Posts filed under 'Speaking'
I have been talking with a lot of conference speakers over the last few days - researching how they prepare and carry out their speaking roles, and what difficulties they encounter. Many speakers hate the inevitable question and answer session after their presentation. One speaker confessed he deliberately makes his presentation five minutes too long in order to eat into question time! That’s a shame because Q and A is a great opportunity to check the audience’s understanding and restate your main message one more time.
Here are a few tips for how to handle Q and A after you have delivered a structured presentation:
-
Plan:
prepare a slide to show during the Q and A. This slide should contain, in one sentence, the main thrust of your presentation (Your Act III, scene 4 slide if you are using
). Ask the chairman to call time on your Q and A session not by saying the traditional “We have time for one more question,” but by saying “Would you like to sum up?”
-
Anticipate:
if you rehearse with colleagues, or at least discuss the presentation with them, you will discover the kind of questions you can expect on the day. Better yet if you can find a friendly client, the kind of person you can expect in the audience, rehearse with him or her.
-
Divide / Restate:
restate each question to confirm your understanding – it helps you and the other people in the audience who may not have heard the original question. Ask for more specfics if the question seems too broad. If the question has more than one part, pause, split the question into its constituent elements then restate and answer each part in turn.
-
Refer / Defer:
if the question is not relevant, don’t waste your Q and A time, even if you know the answer. If you can, politely refer the questioner to a more appropriate speaker and ask the chairman to ensure that the question is followed up. Alternatively, promise to answer the question during a break. If you don’t know an answer, it’s better to admit your don’t know and promise to find out, rather than to take an ill-informed stab.
-
Use both hands:
when faced with “What do you think of…?” or “What is the best… ?” it can be useful to slot your answer into a “on the one hand… on the other hand…” format. The audience really wants to know which hand you prefer, so if possible, end with “in my opinion, the better of those two options is… .”
-
Past / Present / Future:
another prepackaged answer structure is “Here’s how it used to be, here’s how it is now, here’s what I expect / need / want to happen in future.” This is a great structure to use if you are proposing change.
-
Sum up:
if possible, end each answer with reference to one of the key points from your presentation. At the end of your Q and A, when the chairman asks would you like to sum up, quickly restate the main thrust of your presentation, refering to your Q and A slide. Such a professional ending is rare, so you will leave a great last impression with the audience.
Comments are open, so feel free to add your own favourite techniques for handling Q and A.
Update: via
Lifehack
, I came across
, which contains a post on
. Bert’s blog is worth reading.
August 18th, 2005
Great comment from Cliff Atkinson
on
Beyond mind mapped bullet pyramids
:
By stating the conclusion first, you also lighten the cognitive load on an audience, because they don’t have to struggle with holding many fragments of information in short-term memory before you explain what they all mean.
argues for the “conclusion first” approach for similar reasons.
A reader, no matter how intelligent, has only a limited amount of mental energy. Some of it will be used recognising and interpreting words, some seeing the relationship between ideas, and whatever is left comprehending their significance.
You can economise his need to spend time on the first two activities by presenting the ideas so that they can be comprehended with the least possible mental effort. To sequence ideas instead so that the mind has to go backward and forward to make connections is simply bad manners, and most readers react by refusing to do so.
Minto also makes the argument for the sake of clarity. Readers and listeners may misinterpret your message if you don’t make your point first:
The reader (or listener) will assume that ideas which appear together logically belong together. If you do not tell him in advance what the relationship is, but simply give the ideas one at a time, he will automatically look for similarities by which he can group the points being expressed…
Alas, people rarely put the same interpretation on groupings as you do…
August 16th, 2005
Jason Womack
linked back to this
June post from Cliff Atkinson
of
fame. Cliff argues that presenters should state their conclusion first. If the audience knows where they are going, they are more likely to pay attention. Great advice - and once again I am struck by the similarity between Beyond Bullet Points and
by
Barbara Minto
and even
by
Tony Buzan
.
Minto concentrates on business writing and gives the same advice: put the conclusion first and supporting information after. In fact Minto argues a conclusion at the end of the document may not even be needed. Buzan created mind maps to group information in a radiant hierarchy, with the most important point (effectively, the conclusion) in the centre.
This works because the human brain likes to group information. We cannot remember or process long lists of items, so our natural tendency is to look for linkage between separate items of new information. We group information items by drawing conclusions about the relationships between them. As we get more information, we start to make groups of groups. And to make sense of those new groups, we have to be able to group them with existing knowledge.
The conclusion gives your listeners or readers everything they need to group information, both with everything else you say or write and with what they already know. Why save it until last?
August 15th, 2005
Lifehack
points us to the
The Economist Style Guide
: what a great resource, for both writers and speakers. The biggest lesson I need to learn:
In general, be concise. Try to be economical in your account or argument (“The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out”—Voltaire). Similarly, try to be economical with words. “As a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigour it will give to your style.” (Sydney Smith) Raymond Mortimer put it even more crisply when commenting about Susan Sontag: “Her journalism, like a diamond, will sparkle more if it is cut.”
You can even test your writing style with the
Economist Style Guide Quiz
. I scored 9 out of 12. How did you do?
Bonus link:
50 writing techniques
, also via Lifehack.
August 13th, 2005
SpeakersBank
The esteemable
Dale Rees-Bevan
asked recently if I wanted to become an associate with
SpeakersBank
. SpeakersBank is a social enterprise which provides public speaking training for those who would not normally have access to it. At the moment they are putting trainers into schools. To get a feel for how SpeakersBank works, Dale invited me to an inter school speaking competition last Thursday - all the children had done three workshops and this was the culmination of their efforts.
I particpated in a short workshop session with some of the regular trainers, then I was chief judge for the competition. Afterwards I handed out certificates of participation, made a short motivational speech (I talked about John Glen, the astronaut - a big analogy for the importance of preparation and rehearsal), then handed out the prizes.
The standard of the children who spoke (all in their teens) was really very good, and the SpeakersBank trainers were keen to tell me just how each child had improved. The boy who stood on stage with his head down reading from a piece of paper, for example, had refused to say anything at all at his first workshop, so to stand on the stage and speak in a competition was obviously a huge breakthrough. There was little to choose between the top five speakers, who all delivered intelligent, well structured speeches with confidence and enthusiasm.
I didn’t think that I would want to work with teenagers, but after this afternoon, all my misgivings melted away. I signed up for the associates’ induction day and one of the existing trainers asked me to work with her on a series of workshops at schools in Greenwich in January.
SpeakersBank often works with children whose home lives would make your hair stand on end, but the sessions clearly help them gain confidence in themselves. I am looking forward to getting involved.
If you have time and experience, of if your employer runs an employee volunteer scheme,
get in touch with SpeakersBank and find out if they could use your help
.
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July 20th, 2005
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