How to Engage an Audience

Ask how to engage an audience and you will mostly be handed adjectives. Be passionate. Be authentic. Have energy. None of that tells you what to actually put in the talk on Thursday.

There is a better way to think about it, and it comes out of research on classrooms rather than stages. Engagement is not a mood you transmit. It is a set of things the audience does — guessing, answering, deciding, comparing — and each of those can be built into a talk on purpose.

OneEngagement is a verb they do, not one you do

Scott Freeman and his colleagues gathered 225 studies comparing undergraduate science and engineering courses taught by traditional lecturing against courses using active learning — anything that made students work during class rather than only listen.

Exam scores went up by about six percent under active learning. Students in the lecture-only courses were about one and a half times more likely to fail.

Be careful how far you carry this. These were university courses in science and mathematics, measured across whole terms, with graded exams at the end. A fifteen-minute talk to your team is a different situation and nobody has run this study on it, so treat the direction as strong and the numbers as belonging to a classroom. What survives the move is the principle: a room that only receives does worse than a room that does something.

TwoMake them guess before you tell them

Lindsey Richland, Nate Kornell and Liche Kao ran five experiments in which people read an essay about how vision works. One group was asked questions about the key ideas before reading. The other group simply got more time to study, with the same ideas highlighted for them.

The group that was questioned first did better on the final test. And here is the part that matters: that held true even when the researchers counted only the items people had failed to answer on the pretest.

Guessing wrong beat being shown the answer for longer.

They also closed the obvious escape route. In a fifth experiment, people were shown the questions but not asked to answer them — and that was not the same. The benefit came from attempting an answer, not from having your attention pointed at the topic.

In a talk, this costs you about eight seconds:

• Before you show the number, ask the room to guess it. Take two guesses out loud.
• Before you explain your solution, ask what they would have tried.
• Before the case study, ask which of two outcomes they think happened.

Being fair about it: this was tested on people reading alone, then graded. Your audience is listening together and nobody is marking them afterwards. The cost of trying it anyway is one sentence.

ThreeChange “the” to “your”

Richard Mayer and colleagues took a narrated animation explaining how the human respiratory system works and made a second version that differed in one respect. Twelve times, the word “the” became “your”. The nose became your nose. The throat became your throat. Nothing else changed.

Across three experiments, the people who heard the personalized version scored higher on transfer tests — questions that required using the material to work out something new. They did not score higher on retention tests.

That distinction is the whole finding. Those twelve words did not make anybody remember more. They made people do more with what they heard, which suggests they were processing it rather than only receiving it.

It is also the cheapest change here, because it is editing rather than redesigning. Go through your slide titles: “the onboarding process” becomes “your first week here”; “users often struggle with” becomes “you have probably had this happen”.

FourEye contact does not do what you were told

This one contradicts standard presentation advice, so it is worth the detail.

Frances Chen and colleagues ran two studies. In the first they tracked where people looked while watching a speaker argue a position on a controversial subject. In the second they told people to look either at the speaker’s eyes or at the mouth.

More time spent looking at the speaker’s eyes went with less movement toward the speaker’s position, and with less willingness to engage with the other side at all.

Then the boundary, which is what makes this usable rather than alarming. Looking at the eyes went with greater receptiveness in one group: people who already agreed with the speaker.

So the rule is not “avoid eye contact”. It is: hold it when the room is with you or undecided, and reduce it when you are contradicting somebody directly — look at the room rather than into one face. This was measured on listeners watching video, not on presenters being coached, so treat it as a well-supported implication.

FiveWhen the format allows none of this

Sometimes you cannot run an activity: a formal talk, a large room, a full schedule, and asking people to turn to a neighbor would be strange.

No research is behind this section — it is craft, and it is marked as craft so you can weigh it accordingly. Three things still work when nothing else is available:

• Ask for a show of hands. It requires nothing from anybody and it changes the room from an audience into a group of people who have just been counted.
• Say the thing everybody is thinking. “I know this is the fourth presentation about the budget this month.” Naming it costs one sentence and gets their attention back.
• Say your most important number, then stop talking. The silence does the work, and where you put silence turns out to matter more than how much of it there is.

And the largest one, which has its own article: tell them something that happened. A story makes an audience do something internally even when they are sitting perfectly still, and it is remembered measurably better than an explanation.

The short version

Rooms that do something outperform rooms that only listen, though that evidence comes from term-long courses rather than single talks. Asking people to guess helps even when they guess wrong — especially then. Changing “the” to “your” did not make listeners remember more, but it made them do more with what they heard. And eye contact is not a universal good: it strengthens agreement and hardens disagreement, so spend it where the room is already with you.

Pick one of those for Thursday. All four at once is a different talk, and you do not have time to rewrite it.