First published on LinkedIn - November 1st, 2024
If you need to build social connections and trust across an audience, you want them to be able to see and hear each other.
In our upcoming book, The Versatile Presenter, we focus on four different outcomes you may want from any business presentation: knowledge, change, actions, or belonging.
There is an interesting article in The Guardian newspaper this week by Nicola Davis, that connects to the last of these: belonging. These are presentations where you want the audience to feel good about themselves and the work that they do. You may want them to relax, or feel confident about their abilities, or trust in working together. Here’s the article.
Here is how Davis summarises the study’s findings.
“Whether it is laughing at a classic comedy or watching a horror film from behind a cushion, movies can generate myriad feelings. Now researchers say experiencing intense emotions alongside others makes people feel more connected – provided you can see them.”
Davis explains how Victor Chung of the École Normale Superérierure set-out and ran the research. You can go direct to the research article here: Social bonding through shared experiences: the role of emotional intensity | Royal Society Open Science.
In brief, pairs of strangers watched three films, each designed to elicit a different emotion: one a neutral emotion (footage of a library), one a negative emotion (animal suffering) and one a positive emotion (comedy). The pairs observing were instructed to avoid communicating with each other. In some pairs they could see other and in some they were separated by a curtain.
The results were not particularly surprising: whether or not the participants (or in our language the ‘audience’) could see each other directly affected how they reacted. Pairs who could see each other felt more intense emotional responses to the films and afterwards they felt more socially connected to each other.
I suspect this is what you expected. We feel more socially connected to someone we can see. It feels obvious. However, we sometimes forget to consider the obvious, especially under the stress of a business presentation. We focus on whether we can see our notes, can see our slides, and can see our audience. We forget to consider if our audience can see each other.
When you want your audience to feel connected to each other, to feel a greater sense of belonging to this group, it is vital to arrange the room so they are aware of each other during your presentation. A shared experience is only fully shared when they can see (or hear) each the people they are sharing it with.
How might this work in practice? Here are three potential situations.
Situation 1: A virtual presentation to your team to celebrate great results. Let’s imagine that everyone will put their camera on. You choose to run most of the presentation without using screen share, where there are no visuals shared through the screen. This enures everyone to see others in the grid of webcams. You add interactive moments where everyone is asked to respond with one of the emoticons. The audience watches the flurry of hearts and smiling faces and see themselves as part of something.
Situation 2: A hybrid presentation (where some people are in the room and some joining virtually) to an international project team. You prepare photos of everyone on the call - you integrate these into the beginning of the deck. You ask everyone to share comments and opinions in chat (or a Q&A tool like pigeonholelive.com) – you encourage people to read each other’s thoughts. You prepare a section where a few people from the project team each present for a few minutes on their thoughts on the topic. You find ways to show the audience back on themselves.
Situation 3: A stage presentation to a large auditorium. You get there early and ask the technical team to raise the lights a little in the room so that the audience can see each other better. You integrate call-and-response activities where different sections of the audience shout out a line that you give them. You chorograph your presentation so at times you will step into the audience to talk directly with people. You add an interaction where you ask everyone to stand, then work through a few “sit down if” questions.
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When the intent of your presentation is to inform or to instruct, it may not matter whether or not your audience can sense each other. But when you need your audience to feel a bond of togetherness make sure that they can see and hear each other. A sense of belonging relies on a sense of each other.
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