Last week I had the chance to attend a satellite location of the Willow Creek Association Global Leadership Summit (say that five times fast!) and really enjoyed my time. The content of the sessions was great, the venue was perfect, the hosts were very kind and the guys I got to with were top notch. If you’ve spent any time on twitter in the last few days, you’ve definitely seen the quotable moments from the talks by Tony Dungy, Andy Stanley, Jack Welch, Bill Hybels or any of the other great speakers.

(Quick way to find some great Summit hilights is to search for the #wcagls hashtag on twitter and see what pops up.)

I don’t want to re-hash everything that happened during the two days because you’ve likely experienced it yourself or you’re sick of hearing about it from people who were there. So.. Let me give you three quick hilights and then talk about what really impacted me.

1. Bill Hybels can bring it. Even in a talk where he’s focusing on four simple leadership concepts he is able to dig deep and have solid impact.
2. Jeff Manion can preach. His leadership sermon from Numbers 11 was one of the best I’ve heard – and the meaning was probably increased for me since we had worked through that passage as part of a sermon series here about a year and a half ago.
3. Daniel Pink gets it. I had seen a couple videos of him giving talks before but I was really impressed with his ability to deliver content in a way that is engaging and memorable.

Okay.. so what was the bigger takeaway for me? The thing that I’ve been thinking about the last few days is how engaged the audience at my satellite location was with the content being provided by video. We were watching people speak or sing on a screen and yet the interaction between the audience and the presenter was very similar to what I would have expected if the content was being presented live.

During the singing, the crowd sang along. When the song got loud, the crowd got loud. When the song was done, the crowd clapped just like the live audience. During the talks, when the speakers got fired up the crowd would shout back their encouragement. During a couple of strong moments, the crowd actually cheered and clapped when the speaker made a great point. At the end of the talks, the speakers got a nice round of applause while they went back to their seat.

I don’t think that we should dismiss this too quickly or just accept it as normal. But.. think about it. This HAS become normal.

We have become so used to interacting with content on a screen that we now treat it in a way very similar to content that is presented live right in front of us.

Even though we know the band can’t see us clapping for them, the speaker can’t hear us cheering them on or thanking them at the end of their talk with applause, we go ahead and do it.

So  here are a couple of questions that I’m left with after this -

1. As a video audience, do we interact with the screen content in this way so that we feel included in the event in the same way that the live audience does? Is it about making ourselves part of the genuine experience?

    

2. For churches who use video (either as a satellite location or with online experiences) how are you leveraging the emotional connection that the audience is feeling with your content so that follow-up/next steps happen in the same way they would for the live audience?

In all honesty, this was the biggest takeaway for me from the Leadership Summit this year. As tech-oriented as I am, I was very much surprised by the willingness of the crowd to have this emotional investment in what was being presented in the way that they did. There is, of course, the whole discussion about the need and importance of having what’s presented on screen being high quality, engaging and relevant – and the need for that is probably higher than it is for a live audience.

Anyone else attend a Leadership Summit site and find the same thing? I’d love to hear some more thoughts on this.