The Role of Humor & Emotion
When you tie together your key messages with emotion, even virtual communications can be very powerful. But how can we make it work virtually?
Every company, every meeting has it’s “freight” — the information that has to be communicated and discussed. The challenge is for the planning team to make it interesting enough to get the message across, and remembered.
The objective for most meetings and events is to share information to achieve behavioral change. In the process of developing your event, the planners, speakers and the event staff communicate and send thousands of messages — some overt and others subliminal. The event look, feel and brand, the agenda topics and even the PowerPoint font style all send messages to attendees about what they should learn, feel and do.
The aggregation of all these bits of information shape the event experience. Dr. Richard Ackley believes it is important to consider how the brain processes information to avoid having your meeting fall short of its full potential. He offers several ideas for meeting planners to maximize the participant experience.1
Setting the Stage
According to Ackley, when meeting organizers are planning an event, the first thing they need to ask is: “What do we want the attendees to take away from this event? What behavioral changes do we want them to make? Will our attendees already have what they need to understand the subjects or do we have to provide context for them?” With these answers in hand, leadership can organize, sort and present their information so that attendees can see the big picture, assimilate the facts, evaluate their options, focus on the details and embark to complete the task.
Tips for Engaging the Right Side of the Brain
Emotion is a powerful motivator, explains Ackley, and it plays an important role in behavioral change. There are many techniques that can be used to elicit an emotional response electronically. These include:
- Awe: Announce a surprise initiative or the rollout of a new product or service. Steve Jobs was known toward the end of his developer’s conferences to say, “One last thing,” and then roll out an industry changing new product.
- Convey Confidence/Determination/Power/Pride/Positivity: Coach your presenters to display these key characteristics. It will bring great comfort to your audience knowing they work with such successful people.
- Energy/Enthusiasm /Excitement/Fun: Especially with virtual conferences, they need to be well choreographed to have a distinct rhythm that keeps attendees engaged and energized. Develop a well-designed agenda that features inspiring speakers, a productive panel discussion and some surprising moments. People love a show!
- Honesty: People need leadership today to be honest. It’s a very tough world out there and we need the truth and facts even if the news isn’t good.
- Hope: There’s nothing like a well-delivered presentation, from a sincere speaker, outlining a specific challenge, followed by an inspiring call to action, and, specific plans for overcoming challenges. Don’t be afraid to think big.
- Humor: When well executed, humor brings a sense of community to a meeting. At live events we like to use a comedy troupe ala that would come on stage and present skits that were tailored to the audience’s organization. What made their performances so funny would be that the writers would “mine the pain” by focusing on things that recently didn’t go well. It made the organization look good as they admitted their mistakes, it made their executives look even more human and approachable, and the audiences loved the shared experience!
- Impress: Provide case studies that demonstrate how an individual or team accomplished a task that overcame a set of challenges and achieved superior results. Offer hands-on opportunities for attendees to interact with new software or products live, or on-line, to experience the benefits for themselves. Hear from your clients live of via video to tell the story of individuals who have benefited from your new products or service.
- Inspiration: News stories abound about politicians, sports figures and business executives who have not lived up to the qualities people expect from them. Today, more than ever, people want to be inspired. They want something and someone, they can believe in. Motivational speakers are actively participating in virtual conferences now to inspire audiences.
- Love: Yes, it’s an unusual word to use in the discussion of organizational events, but one worth considering. It’s very powerful when the stakeholders in your organization can say they love being a part of your organization. How can you make them feel that way?
- Surprise: Attendees love surprises. An unexpected gift sent to their home for a virtual conference, perhaps even a bottle of wine for the virtual networking portion of your event can truly make a difference.
Tips for Bringing Emotion to Your Event
- Share the credit for successful projects and make sure everyone’s supervisor knows about their team’s contributions.
- Bring the right attitude to your participation in the meeting. It shows, even virtually.
- The golden rule is, stakeholders should feel a sense of reward and recognition equal to, or greater, than their contributions to any meeting or event.
- Hope is a required ingredient for success
Summary: The Face Value of Humor and Emotion is that it opens up your audience to take in and remember more of your messages.
1 Dr. Richard Ackley, “Learning How the Brain Learns.” Meeting Professional International’s One+ Magazine, May 2011, www.mpiweb.org (accessed Feb. 11, 2015)
