Present Beyond Measure

33Beast Mode Techniques for Maximum Audience Engagement

“The size of your audience doesn't matter. What's important is that your audience is listening.”

—Randy Pausch

Several years ago, I was pinged by my fellow analytics expert and dear friend Tim Wilson (aka Gilligan on Data aka The Grumpy Cat of Analytics) to do something I'd never done before: to co-present a session at a popular analytics conference. I tend to be a lone rider on stage, so this was a stretch mission for me. Since we were sharing a time slot, it meant I had to drastically cut content from my signature keynote.

The issue was, I didn't cut deep enough and realized this during the session. There was no clock in the room, and my screen was too far away to keep the time.

Suddenly, Tim called out to inform me that we had gone over our time limit—like, not a little, but way over time. I nearly froze in shock; this had never happened to me before. I apologized to the audience and sped through my remaining content. Luckily, the audience was quite forgiving and responded warmly to our closing.

Nevertheless, I left feeling down on myself; as a professional speaker, it's a big no-no to run over. I deeply respect my audience's time and the conference organizer's agenda. But there was a silver lining peeking its way out of my raincloud: I didn't notice I was over time because no one had got up and left.

The next day, I conducted a post-mortem on my talk. Playing back the mental tape, I made two observations.

First, ...