Speech situations can be quite ordinary, and frankly even quite boring: the audience waits and listens, maybe watches some power-point slides as the speaker moves on from one topic to another. It can be challenging to concentrate to the speech as a whole unless the speaker happens to be an outstanding storyteller by his/her nature. Most of the times, unfortunately, this is not the case (at least here in Finland, the land of the socially awkward and tight-lipped Finns…).
There are ways to make speech situations more engaging and exciting to the audience, though. In our HC version, implemented in 2008, the speaker was going through a manuscripted story while the screen behind him was backing him up giving him a game-like background. As the speech proceeded, the audience could join the avatar on the screen on a journey through the different values of the business world and they could actually participate on the plot of the speech instead of just sitting and listening.
It’s also possible just to add speeches some rewarding elements, for example by setting up different roles or tasks to the audience beforehand or give them problems to solve like the great speech-man Daniel Pink does here with the candle-problem . This way the part-takers will actively follow the speech from their own points-of-view and think independently within its boundaries. Afterwards they will more likely be feeling like they learned themselves something new. And that the speech was awesome!
