To engage any audience, you must include the element of surprise.
A talk with a solid list structure can be comforting; it conveys credibility and order. However, it can soon become predictable and boring, at which point you’ve lost your audience. FAIL.
On the other hand, if you go for a completely organic, interactive talk, while you may have excellent engagement and humour, without any structure, it can soon descend into a mess, without clear takeaways or a satisfying conclusion. Also a FAIL.
There’s a clear lesson to be learnt here from two unexpected sources: Pokémon (the highest-grossing media franchise of all time, bigger than Star Wars or the MCU) and Dungeons and Dragons (US$1 billion in sales worldwide). While each game behemoth is based on a ton of precise, logical, mathematical values, they include a random element to spice things up and keep the player hooked: in the ‘catching’ bit of the Pokémon games, there is a chance that you will fail to catch the creature; the ball teeters for a few seconds to amp the tension, and then it is either captured (yay, yours to keep) or it escapes (curses!). In D&D, to determine success in combat or casting spells (and plenty more, even just noticing things), you roll one of the polyhedral dice.
Calculable logic is thrown into unpredictable chaos. Perfect.
Here’s how to achieve that enticing combination in your communication:
+ Be present. Respond to things as they happen; it will engage your audience and can be funny (always good).
+ Let your audience know what they’re going to get, then throw in lots of unexpected lovely things e.g. additional useful content, an interesting image or two, or a reference to an asset that they can investigate afterwards. This works for presentations, meetings, emails, you name it.
+ Ask them questions and then do something actually based on the answer. The beauty of this technique is that you’re using the audience’s input, so they’ve helped form the content (it’s also added something you – the speaker – can’t predict, but I believe that the new adition is well worth the risk!).
+ Tell them a good story or two. Stories have structure AND surprises, and keep your audience hooked.
Roll the dice. Good luck out there!
(I took this photo of the Ely toy shop window, which usually features Pokémon somewhere. Because, like Lego, they’re perennially popular. It’s the highest-grossing media franchise of all time, after all (did I mention that?)).