Provocative Panel Discussion Game: “Would You Rather?”

Perhaps you are familiar with the party board game, “Would You Rather?”  The premise is fairly simple:  The player picks a card with a precarious dilemma and secretly predicts the result of the other players’ subsequent open discussion and consensus view.

So let’s riff off that game into the panel discussion universe!

Take two challenging, provocative questions to pose to a specific panelist.  Put them up on a PowerPoint slide as choice 1 or choice 2.  Then let the audience pick which question the panelist should answer!

Note: with a small crowd, you can just go with the loudest voice.  Otherwise, you can use some kind of voting mechanism such as flags, online polling (www.sli.do) or audience response systems (www.turningtechnologies.com).

You might be wondering….what kinds of questions should I ask?  Again, take a cue from the game:

• It’s interesting…
• It could be embarrassing…
• It’s the question we all want to ask
• It makes us want to know the answer!

Inject a little levity into your panel discussion by asking each panelist: “Would you rather….?”