I’m not a captivating speaker. I tried holding entrepreneurship club meetings where I gave a talk about what a minimum viable is, and how to start blogging. But I would look into the crowd and see people dozing off looking at their phones.
They sat in lectures all day. They didn’t want another one at this club meeting. Attendance was dropping and we weren’t sure what to do.
Then we learned the number one rule of holding people’s attention: more doing and less talking.
So we started having people build things, and present ideas, and work in groups. They did lots of things. But I no longer had the chance to talk about customer discovery interviews and rapid prototyping. We were doing things solely for fun and the learning dimension of our meetings suffered.
The perfect solution was just around the corner: The AD CADS workshop structure. It’s a simple way to outline a meeting for your organization. The acronym stands for Activator, Debrief, Content, Activity, Debrief, Summary.
If you can fill in that structure, you can host meetings that are both educational and engaging. I just made a YouTube video to explain each aspect in more depth. Click this link to watch it now and learn how you can hold people’s attention without being a world-class speaker.