Episode #226: Posing Big Questions When Presenting

As presenters we want to inform, persuade, entertain or motivate our audiences. Most B2B business presentations fall into the “inform” category, because the organisers don’t take too kindly to presenters “selling from their platform”. They want us to get up there and bring some value to their audience by providing data, experience and insights. Grabbing the mic to flog your widget will see you blacklisted as a presenter for that organisation and through word of mouth, probably many others, as you are considered an idiot sans common sense.

Telling people useful stuff is fine, as far as it goes. However, there is always too much information for the size of the time we have, so we are constantly chopping bits out to make it all fit into forty minutes. The danger here is that we become captured by the elegance of the data, the rarity, the precision or the raw value. Why are we telling the audience this information in the first place? This basic concept starts to erode in our consciousness as we start building slide after slide, packing them to the gunnels with useful information.

Storytelling is a powerful way to convert data into memory and impression. Our listeners will remember data bound up in stories much more easily than a trail of disparate numbers. Stories also help persuade audiences of what we are saying. Also, they tend to recall us as someone they would welcome listening to again. Stories alone won’t take us as far as we want to go.

If we want to really reverberate with our audience, we need to get them going much deeper than they would left to their own devices. People enter the venue at a low ebb. They are sitting there passively waiting for the performance to begin. As the speaker we have to lift their energy stocks right up and get them involved in our talk. Audience passivity has to be replaced with engagement. We have the usual toolkit for that. We can get people to voice their agreement with ayes or nays. We can have them raise their hands to signal their opinion to the question. Or we can give them handheld bats with “Yes” on one side and “No” on the other and have them wave these about in response to our question.

Rhetorical questions are good to get people thinking about what they believe and why they believe it. We can switch it from rhetorical to real, by calling on individuals in the crowd whom we know, to speak up. “I see Suzuki san sitting there, who I know is a real expert in this area and we have enjoyed some great debates in the past. So Suzuki san, how do you see this playing out from your perspective?”.

There is always a tension in the air when a question is posed. Are we supposed to answer this or is the speaker going to take care of that.? Not knowing which keeps audiences concentrated on what we are saying, which is precisely what we all want.

We can also add pertinent questions after supplying some rich data and key information. Most business talks are laden with apple pie is good and motherhood is admirable statements. We state the unremarkable in our advice and everyone listening just forgets it immediately. If we want to have impact, we have to push the audience further in their thinking. We need to make what we are saying as relevant as possible to that audience.

If we say something bromide like, such as, “culture is very closely linked to team performance” then the audience will be absorbing this and nodding in agreement and forgetting it straight afterward. It is much better to challenge the audience. So, we say the same thing and then we add the bear trap, “Can you say you are fully satisfied that the current culture in your organisation is producing the highest possible levels of team performance?”.

Now we have exposed the gap between the actual and ideal situations. We all sign on for the ideal situation of course and agree that it is ideal, but so what? We need to go after the audience members further and push them to action by challenging that big gap we have exposed. We can rub salt into the wound and say, “If you are not completely confident in the current culture delivering out performance, what are the three things you can do today to start fixing that issue?”.

We allow a very pregnant pause to engage the audience in self-reflection and deep thought about available solutions. By emphasising three items, it makes the whole process much more concrete. The stage is now set for us to be the 5th Cavalry, coming over the sand dune to the rescue and tell them what we found worked best for us. If we had just given them our three things straight up, the impact would have been negligible. Now they are all ears, because the three things they came up with on their own were all pretty lame.

How we package stories makes all the difference in being considered valuable and memorable as a speaker. Challenging audiences in the right way is also a real skill and it needs careful planning. Time for all of us to get planning.