Karen was planning the annual Sales Kickoff event for her team, but she didn’t want to use the old formula. After 20 years of putting together Sales Kickoffs, she just didn’t want to put her team through yet another series of presentations and panels. Yes… they’d have cocktail hours, the boat ride, the golf challenge, and the escape room experience, but she was tired of all the “fun stuff” being outside the work. She wanted her team to lean in during the “content” portion of the Kickoff, because that was actually the part of the Kickoff that would lead to real sales results later.

When she came to us, she didn’t really know what she was looking for… only that she wanted something to be different. Her organization was launching two new products and a whole new approach to compensation for the sales team. The Kickoff was going to be when the team learned about these products, how to position them, who the target profiles were for these products, and how they’d be paid. All of this was extremely relevant to the sales team, but Karen didn’t know how to make it engaging to learn.

In our first conversation, we challenged Karen with a question that often leaves many of our clients a bit dumbfounded. What would you do if you took away the option to have anyone present anything?

Now, don’t get us wrong. We don’t have anything against the tried-and-true strategy of information dissemination by presentation. In fact, great presenters can be extremely effective at engaging and even inspiring an audience. But death-by-presentation is a real thing; especially at big events like conferences, kickoffs, retreats, etc. For some reason, we’ve all settled into believing the myth that the best way to communicate to groups of people is to present. It isn’t. At least not necessarily. And when you’ve got a line-up of presenters who are anything but out-of-this-world fantastic, it’s a good guess that death-by-presentation is likely where your audience will end up.

And so, when we take on a new client who’s looking for a new way to engage their people, one of the first things we try to do is take the presentation off the table. This forces a more creative and dynamic approach to teaching, learning, and information dissemination that necessarily supports a more engaged audience.

Why presentations aren’t always the best idea

Unless a presenter is phenomenally dynamic and engaging in her own right, audience members are going to have to consciously choose to pay attention and process the information. This takes effort, and it’s almost guaranteed that more interesting distractions will find their way into the space. Oh! I just got an email, let me check it and make sure it’s not important. Hmm… that coffee bar over there is looking really yummy, maybe I should get another cup. That carpet was an interesting design choice… and so on. If the presenter is presenting information that is remotely complex, dry, or worse, poorly organized, the audience is surely checked out.

Additionally, presentations rarely offer space or time for audience members to truly process and/or contextualize the information they’re hearing. This takes additional mental functioning on the part of the audience member, and rarely occurs without explicit prompting.

What you can do instead of present

So ok… presentations alone are hard for an audience to truly engage with. But what else is there? Often clients come to us with a goal to make the experience interactive, but the interactivity typically happens after someone presents information first. The format of the “interactive” experience often follows a cycle that looks something like this:

Our challenge is to cut out the “Present Information” step altogether. The format of the experience then becomes something like this:

Karen was confused. How would her participants know the information they needed to know in order to apply it in the interactive activity?

And this, dear reader, is the crux of the issue.

Most of the time, when working with clients, the belief is that “net new” information needs to be presented first, and the only opportunity for interactivity is in the application of that knowledge. This is simply not true. Here are a few examples:

1. To announce a new compensation structure, groups of 3-4 are given the structure laid out clearly in a one-pager. The group explores this one-pager together, and is then challenged to rank how well 5 different hypothetical salespeople are compensated based on what they sell in a quarter. Not only will the team truly understand the new compensation structure by the end of the activity, they will also have had the opportunity to apply the incentive schemas to a few examples.

2. To roll out a new set of organizational values, groups of 5-6 are given a set of cards, each with one of the values represented. The group is challenged to rank the values based on how well the organization already lives them. Not only will the group have a comprehensive understanding of what the values are, they’ll also understand practical ways to live into them while at work.

3. To launch a new go-to-market process, a visual map of the process is displayed to a group of 8 on a poster in the center of their table. They’re then challenged with a series of questions and prompts to explore the new process, discuss challenges that may arise, and how they can each contribute to its success in the roles they each occupy. Not only will the group have a full understanding of the new process by the end of their conversation, they’ll also see themselves within that process and how they can bring it to life.

The next time you’re putting together a presentation, or an interactive session that includes a presentation for a portion of the time, ask yourself if you really need it to be a presentation. Almost certainly you can do something more interesting that will better engage your audience and result in higher levels of retention, buy-in, and commitment.