In many situations, audiences are no longer content to sit and listen to you talk—they want to be part of the discussion. Effective presenters recognize and take advantage of this by actively encouraging audience participation. By doing so you can:
- Achieve a richer audience experience
- Source ideas, questions, and information from your audience
- Enable audiences to feel included, inspired, and more open to your recommendations
Despite these benefits, few presenters have mastered the facilitative style. Taking this approach has its challenges. For example, audience participation can be more time consuming than expected. When considering the facilitative style, presenters wonder, “How can I cover everything if people in the audience are using up valuable time with their comments?”
The discussion can also veer in unwanted directions—or even turn hostile. If you want to reap the benefits of facilitative presenting while avoiding these pitfalls, you’ll need to focus on both planning and execution.
Planning
Successful facilitative presenting starts with good planning. Follow the 6 steps below to plan a successful facilitative style presentation:
- Plan to Connect Before Content. Traditionally approached as ice breakers, connecting before content means creating an opportunity to interact on a personal level before getting into substantive content. Even if you’re short on time, you can do a quick check-in, for example, “share one word that describes what you’re feeling right now.” This approach helps to establish trust and rapport so that your audience feels safe to participate later in the discussion.
- Allocate time for participation. A general rule of thumb is to prepare enough content for 25% of the allocated time for a highly interactive presentation. This is especially true when you send pre-reads in advance. Practice delivering your content to make sure you have enough time for your planned interaction.
- Identify specifically where in your presentation it would be good to invite participation and include that in your outline or slide notes.
- Plan how the discussion will move your message forward. How will you transition out of the discussion into your next point or your closing?
- While it can be difficult to find space when meeting in person, if possible, select a room that allows participants to see each other. For example, seating in a U shape, at a conference table, or in rounds depending on the size of the group.
Execution
Planning is only the first step in successfully facilitating an interactive presentation. The next step is managing participation. We’ve put together a few tools to help you execute your plan successfully.
Set Expectations
Set Expectations in the beginning of the presentation about the (shared) goals, timing, and interaction. This makes it easier if you need to interrupt the discussion or a dominant audience member later to move forward with the agenda. When facilitating virtually, let people know not just when to interact, but how to interact, i.e., is the expectation to unmute or use chat to comment?
Use Check-ins and Questions
Use check-ins and questions to create engagement, confirm interest/agreement/understanding, and solicit feedback. Avoid using the World’s Worst Question: “Any questions?” and instead use presumptive questions, like “What questions do you have about…”
Summarize
After each person offers their comments, summarize what they say. For example, you might have someone who talks about the importance of making sure that a particular project has the necessary funding. Before calling on someone else, you can summarize with: “I hear what you’re saying. We need adequate funding to ensure successful completion.”
Repeating and summarizing keeps those who couldn’t hear the speaker in the loop and provides an excellent way to transition to another contributor.
Write It Down
Sometimes it helps to take a page from the world of training and write comments on a flip chart, whiteboard, or shared screen. This encourages participation by showing that you value what’s being said enough to write it down. It also provides a menu of ideas to go back to, as you encourage more discussion.
Manage the Discussion
This is the trickiest part of facilitative presenting. By “manage the discussion” we don’t mean censoring people’s opinions. It means making sure their comments stay on topic, and that no one person dominates the room. If one person is allowed to do all the talking, the other audience members will shut down in annoyance—and they will not participate.
Strategies for keeping things under control:
- Politely interrupt a dominant talker, summarize what he or she has said, and immediately ask for a comment from someone else (you can ask the group, a specific person, or even another section of the room).
- During the presentation, reference the clock and the need for some audience members to get out on time.
- Refocus the discussion if it wanders off topic or heads in a direction you don’t want it to go. For instance, “Let’s get back to our main topic.” Use your presentation’s main theme as your home base, to keep the discussion grounded.
- Ask questions of specific people in your audience—those you know have something favorable to offer.
- If you know in advance that a dominant person will be in your audience, sit down with this person and ask for input on your presentation planning. They will gain a sense of ownership and, consequently, say less.
Doing a straight lecture is a lot easier and more efficient than inviting audience participation; but the extra engagement of a facilitated discussion creates a stronger experience for everyone —including you. After you’ve done a few of them, you might never want to give a straight talk again.
Does your team need to facilitate discussion as part of their presentations? Check out BRODY’s Facilitative Presenting Training here.