8 tips for encouraging questions in your presentation

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Most of us would like people in the audience to ask questions. A lively Q&A session is stimulating and engaging for the audience. But sometimes you ask for questions, and you’re just met with blank gazes back from your audience. It’s a let-down and your presentation ends on a sour note.

Questions from the audience are like young fragile seedlings - they need nurturing. Consider when you’re in the audience - what stages do you have to mentally go through in order to ask a question? It might go something like this:

So as the presenter, you need to nurture your audience’s questions through these four stages. Here are 8 tips to help make them through:

1. Pitch your presentation at the right level for your audience

The first stage of questions is birth - they have to be born in your audience’s mind. If your presentation is too simple for the level of knowledge in your audience - it’s all material they’ve covered before - they won’t have any questions. Conversly, if it’s too complicated for them, they’ll turn off rather than risk asking a question which might make them look stupid.

2. Don’t cover every aspect of your topic in the presentation

If you cover everything there is to know on the topic - you won’t leave room for questions. So don’t be exhaustive in your coverage.

3. Let your audience know you would like questions and when to ask them

Near the beginning of your presentation let your audience know that you welcome questions. Then let them know when to ask them. There are a number of options:

Take questions throughout your presentation

Tell people they can interrupt you throughout the presentation to ask questions as they come to mind. This has several benefits:

• people won’t have to remember their question till later
• if they’re uncertain about something they can get that clarified at the time
• questions on a particular issue are dealt with at the same time that you’re discussing that issue.

The downside to this strategy is that it can take you off track if people ask irrelevant questions or questions that you’re going to cover later in the presentation. If you find it tricky to get back into the flow of your presentation after an interruption it may not be the best strategy for you. Finally, it can throw the timing of your presentation if people ask a lot of questions on a particular issue. This strategy is best used in longer presentations and training courses where timing is less critical.

Take questions at defined points of your presentation

Tell people you will have an opportunity for questions after you’ve finished each part of your presentation. This option is a useful halfway point between having questions throughout and leaving them till the end of the presentation. You can also decide how long to take questions for during each break in your presentation, and so control the timing better.

4. Let them ask a question as soon as they have one

If you’re serious about ensuring that people get their questions answered, invite people to interrupt you and ask their question. It’s the only way to ensure this. That’s when the question is burning for them. The longer you make people wait, the less likely they are to remember it. Once you’ve moved onto a new topic, their question will seem less relevant. Joey Asher from Talking Points blog says:

Questions aren’t to be feared. They’re to be embraced.  There’s no better way to connect with an audience than to allow them free rein to ask as many questions as they want.

5. Invite people to write down their questions as they think of them

If you don’t want to take questions throughout, you can help people remember their questions by suggesting that they write them down.

6. Validate every question

It takes courage to ask a question. It’s public speaking - just not from the front of the room. People are held back by wondering if their question is stupid or did they miss something and you already answered it. So you need to do your bit to make it a safe environment for people to ask questions. Do that by responding warmly to all questions that are asked - even if the question is stupid or you had already covered it. I don’t recommend saying “Good question”. It’s become a cliche which is often used when the presenter can’t immediately think of the answer.

7. Have people discuss in pairs any questions they may have

If your audience seems a little shy, give them an opportunity to discuss their questions with one other person before they ask them in front of the whole of the audience. Here’s how do do this:

“I’m going to ask for questions in a moment. Please turn to the person next to you and discuss together any questions you have. Then I’ll answer those questions.”

This has several benefits:

• It gives people the opportunity to try out their question in front of one person before risking humiliation in front of the whole audience.
• Any questions that are answered by material you’ve already covered can be answered by their partner.
• It gives people the opportunity to rehearse and fine-tune their question so that it will be shorter and clearer when they ask you.

8. Answer questions clearly and succinctly

If you answer every question with a long-winded and incoherent ramble, people are going to be reluctant to ask you another one. They’ll conclude they’re unlikely to get a useful answer from you. Nor do they want to subject the rest of the audience to another ramble.

More resources on other blogs

Five ways to make presentations Q&A friendly from Joey Asher at Talking Points. He also recommends validating every question:

Smiling at the questioner is like rewarding a dog for sitting on command.  Once rewarded, the chances are the audience will ask more.

John Windsor has a useful post Making the most of a Q&A session. He stresses anticipating the questions that might be asked. And also advises that you recap and conclude your presentation after the Q&A session. That provides a stronger ending to your presentation than just lettting questions peter out.

Andrew Dlugan discusses Leading the perfect Q&A. This covers all elements of the Q&A session from both the audience’s point of view and the presenters.

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6 Major Distractions to Eliminate in your Presentation #2

Yesterday I talked about 4 environmental distractions which cause people to stop focusing on your presentation.

But it’s also easy to distract your audience by what you say (or don’t say) and by what you show on your PowerPoint slides.

5. What you say (and don’t say)

This is the major cause of people starting to think about something other than what you’re saying. That’s because they’re busy thinking about what you just said. Here’s a whole lot of things that might take them off track:

• You’ve used jargon or an acronym that they don’t understand - so they’re busy trying to figure out what it means. Meanwhile they’re not listening to you. It’s Ok to use jargon, as long as you explain it - it only takes a few seconds. When we get people on our in-house courses to explain jargon, a colleague (who the presenter assumed would understand) will often pipe up and say “Thank you - I never knew what that meant.”
• Your explanation of a concept is confusing. While you’re moving onto the next point, they’ll still be trying to understand it. If the rest of your presentation is dependent on an understanding of that concept, they’ll tune out altogether. So take your time with explanations - and use presentation techniques such as metaphors, analogies and explanatory visuals to help.
• You’ve told a story but it doesn’t obviously relate to your presentation. Some members of the audience will start trying to guess the relationship. It doesn’t matter how great the story is - if it’s not relevant, it doesn’t belong in this presentation. If you’re telling a longer story where the relevancy is not immediately apparent - but will be by the end of the story - let your audience know so that they can sit back and enjoy the story.
• There’s no structure to your presentation or the structure of your presentation is not apparent to your audience. People like to have a feel for the flow of your presentation. If the flow of your presentation appears random - you’ll lose them as they try to figure out where you’re going with this.

6. Your PowerPoint slides

There’s lots of catalysts for off-track thinking when you add visuals to a presentation. (And that’s on the assumption that you long ago ditched the bullets. Still using bullets? Check out our page on PowerPoint and other resources such as Presentation Zen.) Research in e-learning has shown that any extraneous element - pictures, graphics or sound - reduces learning (Multimedia Learning, E-learning and the Science of Instruction).

• Reduce visual clutter on the slide. Yes, that includes your corporate logo. If you have to include it, have it on the first slide and the last slide. Tell your Communications Department that the audience will remember it better that way due to the Primacy and Recency effects.
• Ensure that the colours that you’re using as background and text have sufficient contrast so that people can easily read the text. Test this with a datashow projector because colours can appear quite different when they’re projected compared to your computer screen.
• It’s not enough to use great images - the images must relate to the point you’re making. If the image is a metaphor for what you’re saying, explain the metaphor. Otherwise, when you click onto the next slide, your audience will be stuck thinking about the last one.
• Similarly, video clips which are related to your presentation topic, but don’t actually help make your point, will distract people from your main points. In an e-learning research study (Mayer, Heiser and Lonn, 2001), students watched a short narrated animation on lightning formation. For some students the animation contained six ten-second video clips on the effects of lightning. The video clips were related but didn’t help to explain the formation of lightning. Students who didn’t see the  video clips performed much better in subsequent testing ( page 122-3, E-learning and the Science of Instruction, sorry - I tried to find an online reference).
• Use animation and sound with discretion. Some of these come into the category of hot buttons - they can be maddenly annoying if used indiscriminately. But animation which allows the audience to focus on the right elements of a visual or shows movement relevant to your visual explanation are helpful.
• John Windsor of the YouBlog has a number of useful posts on distracting visuals:
  What stories do your graphics tell?
  Let’s talk about transitions
  One thing at a time

It’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming that just because you’ve said it, your audience will get it. As we’ve seen there are many ways that you can cause your audience to get distracted and stop focusing on your presentation. Don’t give your audience cause to think of anything other than what you’re saying.

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6 Major Distractions to Eliminate in your Presentations

We tend to assume that if we say something in our presentations, people will get it. As if it was a direct brain-to-brain transfer of information.

In the courses that we run, we give a short presentation, and then ask the course participants to complete an exercise based on what we’ve said. When we first started out, we often found that as soon as we got participants started on the exercise, somebody would say “What am I supposed to do here?” We’d said it, but the participant hadn’t got it. We’ve got good at ensuring that participants get it by eliminating distractions.

The human brain is great at getting distracted. We work hard to stay focused but stray thoughts are coming into our minds all the time. This will happen despite your best efforts as a presenter - but you can help reduce the stray thoughts by eliminating distractions. Distractions are anything that cause a person in your audience to think about something different than what you are saying at that moment.

There are two causes of distractions:

1. environmental distractions, and
2. what you say and what you show.

I’ll cover environmental distractions in this post, and “What you say and what you show” in Part 2 tomorrow.

Environmental distractions

1. Physical comfort

It’s very hard to focus on a speaker when you’re not physically comfortable. Here are some things to check:

• Room at the right temperature - not too cold, not too hot.
• Frequent toilet breaks - you can’t concentrate with a full bladder (if you’re presenting after a refreshment break, I wouldn’t go longer than half-an-hour before offering a micro-break).
• Lighting - check that nobody is suffering from sun in their eyes.
• Hunger - if you’re hungry you start focusing on when lunch is going to be. Let your audience know so that they can relax knowing that food will be available soon. Don’t keep going past the time of the scheduled lunch break or tea break - people won’t be listening to you anyway!

2. Hot buttons

Some people get annoyed by little things and then they fixate on them. And stop listening to you.

• A repetitive phrase - there’s a presenter on Radio New Zealand who constantly uses the phrase “if you like” when she’s interviewing people. If I don’t make an effort to focus on the substance of the discussion, I’m distracted by that phrase. A common issue is to say “OK” at the end of a sentence. You may not be aware that you have a repetitive phrase so ask an honest but compassionate friend to let you know - or video yourself. Bert Decker has a post on using video feedback to change verbal habits.
• A repetitive gesture. For example, some men (it does just seem to be men) have a “policeman’s hop” - they rock backwards and forwards on their heels. Again call on that friend or the video to become aware of these.
• Anything jangling as you move - keys, coins in pockets, jangly earrings or necklaces. If you’re wearing a lapel microphone, remove any necklaces so that they don’t bang into it.
• And a different kind of hot button - women - if you look  toooo good, the men in the audience will get distracted.

3. Can they see?

Can every member of the audience see you and your slides clearly from their seat. Check out this post on seating from Tom Antion. Here are the most important points to look out for:

• Are you getting into the beam of the datashow projector? Not only will some people in the audience not be able to see the slide, but some will start daydreaming about the various shape shadows you’re making. Before the start of your presentation, stick some duct tape down to remind you of where not to step to avoid going into the beam.
• Are you physically getting in the way of the audience and the screen? This is a perennial problem. If the screen is in the middle of the room - it means you have to stand off to the side and you become more of a projectionist than a presenter. My recommendation is to place the screen slightly off-centre so that you can stay nearer the centre more of the time. We request a portable datashow screen so that we can decide where it should go. You may still have to check that everyone can see. If you see a person in the audience ducking and weaving that means they’re probably trying to find a way of seeing the slides. While they’re doing that they’re not listening to you.

4. People in the audience

Other people in the audience can be doing things which distract others - cellphones ringing, whispering to person next door, doodling, texting, dozing off. There’s a delicate judgement to be made here about when to intervene. Intervene too soon, and the whole of your audience may perceive you as coming down too hard, but leave it too long and you may be seen as lacking leadership.

I posted on how to handle these issues in my post Audience Management - Don’t copy your Teacher. But I don’t do anything about doodling. It doesn’t tend to distract anyone else. And some people listen better when they’re doodling - so leave them to it. (I’ve had doodlers come up to me afterwards, thanking me profusely for letting them doodle without drawing attention to it).

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll cover the distractions that can arise from what you say and what you show.

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How to manage unruly question time

A while ago I posted about various ways to manage hostile Q&A sessions.

There was one powerful technique that I missed out.

Ask each questioner to state their name before they ask their question or make a comment. They’re likely to behave better.

This technique was inspired by research on the way people behave when there are mirrors around. I haven’t been able to find a link to the original research but here’s a quote from a New York Times article:

Subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in nonmirrored settings.

Reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, C. Neil Macrae, Galen V. Bodenhausen and Alan B. Milne found that people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion.

“When people are made to be self-aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they are doing,” Dr. Bodenhausen said. “A byproduct of that awareness may be a shift away from acting on autopilot toward more desirable ways of behaving.”

In Yes: 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion Robert Cialdini and his colleagues report on research which shows that asking people their name can have the same effect.

Anonymity allows people to behave in ways that are socially disapproved of - and get away with it. If you ask people to state their name before they ask a question or make a comment during a public consultation meeting they are no longer anonymous. They become personally accountable for the way they behave in their interaction with you. It makes sense then, that they are likely to behave better.

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Three steps to take before you answer the question

From the earliest age we’re trained to answer questions - and as quickly as possible. But in many presenting situations, it’s not the best thing. We work with many organisations who are involved in community consultation. They may be presenting proposals for new projects that the community don’t want (for example, a new road or windfarm) or suggesting changes to a much-loved city square. That means presenting to highly-charged public meetings and handling emotional Q&A sessions.

In handling emotionally-charged questions, don’t rush to answer. Instead follow the Question Cycle. This is adapted from Jerry Weissman’s book In the line of Fire. It’s an excellent book on handling Q&A, but most of his examples come from IPO presentations (when companies present to potential investors prior to launching on the stock exchange) and presidential campaign debates. His methodology requires a little adaptation for dealing with the more emotional situations of community consultation.

Here’s my adaptation of the Question Cycle:

So before you answer, take these three steps:

1. Listen effectively

Listen for both the substantive content of the question and any emotional concern. For example, the question below involves both the issue of birdstrike and emotional concern about birds dying.

2. Acknowledge the emotional concern

If the questioner is very emotional on the topic they won’t be able to listen fully to the substantive answer. Acknowledging the level of their concern will help them to  focus on your answer. And this should not be just a cliched “I understand how you feel.” Acknowledging their concern has two parts:

a) Naming their emotion eg: concerned, worried, unhappy, frustrated, and
b) Being specific about their concern.

For example: “I get that you’re concerned about birds being killed.”

Now that you’ve acknowledged the questioner’s emotional concern, you’re ready to move to the next step.

3. Restate the issue in a neutral manner

The purpose of restating the issue is to strip the original question of any emotional and sensational language whilst  keeping the focus on the key issue. This rephrasing has several benefits:

• It shows you’ve listened
• It sets you up to answer the question in a calm and reasonable way - as opposed to being defensive or aggressive.
• It gives you thinking time
• It may well trigger the answer for you.

Compare the responses below. On either side the response involves immediately answering the question - which has the answerer either come across as admitting guilt or being defensive:

The middle option has you stay calm and in control and sets you up to give a rational and reasoned answer.

When you were acknowledging the questioner’s emotional concern, you responded directly to that person. When you’re restating the issue, return to addressing the whole audience.

And you’re now ready to give your susbtantive answer in a calm and rational manner. So don’t rush to answer highly-charged questions. Follow these steps to remain calm and in control.

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Audience management - Don’t copy your teacher

The No 1 mistake people make managing difficult audience situations is to use sarcasm, put-downs and humiliation. They were the weapons of choice of the previous generation of teachers. And for most of us that’s the only model we have for how to handle difficult audience situations.

How does this show up?

The classic is when people are talking, many presenters’ instinctive response is to say “Would you like to share with the rest of the group?” A moment’s thought will reveal that this isn’t appropriate when dealing with adults.

Or if a person is falling asleep, some presenters will put them on the spot by firing a question at them.

Using the classroom model as a guide on how to handle an audience can result in the presenter being perceived as patronising and condescending or at worst humiliating a person in the audience. That can backfire on you - because the audience is likely to feel empathy for that person and become resistant to you.

Dealing with people in the audience should be no different to the way that you might deal with someone when you’re in a one-on-one or one-on-two conversation. The guiding principle is  “Treat people with respect.”

Let’s take the situation where a side conversation starts up. The most common reason for side conversations is when somebody missed what you just said - or didn’t understand it. They don’t want to miss out so they check it out with the person next to them. You probably do the same when you’re watching TV and miss something.  So in most cases, simply ignore side conversations. If they carry on for longer than a minute or so, pause …

…the people talking will hear the silence - and will return their focus to you.

If somebody is falling asleep, realise that there may be many reasons for this. They may have a new baby in the house and been up half the night. As long as its not disturbing anyone else, it’s no big deal. But if several people are looking dozy, take responsibility. Call a short break for a stretch.

There’s no need for humiliation or sarcasm. Treat people with respect and they will respect you back.

 

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How to handle a difficult audience #2

In my last post, I discussed what you could do to set yourself up as the leader at the beginning of a controversial presentation.

There’s a second thing that you can do at the beginning of a presentation to reduce the likelihood of audience members getting upset and annoyed. Acknowledge the issue that people are concerned about upfront. Barack Obama did this with elegance and a touch of humour at a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last week:

Before I begin, I want to say that I know some provocative e-mails have been circulating throughout Jewish communities across the country. A few of you may have gotten them. They’re filled with tall tales and dire warnings about a certain candidate for President. And all I want to say is, Let me know if you see this guy named Barack Obama, because he sounds pretty frightening.

You may be concerned about revealing a weakness to a potentially hostile audience. But so long as it’s not a major weakness it may increase your credibility in the eyes of the audience. A study of juror behaviour reported in the book Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive showed that when a lawyer revealed a minor weakness in their case before it was revealed by the opposing lawyer, the jury would trust them more and they would receive more favourable verdicts. So be upfront, acknowledge valid concerns that your audience may have. You’ll reduce the likelihood that the meeting will get out of hand.

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How to handle a difficult audience

We work with many public sector agencies who are often in the firing line in meetings with the public. Knowing how to handle concerned and angry people in the audience is an important skill.

Remember back to your school days. You can probably remember a teacher who you and your fellow students respected. There was no way that you would play up in their class. There was probably also a teacher who you knew you could run rings around (or if you weren’t that sort of child - your classmates could).

You want to be like the former - teachers who were instantly respected and seen as leaders. So set yourself up as the leader from the first moment of the presentation. Here’s how you can do this:

Establish ground rules

Choose just one or two issues to set ground rules about. Here are two possibilities:

1. Cellphone use - ask people turn their cellphones off
2. Questions - let the audience know when you will be taking questions.

But note that the exact issues that you choose to set ground rules about are not important. The important thing is that you have set some clear rules about how the meeting will run. This lets the audience know that you are in charge and that you know what you’re doing. You will have set yourself up as the leader and as a result they will be less likely to challenge you.

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