Speaking on a Panel? Get Ready to Learn

I’m new to Portland. I love the city’s natural beauty and perfect balance of art and science. But I don’t know many people here. Which is why I agreed to join a panel hosted by Vacasa, arranged by Chris Ortolano, and led by Tyler Lessard. My goal was simply to meet new people and hopefully learn something.

The problem was, I was invited as a Speaker.

As a Speaker, you’re expected to teach, to inspire, to share your knowledge. You’re not expected to learn much. Yet I wanted to learn. I wanted to connect with storytellers and marketers in Portland on an equal basis, not as a thought leader or an expert. To my surprise, this event had a very practical format to it, where the panel spent its entire time answering questions followed by four workshops dedicated to deeper conversations about customer video storytelling for marketing and sales.

Turns out you can learn a lot by not speaking. Even on a panel. I was fortunate because the way the panel was organized, I had the distinct advantage of always speaking last. Simon Sinek says you should always speak last.

Simon Sinek is a smart guy.

Me, not so much.

With Preston Zeller’s in-depth knowledge of content marketing and storytelling, and Nathan Isaac’s wealth of real-world examples, I had about a minute to round out each question before Tyler would move on. I used my time to provide a different perspective, or to examine a specific issue more closely, since the foundation for each answer had already been laid out before me. 

But that’s not really an answer.

The issue with providing a different perspective or a contradictory viewpoint at the end of each question is that your audience will be left with more questions than answers. Our audience’s faces confirmed my suspicion, as most started leaning in and taking notes. Their heads started turning in unison as the conversation went back and forth. Like people do at Wimbledon. Confusion was replaced with contemplation. Intrigue led to agreement, expressed with the very slightest of nods. Some arms were folded, some hands on chins. If I could’ve assigned a different color to each expression, this audience would’ve looked like the cast of Sesame Street.

But we had a wild card.

Tyler had an ace up his sleeve. To be fair, he may have actually had a card up his sleeve - he’s been known to go to great lengths to entertain his audience. But the card I’m speaking of were the workshops. He knew we could drive the audience’s curiosity well beyond the scope of our panel because we had the workshops to answer every single question they had. And he was right.

Strangers can surprise you.

As the few dozen attendees organized themselves in to four workshop tables, I had settled in with my co-lead, Kelly Guenther, to deliver an intense class on video production and narrative strategy. Kelly is a freakin’ genius, so I didn’t have to do much. But what I saw the table classmates do was simply astonishing.

With no preparation, I asked a marketer to ditch their brand’s perspective and assume the persona of their customer to determine what their customer cares most about. The change was instantaneous. He began laying out what a poor student cares most about when applying for college, which led his classmate to describe what parents want for their kids when they send them off to college. And so on.

I’ve spent years training award-winning executives to be empathetic to their audience. To be genuine and humble, to make themselves smaller so they can connect with everyone. Yet here in Portland, eight willing participants demonstrated these abilities with minimal effort.

Are you talking about yourself?

Our European classmates at the table explained how boring and self-centered many American webinars are, because presenters continuously talk about themselves, their products and their companies. She found this simply unacceptable in Spain, where you must address your audience’s goals and their role. Because it’s not about you, it’s about them. Which helped her classmates understand why conversational dialogue performs better than “marketing-speak” in videos. Because people understand what they say, not what you say.

Maybe there is hope for panel sessions.

Maybe.

For years, I’ve advised large corporations and startups to use the “voice of one to reach the audience of one”, i.e. to leverage strong individual speakers that can connect with every single member of their audience, instead of a panel of experts who are more engaged with each other than the audience.

One of the best examples I’ve seen of this was Neri Oxman’s keynote at Convening Leaders 2018. On the surface, you have an MIT professor discussing innovate architectural and biological structures with an audience of 5,000 event professionals in Nashville, with thousands more watching live online. But what actually happened was one woman connected with thousands of her colleagues, asking each of them to rethink the building blocks of each experience they deliver for millions of people around the world. Design thinking. Every one of her attendees left inspired and full of questions about how they can do better. Every one of them relating to her and respecting her at the same time.

Will a panel session ever create that kind of connection with its audience? I don’t know. But on June 27, 2018 in Portland, we tried.

And that’s all that matters.