winner. In fact, even in most casinos' slogans, they build in this psychology of like, you could be a winner. Even that phrase or idea. That concept I think is used in maybe potentially unhealthy ways in gambling, although no judgment to gambling. What I want to do is channel that same psychology for healthy ways. It's also used, tech companies have capitalized on this, I think maybe way too much at this point to hook us to our scroll and to our notifications. There's a reason that those notification numbers are big red bubbles that ding and ping and remind. Cha-ching, cha-ching. There's a reason that Facebook auto-plays videos one after another. There's a reason that it's so easy to scroll with a never-ending feed. A slot machine isn't going to turn off after 30 pulls. Okay, got the psychology. The two methods that I'm going to share with you are the popcorn and ping pong method of getting audience interaction. I believe and have observed in my audiences of between 12 people to 8,000 people that they consistently create this extra presence of like, ooh, what's going to happen next? Popcorn method is really simple. I have used this with too many people to count and it has never failed me once. Now there is one trick. As I describe this, you have to know that the best way to avoid awkward silence when you're trying to get interaction, the best way to avoid awkward silence is to create productive silence. When you do this technique, it's really important to give the entire audience at least five to 10 seconds to think before you invite their responses. Very simply, actually I'm just going to do this with Steven right now. I'm going to ask you a question and I'm going to invite you to just popcorn out a bunch of responses. Just quick responses, little snippets, and you'll even notice as I'm talking to Steven that, and Steven's actually here, you just can't see, wait, wave, Steven, yay. Steven is here and you'll only hear his voice, but imagine Steven is like 15 audience participants in a session that you're leading. We've just had breakout conversations or in this case, we filmed a series of videos right now. Steven, I'm curious for you, just from the last hour or so of filming videos, what has struck you or stuck out to you? Just a couple of quick responses. No meeting Wednesdays stuck out to me. This idea of no meeting Wednesdays, good video, check it out, previous video. What else? I think the idea of being authentic or being vulnerable to create trust with your team. I filmed a video on how the best leaders build trust and I just called five of my clients and had them on speakerphone and one of the themes that showed up was that. Cool. I'm going to keep doing that with Steven. I'll pause for now, but did you see my hand motions as I was doing this? When I use this popcorn technique, I'm doing this because I want five or 10 people to give quick answers and perspectives. I don't want Bob to talk for five minutes about this crazy niche story that nobody else really cares about. That is not variable reward. I want to keep it fast paced. I want there to be a little uncertainty of who's going to share what. I don't want people to get fried out with Bob's perspective. Sorry, Bob. The reason that I call this the popcorn technique is think about popcorn in a microwave. You put it in a microwave and it takes a little bit of time to heat up. That's your silence. I didn't do this with Steven. It wasn't fair. I should have said, let me ask you this question and just count down and pause five to 10 seconds for you all to think of your own response and then I want to popcorn out. That is a huge gift to introverts and people who need more than no time to actually think, which is everyone. Unless you want interaction from extroverts who are struggling with critical thinking, you've got to give your group time to think because otherwise you're just going to have the person who just speaks out loud blabbing out answers and it won't actually be quite necessary. In fact, that is the type of audience interaction in a presentation that I think creates eye rolls and people get up in a Q&A and it's like, oh man, Bob is back. Here we go. You want to avoid that dynamic and create a fast paced level of uncertainty in your interaction. The gem of this though is that you can always go deeper as well. But like a bag of popcorn in the microwave, you want to take it out before it starts to smell burnt, at least 15 seconds before it starts to smell burnt. While you could do this for a half hour until all 300 audience members have shared, I'd recommend getting between three and 10 perspectives max into the room and you might add your commentary in between them to make that interaction a conversation. So you're not just like, I hear you, I hear you, I hear you, I hear you, I hear you. It might be I hear, I hear you, I hear you, ooh, that resonates so much. There's a time, blah, blah, blah. You might offer some thoughts and then popcorn out a couple more. But end the party while it's still fun. Take out the popcorn before it's actually burnt. Taking the popcorn method one step further into the ping pong method, you can do this in a variety of ways. If we're just going to stick with the type of audience interaction that I'm talking about now is simply the ping pong method. And I might actually grab, I don't have a ping pong ball with me, but I might actually grab some sort of object to actually toss to a group member. So audience interaction, I might throw this to Steven. And then after Steven's done popcorn he has to answer or sharing, and maybe this is for a little bit deeper answers. It could even be for a Q&A at the end. I'm going to coach and remind Steven, Steven, you can pick the next person who shares. That way I'm distributing my power as the presenter to the audience. I want my audience to feel empowered, not disempowered as we go. And so when I throw this ball, oops, sometimes that happens too, by the way. And that actually is valuable interaction because I guarantee you if somebody throws it and picks something soft that can't hurt anybody, somebody's going to get hit with it. Somebody, something's going to happen that's going to make the audience gasp, laugh, or belly laugh. And all of that is really useful. It's like it serves as this little energy attention reset in between some really magic gems and content that are being live created by an audience. I will say for all of this to work, you've got to be really confident in your stuff. The best advice I can give to any presenter on how to be able to navigate this uncertainty is just always tell the truth on stage, on virtual stage, on real stage, in a little presentation of five people. Just always tell the truth. And so if somebody asks you a question or somebody says something that you don't know how to respond to, an amazing response is, wow, I have no idea how to respond to that. That could be an amazing response that as a leader shows like, hey, imagine that. I'm not a know-it-all. I don't know everything in the world. It humanizes you, brings you on to the next level. And the next thing somebody asks or shares, it's going to be whatever you say next is going to be listened to more because you're a human, not the sage on the stage. If you're loving this and wanting some coaching, every once in a while we run group coaching clinics. And I personally take on about one to two private clients every year, coaching them on how to make virtual presentations more interactive. If that sounds super fun to you, not a particularly cheap date, but it is a really awesome one. And we'd love to meet you. There's info below along with a whole bunch of other tools to make your presentations more interactive. I'm Chad Littlefield. Have an awesome day.