Thanks so much to everyone who came along to Thursday’s Interesting Breakfast. As promised, we’ll be putting all the content up here. If you’d like more detail on anything you heard or experienced just drop us a line.

Jez kicked things off, sharing five ways that presenters can make their content more brain-friendly. These examples can be used to inspire senior leaders to find new ways to deliver content.

Earn Attention 

Establish the relevance of the topic with an anecdote or startling statistic. Jamie Oliver used a statistic in a powerful way to grab the audience at the start of his TED Talk on Obesity.

Change the Pace & Dynamic 

This can be as simple as breaking up a presentation with a special guest. Intel’s CEO did something far more ambitious: a colleague joined him on stage, took a 3D scan of his body which was turned into an avatar and placed into a computer game.

Power of Live  Events

Finding creative ways to harness the immediacy of being face-to-face with an audience can be incredibly engaging. For a recent client presentation on demographics we inserted a worldometer API that shared live population data.

S.T.A.R (Something They’ll Always Remember) 

Identify the S.T.A.R moment in the presentation and then find creative ways to land it. Al Gore famously used a scissor lift to dramatise the rise in CO2 emissions – following the line off the chart.

Participation in Live Events 

The previous ideas are all great ways to engage audiences with big ideas, but business events also typically need to land more granular content. Presentations aren’t the best way to do this. Jez included two examples of formats that are less about speakers delivering content and more about audiences discovering meaning for themselves.

The first is a Traffic Light Session which sees the audience discussing ideas and indicating their response to it using voting paddles. The second is a Solution Room – a great way to harness the collective intelligence in the room and find practical solutions to people’s challenges.