Utkarsh NarangFounder, IgnitedNeurons · Your best doers become your worst managers as you scale. I turn them into leaders so your best people don’t leave.

Want to Engage People? Stop Performing, Start Connecting

5 Sept 2025 · 1 min

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In this talk, Utkarsh Narang introduces the "contribution method," a facilitation framework that flips traditional presentation design. Instead of scripting the presenter’s words, the method focuses on pre‑designing the audience’s work: specific prompts, breakout structures, and follow‑up questions. The facilitator scripts how they will ask participants to engage, not what participants will say. By defining clear audience tasks (e.g., grouping into threes, asking a targeted question, then sharing insights), the facilitator can respond organically to the audience’s contributions, creating authentic dialogue and higher engagement. The speaker emphasizes that this approach reduces the need for a detailed presenter script because the facilitator’s role becomes one of listening and reacting to the audience’s input.

Chapters

And I call it the contribution method. And it's a very particular way that I design any gathering. And it very heavily focuses on what work I'm going to ask the audience to do and not what I'm going to say and do. So, in fact, I don't really script out much of what I'm going to say and do anymore, but I do script out what I'm going to ask the audience to say and do. I don't script out what they're going to say, but I script out how I'm going to ask them. So, in other words, I script out, I know that at this point, I'm going to ask people to break out into groups of 3, and I'm going to ask this very specific question. And then when they come back, I'm going to ask them what struck them from those conversations. And I'm going to listen to what they had to say. And then whatever I say is just going to be in response as a dialogue back to what they've said to me. I don't need to script. I don't need to pre-plan what I'm going to say. How would I do that? Because I don't know what they're going to say.