Use Gallery Walk To Make Presentations Interactive & Engaging For Everyone

One of my guilty pleasures is creating PowerPoint presentations. I love the simplicity, the process of capturing the essence, and the visual aspects. I genuinely love it! I don’t like presenting my slides. I consider it a terrible way to engage people. Most people have a short attention span, and the longer you talk, the more people tune out.

Luckily, there’s an option to present your presentation super-interactively, which gives us a perfect opportunity to keep creating PowerPoint presentations! Christiaan Verwijs demonstrated this during a Scrum.org trainer meetup in Munich. In this blog post, I share a practical example of how we used the unofficial Liberating Structure “Gallery Walk” to make a presentation interactive and engaging for everyone.

Visual Thinking Strategies

We first learned about Gallery Walk from S. Fisher Qua and Anna Jackson during our joined Liberating Structures Immersion Workshops. Its simplicity and possibilities immediately struck me. Although I’m not entirely sure what the origins of Galley Walk are, I do see a strong connection with the concept of “Visual Thinking Strategies”.

Christiaan describes the idea of Visual Thinking Strategies in this blog post. In the article, he shares how Philip Yenawine developed Visual Thinking Strategies about twenty years ago as part of his work for art museums. The initial goal was to improve how people learn from studying art. The regular approach in museums of telling people interesting details about the painter and the painting (with audio tours, booklets, or information panels) turned out to be very ineffective in terms of ‘stickiness.’ Studies showed that people tended to forget what they learned within minutes, hours, and certain days.

Building on insights from cognitive psychology and learning sciences, Yenawine and his team developed an approach designed to actively trigger people to explore and make sense of material for themselves with a group of peers. In VTS, teachers ask three consecutive questions:

1. What is going on here (in this picture)?
2. What makes you say that?
3. What more can we find?

This is also the essence of how we use Gallery Walk. Instead of explaining the slides of a presentation upfront, we offer the group the opportunity to make sense of it themselves first.

A Real-Life Example Of Gallery Walk

Let’s start with a bit of context. In recent years, Christiaan has performed scientific research on Scrum team effectiveness with Daniel Russo. They developed a scientific model that explains the core factors that influence the effectiveness of a Scrum team. During a Scrum.org trainer gathering, Christiaan intended to describe this model to various trainers and Scrum.org staff. Although he did prepare a presentation, the intention wasn’t to make this a 1-hour talk. The more complex the topic, the higher the risk of losing your participants, and the more an engaging and interactive approach is needed.

Step 1

We printed the presentation and distributed the slides on the floor. Using the “Gallery Walk” allowed each participant to make sense of the slides individually and in silence—without explanation.

Step 2

After 5 minutes, we offered various prompts to help the participants reflect…

👉 “Move to the slide that you consider most interesting…”
👉 “Walk to the slide that confuses you…”
👉 “Move to the slide that raises a big question…”
- “Etcetera…”

For each prompt, the group had 2–3 minutes to discuss the slide with others around it.

Step 3

Next, we used a quick 1–2–4-ALL to generate questions. Each group of 4 was allowed to raise two questions based on their reflections. We used a 30-minute timeslot to discuss the questions interactively.

Step 4

We finished the session by asking everyone to write down 15% Solutions based on what they learned, discovered, or noticed. A 15% Solution is any first step or solution that you can do without approval or resources from others, which is entirely within your discretion. It helps the participants to leave the session with tangible next steps.

Closing

This was a one-hour session in total. It also works perfectly fine online; just put your slides on an online whiteboard and use breakout rooms to enable interaction. So, if you also enjoy creating presentations, keep doing it! But next time, ask yourself: Is there a different way of presenting it?

I believe there is :)