Episode #169: Small Target Tactics For Hostile Audiences

Presenting isn’t always adoration, adulation, regard and agreement. Sometimes, we have to go into hostile territory with a message that is not welcomed, appreciated or believed. Think meetings with the Board, the unions, angry consumers and when you have sharp elbowed rivals in the room. It is rare to be ambushed at a presentation and suddenly find yourself confronting a hostile version of the Mexican wave, as the assembled disgruntled take turns to lay into you. Usually, we know in advance this is going to get hot and uncomfortable.

We still have our message to get across but we have to make some adjustments to head off trouble. The essence of the issue is disbelief. The audience, for whatever reasons, simply don’t believe what you are telling them or they just don’t trust you, regardless of what you tell them. The first casualty of this type of speaking engagement has to be big, bold statements. In less tense situations we might be throwing these types of statement around with gay abandon and not face much resistance from the audience. If what we have said gets brought up in the Q&A we bat it away without breaking into a sweat. No problem, we have this one!

In more fraught circumstances, those big statements will get us hammered, maybe even as soon as they are issued, with no regard for waiting for the Q&A, as the interrogation gets underway immediately. By the way, if there is an intervention by someone in the audience, we should redirect them to ask that question in the Q&A, which is where we will handle all questions. This stops your flow being interrupted and the proceedings being hijacked.

We need to be more circumspect about claims we make. We need to introduce ideas surrounded and buffered by evidence. Instead of saying, “this is how it is”, we need to say, “according to the research, this is how it is” or “according to the experts, this is how it is”. We swiftly and subtly slip off to the side of the attack and let the third party reference take it between the eyes, rather than ourselves.

We need to wrap up our statements in cotton wool and preface them with comments like, “as far as we know…”, “according to the latest information…”, “to the best of our knowledge…”. In this way, we are not holding ourselves up as the oracle, the all knowing, all seeing sage, unburdened by limitations of self awareness. We are making ourselves a small target, harder to attack and providing many loopholes to leap though, should we need to.

We need to lead with context and background. Making statements, drawing conclusions, before we get to the evidence part, is ritualistic suicide as a speaker facing a hostile crowd. We need to take a note from the pages of the Japanese language grammatical structure. Unlike English and most European languages, in Japanese the verb comes at the very end of the sentence. This is a great metaphor for dolling out the evidence.

In Japanese, we don’t know if the sentence is past, present or future oriented, if it is negative or positive until we get to the end of the sentence. That means we have to sit there and absorb all of the context, background and evidence before we can make a judgment about whether we agree with what is being said or not. This is what we should do with a hostile audience – load them up on the details, the data, the evidence, the testimonials, the expert statements, before we venture forth with what we believe to be true.

We deliver this this deluge of facts piecemeal, so that the audience is taking the information, processing it in their own minds and jumping to conclusions about what they have just heard. Our object is that the conclusion they have jumped to is the same one that we have reached, based on the same information. It is almost impossible to disagree with our context. They may not agree with our conclusions from our understanding of the context, but the context itself is usually inviolable.

Before we go into Q&A we must publically announce the amount of time available for questions. It is going to get heated and we don’t want to appear like a cowardly scoundrel beating a hasty retreat, because we can’t take the rigour of investigation of what we are saying. By having stated the time available at the start, we can simply refer to it later and say, “we have now reached the end of the fifteen minutes for question time” and go into wrapping up the evening with our final close.

Hostilities will commence immediately we begin to speak, so we have to be mentally ready for that. We also need to switch our presenting tactics to account for the pushback which will come. By making ourselves as small a target as possible, it becomes much harder for any enemies in the audience to successfully attack us. If they are going after you, they are definitely not your friend, so keep that in mind when your are preparing.