No one likes being talked “at”. Most people like being talked “to”.
Even if you, as the speaker, do all the speaking, your audience should be in an interactive relationship with you.
They might not actually speak – but they should feel like it’s a conversation.
As they say, if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made… and if you can have a conversation with people who are just listening, you’ve like-wise cracked it. So the question is how you do this.
Questions – yes, yes, okay, that’s obvious, right? Of course it is. Except that about half the people in the world hate being asked questions and would rather keep quiet. The trick therefore lies in the way you ask the questions. What we do is ask simple yes/no questions, particularly at the beginning of presentations and gesture with our hands, indicating that the audience can ‘vote’. People who are happy to/like being seen to give information away about themselves can therefore wave their arms in the air. On the other hand, people (like me) who prefer to be a bit more ‘private’ can gesture in a much more subtle way – in a way that’s seen the presenter but not so much by fellow members of the audience…
Once you’ve broken the ice like that you can get into gradually more complicated questions and ultimately into ‘open’ questions.
This isn’t a definitive list, but from experience, the order we use questions tends to be something like this:
- rhetorical and silent – that is, asked in such a way that replies can be in the audience’s heads
- rhetorical and responsive – with nods, or a show of hands etc
- obvious – in other words, where the audience can’t possibly get it wrongs (“Two and two make…..?”
- structured but a bit more complex – a crude example might be for a show of hands for how they got to the presentation: by bus, walking, in a car, public transport, Star Trek transporter
- open – the final option. Things like “Does anyone have any suggestions about how we can…?”
Don’t take this too literally, but it’s a very handy structure. How about you – how do you get away from talking ‘to’ your audience towards talking ‘with’?
