Sorry to all who’ve tried to read this blog over the last few days. Some joker thought it would be funny to attack our ISP and consequently they shut down all the websites they host for three days. Hope you feel big, fellas.
One of the things we’ve been doing while the site was down is working on a community opera, with a mixed (but mainly amateur) cast… more fun than any job has a right to be. One of the things we taught them in this project was a few basic improvisation tools – the main 
one being accept, return and build: as we worked on it, it struck me how useful it was as a tool for improvised sections of presentations such as the question and answer session or when you realise you need to go ‘off script’ to deal with some particular need of your audience. It works like this…
Accept: this is the basic and most simple of stages. If someone gives you the gift of a question or point of information, simply accept it (If you don’t agree with it, accept it provisionally by saying something like “assuming for a minute that…”). Work with it.
Suppose someone asks you a question such as “What do I do if…”. There’s no point in replying, no matter how rightly, “Well that won’t happen so don’t worry about it”. The obviously are worried about it. Accept that and deal with it directly. By all means reassure them (and the rest of the audience, that the alien invasion during a presentation (or whatever!) isn’t likely, but don’t just fob the questioner off by suggesting it won’t happen at all so they don’t need to worry!
Build: give the questioner an answer – but don’t stop there. Generalise the issue so that it’s relevant to a lot more people in the audience. If the question is about an alien invasion deal with that first and then go on to say something about zombie invasions or attacks by giant ants…
Generalising to a wider context makes the rest of the audience feel more included. I’m constantly amazed at how much people take what’s being said as very specific and don’t really try to (or see how to) make it apply to their circumstances: help them.
Return: give the ‘onus of control’ back to the questioner, or to the rest of the audience. This continues the flow of the presentation. The most simple way of doing that is to say something like “Does that answer your question?” or perhaps more generally “Does anyone else find that they have a similar problem?” The idea is to use what you are talking about now to move the conversation on. If you don’t move a little way forward you’ll risk going around in circles, giving the audience a limited experience of your skills and not helping them with enough content. On the other hand, just starting something else is too much of a non sequitur and you’ll confuse people. The trick therefore is to use where you are as the starting point to talk about something else. By moving from the specific to the general you very much encourage this to happen.
Before anyone says anything – yes, I know, I’ve taken liberties with the tool, but I’m sure you’ll forgive me.
