What is your favourite warm-up question?

When you’re planning a medical education symposium, your biggest challenge is keeping your audience engaged: once their attention is lost, it takes a lot of effort to win them back. That’s why, on top of the top-notch scientific content, it’s worth your while to iron out all other factors of success: faculty appeal and chemistry, stage setup, discussion format, and yes, the little things too, like the polling questions.

Warm-up questions do two things brilliantly. Most people focus on the primary purpose of the warm-up questions: to test the polling system and prepare delegates for the important clinical questions that will come later. Their second, somewhat hidden purpose, is to get your audience engaged from the outset. When someone answers their first question, they are no longer passive – that’s when they become an active participant at your educational event.

Unfortunately, the opportunity to capture the audience attention often gets squandered by asking the same predictable demographic question that the delegates have likely already answered a few times at your competitors’ symposia. Take, for example, the old familiar ‘Where are you from?’ – how many times have you seen it on a slide?

Yes, this question is very straightforward, the delegates can answer it on autopilot, and you will have collected some information on your audience (however, if you think about it, the geographic distribution should also be available from the badge scanners – do you need to collect it twice?).

Instead of going for the conservative question with conservative answers, could you give it an unusual twist by thinking outside the box?

Do you feel the difference between these two versions? By asking the same question with an unusual set of answers, you have primed their brain and encouraged them to think. They need to pause for a second to review the options; they will look at your map and try to imagine where their city would be on it. You have engaged them before you even started talking about your clinical data.

Next time you think of a warm-up polling question, do yourself and your audience a favour – give them a tricky question to prime them for the learning that follows!