How to Connect with a TEDx Audience

How can I connect the audience with my message? — that was my challenge at TEDx. And a challenge that every presenter faces. Your talk needs to hook the audience in the opening seconds. It must give them just enough context to follow the journey you’re about to take them on and prime them to receive your big idea.

When the audience shares your experiences and perspective, this is easier to do. But sometimes you have almost nothing in common with them. They’re on the other side of an intellectual Grand Canyon — and you must build a bridge to reach them.

My talk at TEDx KU Leuven was about leading through the first moments of a crisis, so I told the story of a surprise attack during combat operations in Iraq in 2008. My audience? Hundreds of Belgian university students, half my age, with little understanding of the military.

Most were just entering their careers, with little to no experience in leadership or managing organizational crises. My talk was directed at a problem they had yet to face. So before I could share insights on crisis leadership, I had to help them visualize what their own future crisis might look like. I needed to build a bridge from my crisis to theirs.

Finding a Way to Connect About Crisis

In writing my talk, I considered three approaches to establish this common understanding of crisis.

Define the concept of crisis.
Ask the audience to describe crisis in their world.
Describe relatable crisis scenarios myself.

#1: Define Crisis for the Audience

I considered the first approach for several weeks, stubbornly holding on to a definition of crisis that John Maxwell offers. This is the text I scripted and even rehearsed, but eventually canned:

Today, I’ll share the playbook you can use to respond to these situations.

First, let’s figure out what we mean when we say crisis.

On the one hand, a quick search will give you dozens of definitions.

But on the other hand, plenty of companies and even entire industries don’t have a working understanding for what it means to be in crisis.

I like the definition by bestselling leadership author John Maxwell. He says that a crisis is “an intense time of difficulty requiring a decision that will be a turning point”

From this perspective we see that a crisis has three major elements.

First, a crisis has an element of shared risk or danger.

Second, there is a time component that adds pressure to the situation.

And third, a crisis is a situation which will require a decision (or many decisions) to navigate.

When I talk about crisis, I like to add a fourth important element. And that’s leadership.

The kind of crisis I’m talking about today is the kind that will require a leader.

It will require you.

So let’s talk about how to survive the first minutes of a crisis…when you realize the world around you is changing and others are relying on you to get through it.

3 actions.

Your first action focuses on the people. Your second action addresses the organization. And your third action brings it back to the people and prepares them for the challenge ahead.

It was too much. And though I liked the way it sounded, I had to find a more concise way to orient the audience.

#2: Get the Audience Involved

The second option was to do a segment of audience participation, where I would invite a few crowd members to describe a crisis situation in their field of study or profession. I knew this method would consume precious minutes of my stage time, but I thought it might be an engaging, authentic way to align the audience’s viewpoint.

However, after a day or two of considering this method, I decided it would take too much time and be too risky to involve the audience in an unscripted or hastily coordinated way. Best to keep the presentation clean and in my control. Convincing me further was my speaker coach, who warned that audience participation doesn’t come across well in the TEDx online versions.

#3: Highlight Crisis Scenarios

That led me to option three: describe crisis scenarios the audience could relate to.

I needed to help them see that crisis is a real possibility, regardless of the profession. If all went well, these future leaders would envision their future selves and hold a crisis scenario in their minds as the rest of my talk unfolded. I wanted to bring them to a moment of pause—a “zero state”—where they could feel the weight of the problem before I offered a path forward.

The question became, how many possible crises to describe and in how much detail? After brainstorming with ChatGPT for a bit, I developed seven example scenarios:

You’ll be a corporate PR manager when a cyber security breach exposes sensitive customer data
You’ll be a politician on the campaign trail when a news outlet releases a damaging article.
You’ll be a doctor leading a ten person surgical team when the procedure goes wrong.
You’ll be leading a student finals project and your presentation gets corrupted the night before it’s due.
You’ll be a small business owner when a delivery truck carrying your most valuable product crashes
You’ll be a lead researcher and lose funding for your most important work
Or…you’re the hospital nurse manager when a global pandemic hits.

I again felt like this was too much but I recorded a few sessions with this version and sent it to some friends, with mixed feedback.

Balancing Multiple Audience Perspectives

During the formal rehearsal two weeks ahead of the talk, a TEDx speaker coach said that the student-heavy audience may struggle to see themselves in the scenarios I had drafted. Another reviewer pointed out that “finals project” isn’t a phrase that European students would use.

I was at a crossroads. True, the live audience would be European, but I estimated that more Americans would view the TEDx video online when it was posted.

I had days left. I had to decide.

Decision Time

After lots of early morning deliberation, I decided to revise the student example to be more universal and cut the list down to four diverse crisis scenarios that future leaders could imagine themselves facing. Then I added some questions to create tension around the fact that a crisis is coming and they need a way to lead through it, which I would then provide.

Here’s the final version of the text:

Like it or not, your next crisis could be just around the corner.

Now, it may not arrive as an explosion like mine did, but let’s imagine where you could be when it happens.

You’re a corporate PR manager when a cyber security breach exposes sensitive customer data

You’re leading a student project and your presentation gets corrupted the night before it’s due.

You’re a small business owner when a delivery truck carrying your most valuable product crashes

Or…you’re the hospital nurse manager when a global pandemic hits.

So, what will your next crisis look like?

And when chaos strikes, what do you do?

So, how do you lead when everything starts falling apart?

Today, I’d like to share three actions that I have come to rely on in crisis…and may help in your next crisis.

And here is how I rehearsed it just hours before the live TEDx event:

It took a lot of trial and error to land on this version—and even now, I wonder if there was a better way to deliver it. Nonetheless, here is what it looked like in the final rehearsal and I can’t wait for you to see the onstage version when it comes out.

How Would You Do It?

Time for feedback. What could I have done differently to bring crisis into context and orient the audience for the rest of the talk? What would you change about this version? And what techniques do you use to connect with your audience?