Opening with Intrigue

One of my most fundamental beliefs about presentations and speeches is that we need to seize the audience’s attention in the opening few seconds of a presentation, when their anticipation and focus are at their peak.

One of the easiest and most reliable ways to do that is to surprise or shock them. A counterintuitive fact, contrarian opinion or unexpected action or statement will instantly engage your audience’s minds, because it clashes with their understanding of the world.

But if you do use shock or surprise to get the attention of your audience, you’d better move quickly to solidify that attention, because the effect tends to fade almost as quickly as it came on, especially if the surprise or shock is based on something relatively trivial or irrelevant to your overall message.

An often more powerful method is to intrigue. A rhetorical question posed for the audience to ponder, a statement that raises a host of loaded issues or an irreverent quote, ……….followed by a long pause, will draw the audience in by triggering their own thoughts on the issue. Once you’ve got them thinking about it, they are engaged and ready to hear what you have to say.

Instead of peaking quickly and then beginning to fade, as a shock or surprise does, intrigue starts slowly and builds over time. The longer you build it up, the more powerful it becomes.

Steve Jobs used intrigue brilliantly when he introduced the first iPhone, as I wrote about in A Master Class from Steve Jobs.

The first words out of his mouth were, “This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two and a half years.” He then paused and let the words hang out there for a few seconds until the audience was fairly quivering in excitement.

He continued to build the mystery, touting the still unnamed product as a game changer on par with the Macintosh computer and the iPod. He used every trick in the book to whip the audience into a lather of anticipation.

By the time he finally unveiled the iPhone, the audience had already long since bought in to the idea that the new product was the most amazing electronic gadget since the digital watch.

You don’t have to be introducing a ground-breaking new product to use intrigue in this way. Any time you are presenting information that your audience doesn’t yet know, whether it’s the quarterly sales figures or the name of the new VP of Finance, tease them a bit. Drop a few hints. Make them wait. By the time you finally reveal the information, they’ll be primed for it. You’ll have their absolute attention.

Shock and surprise are certainly effective, time-tested ways to grab the attention of an audience, but sometimes you can create more long-term impact with a tease than with a punch in the face.