Add Fun to Your Presentations With Audience Activities

Game Benefits

To make any presentation more interesting, educational and fun, involve your audience. Mark Twain said, "No sinner was ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon." He meant that twenty minutes is the attention span of most people. Shifting gears often makes it easier for your audience to stay tuned. To change pace involve the audience by giving them something to do. Games and exercises keep people interested.

Activities also generate information, reinforce learning, improve retention, promote discussion, and help people to bond.

Some of my favourites are:

1. DATALESS PARTNER INTRODUCTION

Introduce a partner after only a thirty-second interview without a reference to job, marital status, age, number of children, or leisure activity. The idea is to present your personal impression of your partner in a convincing way, to share your feeling about the person. I like to use the exercise near or at the end of a program, after participants have already gotten to know each other. Questions that elicit information that helps to formulate the introduction are: What do you most love? Most fear? If you could be any animal, what would you choose? Any car? Any dessert?

There's no need to tell the audience what any of those choices are.  It's more fun to infer what you like from the response and improvise on it. For example, if your partner, Glenda, says she'd like to be a dolphin, you might say: Glenda is a very social person with a love of play. She likes people and feels comfortable in different environments, especially those in which she can be active. She is very loyal to her family and also welcomes contact with strangers that reciprocate her friendliness.

What you say is less important than how you say it. The intro isn't supposed to be a complete psychological profile, just a passionate presentation of something you believe to be true about your partner. I find it works better if, after explaining it, I give a demonstration.

2. ANECDOTE OR CHALLENGE EXCHANGE

Tell a partner something good that happened to you in the last week. Or tell about a challenge you're facing, why it's a challenge, and how your strategy for dealing with it. The exercise takes very little time. I find the game useful to show people how they can start or keep a conversation going after the customary exchange of names.  As with any two partners game, you get l00% participation. There's no place to hide.

3. THREE THINGS IN COMMON

This game encourages people to open up with each other. I've found it especially effective with singles groups. It takes a while to play, even with a small audience, but the energy it generates and the laughs it produces are well worth it.

Find a partner and take five minutes to discover the 3 most interesting things you have in common. Sun signs, job similarities(unless the jobs are very unusual), and recreational activities are not interesting. Go for things very few people would have in common, like an exotic, out of the way place you've both been or the fact that as kids you both raised snakes. When the partners have gotten their three things(two things for groups of three people), I have them announce their commonalities and write them on a flip chart. Then the whole group votes on the winners, to whom I give prizes. In one group the winners were two women who found they'd both been pregnant in Beaumont, TX. In another, it was a man and woman who had both wet their pants in fourth grade classes.

An important benefit of the game is that it is an object lesson in active listening. With prizes at stake, people really pay attention to what their partner is saying, lean forward and ask questions. That, I tell them, is the best way to listen to anyone -- fully focused on what he or she is saying.

4. SIX PERSON INTRODUCTION

This is the single best way I know to energize an audience in which more people don't already know each other than do. If the audience has been sitting for a while, listening to announcements or another speaker, I find an excuse to use it. Give people 90 seconds to stand up and introduce themselves to six others they haven't already met. The time limit means they have to keep moving, looking for new introducees. In one group, a man climbed on his chair to get a better view of who was around him.  People started coming to him. It added to the semi-chaotic, manic energy in the room. When you call time at the end of ninety seconds, you'll see that everyone in the room is smiling.

If you want to glean some educational value from the exercise, ask the audience which of them noticed the eye color of the people they introduced themselves to. Remembered how many of the names. Had a tactile memory of the grips. Were aware of the firmness of their own grip. This can be an introduction of things to do when you meet people: Look them in the eye, focus on their names, maintain a firm but not hurtful grip for a few seconds, stand up straight, SMILE.

5. TEACH YOUR PARTNER(OR GROUP)

The best way to learn something is to teach it. We easily forget what we hear and read; we remember what we do. Give partners or members of small groups(four people max) an opportunity instruct each other in specific points you've made. For example, in a seminar on selling, you've stressed the importance of Initiative, Imagination, and Information. Let each person in a group of three take one of these ideas, define it and give at least 2 examples of how it can be implemented. It's fine that they may simply repeat what you've given them. In doing so they are internalizing your message. Some will expand on what you presented, think of other examples, maybe even call upon the other group members to come up with fresh applications of your principles. And that's just what you want -- audience involvement.

6. TWO MINUTE BACK RUB

If your audience is seated in rows, ask them to stand and face the same direction, toward one side of the room or the other. When you say Begin, each person gives the person in front of him a two minute back & shoulder massage. After two minutes, people reverse direction & rub someone else. The exercise works fine with partners, though a line rub is a bit less threatening to the touch wary. This is far more fun than a stretch break. I recommend using it only after you've had some less kinesthetic exercise that has served to acquaint people with their neighbors. Be sure to announce that no one is required to participate, so the touch phobic in your midst won't feel pressured to do something outside their comfort zone.

7. THREE IMPORTANT POINTS

An excellent activity for early arrivers, while you wait for last-minute arrivers, is to have small groups decide three or four things they'd like to get from the program. It not only gives folks an activity, it gets them thinking about the program content. It also works well at the end of an extended program, seminar or class. In that case, you ask the groups to list the three most important things they learned and their reasons for choosing these over others. This helps to reinforce ideas. As with any exercise, de-brief when you finish. Ask for the results, maybe even write them on a flip chart.

8. DIFFERENT VALUES DEMONSTRATION

Different people have different moral frames of reference. While we all agree that values like integrity, loyalty and honesty are good ones, we often find such values in conflict in a specific situation. Then we are forced to make difficult decisions about what is "right."  Understanding how others analyze an ethically ambiguous situation is important to our appreciation of them as human beings. Any program on leadership, communication, team building, or other inter-personal content can benefit from an exercise that gives participants a chance to share firmly held beliefs and how they apply them to a specific ethical problem.

Describe a dilemma. Here's an example I used to use in college philosophy classes. Dick and Jane have been married for sixteen years and have two children. He provides well for his family but has become increasingly involved in his work, so much in fact that he has long ignored his wife's emotional and physical needs. She has called this to his attention repeatedly but to no avail. Of these three alternatives for Jane -- divorce, affair, grin and bear it -- which is the least bad and why?

Divide into groups of four for discussion. Give them twenty to thirty minutes. One group member is the secretary and takes notes.  Another is the reporter who will share the group's "conclusion" with the larger group. Someone else is the captain and encourages all members to participate. The fourth person is the analyst. He or she asks questions of the others to clarify their reasoning. The reasons are more important than the conclusion. Part of the group report can be about what additional information might have led to a different conclusion.

No matter how many classes I've given this problem to, one thing never changes. People disagree. Even people who chose the same "solution" did so for different reasons. And many said that the exercise gave them a better understanding of themselves and others.

9. WHO GOES FIRST

This is not a game as such, just a way for a group to have fun figuring out who will be first to do whatever the assigned activity is.  Just announce that the first person will be any of the following:

• Who was born closest(or farthest) from where you now are, or
• Whose birthday is closest to today, or
• Who has the biggest feet, or
• Who has the longest hair, or
• Who is the oldest(or youngest), or
• Who is the anything else you can think of.

Game Tips

Give people who arrive early a meaningful activity. Not only does it engage their attention, but it also rewards them for having come on time. That's far preferable to making the prompt people wait for the latecomers. An easy activity is to list what they think are the top five or ten anything.  For example the world's five highest mountains(Everest, K2, Kangchenjunga, Lhotse, Makalu); the five longest rivers(Nile, Amazon, Yangtze, Mississippi, Yenisey); five largest oceans(Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, Arabian Sea). If you can find a category that bears some relation to the content of your presentation, so much the better. A good place to look for the information is Russell Ash's THE TOP 10 OF EVERYTHING.

With any small group activity you can anticipate that not all groups will finish at the same time. To meet this difficulty ask that the group leader signal you when his or her group has completed the task. Walk over and give an additional task, preferably one that in some way extends the initial assignment. Or you can have people give themselves a new challenge. This will save you running around the room asking who's finished and who not.

After most games, I like to debrief the audience. People are eager to share their thoughts and feelings the activity brought up Thus, the debriefing extends the activity. It also allows people who didn't quite complete the assignment in the allotted time a chance to finish their thoughts and reunites the audience. Best of all, it lets everyone hear some stupendous statements. After an eye contact exercise, a gentleman volunteered, " I had more trouble sustaining five seconds of eye contact with people I've long known than those I'd just met. That made me realize that I don't often look at my wife when I talk to her. So when I get home I'm going to give her five seconds." The room burst into applause.