Having attended a small business festival’s workshops, where people could attend small classroom like rooms and listen to speakers, I realised that I really don’t like classroom locations where the audience is listening to speakers.
I actually think the traditional small classroom speaker audience relationship must change. The traditional model is a speaker talking to an audience, in a lecture type environment where its assumed the speaker is an authority and through lectures delivers content.
If you’ve ever sat in such environments, there’s almost a feeling of being lectured at. I don’t like such environments, and feel the traditional orthodoxy that the speaker knows all and is sharing his/her knowledge from a pedestal must change.
Lets try inverting the relationship. So, instead of a presenter talking to an audience, get the audience speaks to the presenter.
Of course this is not a new or novel concept. The idea of participatory workshops, or small sprint teams or where the audience explores and challenges ideas using co-creation techniques has been around for a while.
There are many benefits to this.
- It gets people talking
- Random collisions between people might uncover shared traits, skills, connections or beneficiaries; how else would you know that a person on a table might actually offer a shared skill
- The volume of insights generated are greater, richer
- The audience feels they are working through the challenge, and new questions, ideas and solutions can be framed from this discovery technique.
Whilst I do not advocate using this technique all the time, I do feel business events with speakers must try to ask themselves, what is the key piece of information or take-away you want to impart to the audience; what do you want them (the audience) to do?
Given the right context, I feel if we invert the presenter-audience relationship, we can explore greater avenues of possibilities, and innovate together, rather than in silos.