Episodes

  • Presenting During The Time Of Cancel Culture

    Presenting During The Time Of Cancel Culture
    Jun 2 2025
    “That has to come out”. “Why?”. “It might offend women in the audience”. “But this example is totally in context with what I am saying”. And so it went on. This was my first bruising encounter with cancel culture. Living in Japan this third time since 1992, I have been outside the cancel culture debates sweeping America. Until now. The speech I was going to give would be videoed and go global, including to America. Perplexed, confused, insulted – these were the emotions I was confronting upon hearing I had to make that specific change to my speech. It got me wondering about our ability as presenters to present our thoughts in public. What does this mean for the future of public speaking? Living in Japan, I had vaguely heard of cancel culture. I understood it to be mainly centred on Universities where students were confronting their Professor’s ideas and comments they disagreed with. I had read in the media about youthful tweets and social media postings coming back to haunt the authors many years later. I cannot say I ever expected to be cancelled. The offending item was an image objectifying women in Japan. A photo of a maid café young lady done up in a frilly miniskirt in fact. At her request, I took my anime besotted teenage daughter to visit a maid café in Akihabara when she was visiting from Australia a number of years ago. The image in the photo corresponded with the outfits I saw being worn by the staff, so the image in question was congruent with the maid café experience. That is to say it reflected a reality, a truth, we can see any day of the week in Akihabara. Apparently, such a confronting picture would be too much for women located outside Japan and in particular those living in the USA. The speech topic was on Diversity and Inclusion in Japan. The main issue here is gender inequality, although sexual orientation has become more prominent lately. The context of this speech was that the comment by ex- Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori about women on boards talking too much, can be traced back to the Confucian idea of a woman’s place in society being there to serve men, throughout all stages of their lives. The maid café photograph was an example of how these women are being objectified to serve male fantasies in the modern era and therefore, there is still a long way to go for women in business to achieve gender equity here in Japan. The photograph was totally in context with the text and was not supporting the objectification of women, in fact the precise opposite. So, being told it had to be removed was incomprehensible to me. I argued about the photograph being in the context of the text and that the central argument I was making made it all congruent. This next pushback was the snapper for me: “Women seeing the photo alone would be offended. There was the danger they would not pick up on what you were saying in the video and may misinterpret your meaning”. “Wait a moment. You are saying they are not smart enough, intelligent enough to discern the context of what I am saying and therefore the photograph and that paragraph have to be cut?”. That struck me as being totally chauvinistic and condescending to women. By now you will have worked out I was having this conversation with another man. He reported back to me that he had discussed it with some female leaders in that organisation and the consensus was that I couldn’t include it. Here is the dilemma we have to face – do we agree with this cancel culture putsch or do we stand our ground. I felt this was a matter of free speech, free expression and I really struggled with whether I should buckle under this request for removal pressure or should I fight. If I remove it, unintelligent people win. If I refuse to go ahead and recuse myself on the basis of the principle of free speech, unintelligent people win. If I fight, then I create powerful enemies and get bogged down in the cancel culture wars. Where is the line regarding what is acceptable and what is not? Who is the arbiter of the line location? How do we deal with committees making these decisions? Are they representative of the masses or are they wannabe oligarchs calling the shots? I removed it. But I have felt very uneasy about that decision ever since. I have so many thoughts flying around in my brain about this cancel culture issue and I cannot get them to fly in formation as yet. This was an eye opener for me. I often make the point that we speakers and presenters live in the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism. It would appear we are also living in the Epoch of Cancel Culture. What do we do? Pick our fights? Assemble the barricades on principle on every occasion? Fight or fold? I folded, but I regretted it. What about you? When the cancel culture brown shirts turn up, what is your plan? “What is that you say, no plan”. ...
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    12 mins
  • Gold Medal Winning Mistakes When Presenting

    Gold Medal Winning Mistakes When Presenting
    May 26 2025
    Our event speaker was a well-coiffed and well appointed senior executive in one of the world’s biggest corporations. The topic was on building your personal brand. A good crowd had turned out to pick up some pointers. Anticipation gradually turned to disappointment though, as the talk unfolded. The slant taken was how to project your brand “within” this gargantuan monster. How to climb their thousand foot high greasy pole. As with other luncheon speaker events, you had a chance to meet people beforehand and then engage with your table mates over the meal. I reflected that I had “worked the room” pretty thoroughly, combing the ranks of the assembled professionals for any potential clients. I noted that none of them worked for a mega beast even close to the size of this colossus, so the speaker’s sage advice didn’t quite hit the mark. How could that be, I thought to myself? Who Is In The Room? One of the big mistakes for a presenter is not understanding who is going to be in the room. At what level should you pitch your content? Are they experts, amateurs, dilettantes? These days it may be hard to get the full list of who is coming, because of privacy concerns, but usually you can at least get the company name and their positions. If our speaker had done that, then hopefully the speech may have taken a different direction and would have become more relevant to those who took the trouble to attend. Our Purpose Is? We need to make a decision about what is the purpose of our talk. Are we here to inform, entertain, inspire or persuade? Responding to the organisers request for a talk on a certain topic doesn’t determine the purpose. We are given the overall theme and analysing our audience, we know now what angle we should select. In this previous case, it would have been to “inform” and in that sense the speaker got it right. The relevancy bit was completely missing though, but at least the purpose was correct. An inspire speech will be totally different to a persuade or entertain speech. Think back to the presentations you have attended. Could you recognise the event speaker’s approach or was it just a jumble, a catch all effort? I am putting my money on “jumble”. First Three Seconds We have three seconds to grab our audiences’ attention and create a positive first impression. It has to be powerful enough that they don’t seize their phones and escape from us to the siren calls of the internet. Why three seconds? Over the last five years I have been asking participants in our presentation classes, how long does it take you to form a first impression of someone new. The answers used to range from five minutes to thirty minutes. When I ask that same question today, they tell me three seconds, five seconds, fifteen seconds. It is shocking how little time we actually have, so our opening has to be well planned and well executed or we will have lost the room. The Age of Distraction and The Era of Cynicism. Audiences are quick to judge, slow to trust and fast to flee from our presentation. We need to have a blockbuster opening. Something that will stop them in their tracks. However, what do we see presenters doing with those first few vital moments? They are not actively engaging their audience because they are head down, hunched over their laptop, fumbling with their slide deck to get it up on screen. They are doing other amateur things like pounding the microphone asking “can you hear me down the back?” At the next presentation you attend, count the number of first impression killers the presenter is exhibiting. Have they managed to capture your total attention from the very first few seconds or are you reaching for your phone? How To Begin Rules number one and two of presenting are rehearse before you give the talk and never practice on your audience. Rehearsal is such an obvious point, but it almost never happens with business presenters. This one thing will change everything about how the talk is received and how you will be perceived. Get there early and check all the equipment. No microphone thumping please! Also have someone else load your slide deck for you, if it can’t be primed ready to go. We need to be 100% present with our audience, so reduce all friction impeding that result. Begin by picking out someone in your audience half way back and around the middle of the venue. Make direct eye contact with that person and for the next six seconds speak to them, as if you were the only two people in the room. Then at random, move to the next person and just keep repeating this six second process for the entire presentation. Why six seconds? Anything less and it doesn’t give you enough time to engage that person one on one. However, continuously staring at someone burns into their retina and becomes too intrusive. We want to directly engage as many people as possible in the time we have, so our ...
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    14 mins
  • Ineffective Persuasion Techniques For Presenters

    Ineffective Persuasion Techniques For Presenters
    May 19 2025
    This is horrible. Man, this is so bad, what were they thinking? I am watching a video of a leader asking for some major changes to the organisation’s finances and he is doing a woeful job of it. They have a dedicated Coms team, there are talented people in the leadership group, so I am asking myself how could this train wreck come to pass? I was also thinking, “you should have called me, I could have saved you a lot of wasted opportunity with your messaging”. Too late now, the video is out there for all to ignore. This is a classic case of people who don’t spend any time appreciating the importance of communication and presentation skills, suddenly going for the big ask and then falling flat on their face. It was serious subject, a heavy subject and the background chosen for the video was given zero thought. When you are asking for a truckload of dough for a project, you want the background oozing with solid credibility. You need to look Presidential, capable, considered and trustworthy. That lightweight scene setting wasn’t given much thought but the talking head only occupies a small part of the screen. Having people moving around in the background distracts us from the key message. No one thought about that either. They should have told those people to buzz off for ten minutes, so the video could get done. The camera saps twenty percent of our energy. If you are a low energy leader, you can come across as cadaverous. You need to ramp up the speaking power. If the message requires convincing people about spending more money, then you really need to amp it up, to come across as confident, considered and competent. The body language, gestures and voice modulation need to be on point. Hitting key words is a must, as are carefully thought through pauses. We need these to allow the audience to absorb what we have just said. Rolling thoughts over the top of each other leaves the viewers lost. The camera is also unforgiving. If you can’t hold its gaze, then you look like a shifty Souk merchant trying to sell us some dodgy, dud stuff. You have to look straight into the camera barrel and keep looking at it the whole time. You don’t want to be sitting too close to the camera when you are doing this though. A massive close up of your dial isn’t going to work for most people, so better to back up a bit. It also allows for gestures to be used and more importantly, to be seen. Looking away, looking down and looking at your notes are a no no. If it is an important occasion, a key topic, the big ask, then do what the world’s leaders have learnt – use the teleprompter. You need to refine the script and then read it, word perfect, while looking straight into the camera lens the whole time. This takes some practice, some effort in the preparation, rather than just pulling up a chair and free styling in front of the camera for a “once over lightly” approach to a serious subject. I will never forget a gorgeous young American woman I saw on YouTube. She was the complete package. She was teaching people how to use the teleprompter. However her eyes were obviously reading across the screen left to right following the text. You don’t want that. You need to be able to zero in on the lens and read the text at the same time. That takes some time to get right. You also have to play around with the teleprompter speed setting as well, to find the right cadence for your talk. There were no gripping stories to give us hope. Just a dry rendition of what he wanted to tell us. The visuals were not clever. Cherry picking the minimum damage case smacks of the carnival barker and snake oil salesman. Show us the real numbers, so there is more honesty about the proposition here for us to consider. He was trying to be too clever by half and failing miserably. Our errant, non-persuading persuader really murdered the message. Once it is done, it is out there. His personal and professional brands both took a massive hit thanks to that video. His messaging missed the mark and I doubt people will be persuaded to join him on his programme. I am not super opposed to his offering, I get it, but I am vaguely insulted by the lack of professionalism. If he can't get this right, how can I expect he can get anything else right. It is the remaining coffee stain on the pull down tray in the aircraft when you board, that gets you worrying about whether they can actually do a professional job on engine maintenance if they can’t get this simple thing right, why should I trust them with complex things? There is no excuse for this exercise in bungled communications. In this day and age there is so much information available on presenting skills, it is staggering. For example, in my own case, I have broadcast over four hundred pieces on the subject, for free, over the last years. Don’t allow yourself to become part of the casualty ward of ...
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    13 mins
  • When To Fake It When Presenting

    When To Fake It When Presenting
    May 12 2025

    It makes sense to be authentic when presenting, because this is the easiest state to maintain. As someone wise once noted, “if you are going to be a liar you need a stupendous memory to keep up with who you told what”. Presenting is something similar. Maintaining a fiction in front of an audience takes a lot of skill. In fact, if you have that much skill, why worry about faking it in the first place? Well, there is a place for fakery when presenting, but we need to know when is appropriate.

    We know that the way we think about things influences how we well we do. Imposter syndrome is a common state of mind though amongst people, across a broad range of situations. You might write a blog and put it up on your website, or waffle away on Clubhouse or pontificate to an audience, live or online. But who are you to talk about this subject? Are you saying anything worthwhile or just regurgitating what far cleverer people have already said? Do you really know this subject? Is your experience valuable or even relevant to others? Are you really qualified to give advice to people running far bigger organisations that your own?

    Looking over that list, it can be enough to scare you off emerging from the deep depths of your comfy comfort zone ever again. So, we have to create a positive mindset that “yes”, we have every right to address this subject area, even if we feel a fake when compared to other more famous or clever people. The funny thing is they suffer the same imposter syndrome too, relative to their illustrious peers. Academics, for example, are generally a put upon group, because they have to publish their research to get ahead in their careers. When they publish it, they are now exposing the weaknesses of their intellectual process, their inadequate research ability or their dubious writing skills, to the entire expert community in their area of defined speciality.

    Confidence warrants confidence. If we sound and look confident, most people are likely to ignore the emperor has no clothes and is not perfect. They will be carried away with our enthusiasm for our subject, with our passionate belief in our findings and our commitment to share the knowledge. The problems crop up when we become nervous speaking in front of others. Normally, we are quite even keeled and confident, but with all of those beady sets of eyes drilling holes into us, we start to wobble. Suddenly, our imposter syndrome fears come flooding forth and soon our usual cool, calm, collected façade is torn to shreds, as we are exposed as a self doubting, insecure, fake.

    Now how would the audience know we are a fake? Well, we very helpfully tell them, by saying daft things like, “I am rather nervous today”. Or “I am not very good at presenting”. Or “I didn’t have much time to put this presentation together and I am afraid it won’t be very good” and any other of the motley collection of dubious, sympathy seeking, self-serving, cop out proclamations. Do us all a favour and keep all of this imposter syndrome stuff to yourself. Here is a secret - we all want you to succeed.

    If you are nervous presenting then fake it, such that you appear at least “normal”, rather than being reduced to a quivering tower of jelly on stage. If your knees are knocking from the nerves, then stand behind the podium until you feel more comfortable to walk around. If your hands are shaking and you have to hold a microphone, use both hands and draw it on to your chest, so that your body secures the erratically jiggling instrument. If your throat is parched, then have warm, room temperature rather than iced water, close by and drink it when you need it. The iced water constricts your throat and you don’t want that, so forgo the usual venue offered beverage and request the no ice alternative. If you begin to speak and instead of a mellifluent note, out pops a constrained, awkward, embarrassing squeak, then clear your throat and try again. If you stumble on the pronunciation of a word, try again. If you get the speech points order mixed up or miss one, then fake it and keep going, offering not a hint of anything untoward occurring.

    If you act enthusiastically, you will become enthusiastic. If you act confidently, you will become confident. Yes you might be nervous, but as Winston Churchill said, “if you are going through hell, keep going”. That is the point. No matter what happens, the show must go on and that means you must keep going. If it is a disaster, then dust yourself off and climb back in saddle. As the Japanese saying goes, nana korobi ya oki (七転び八起き) - “fall down seven times, get up eight times”.
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    12 mins
  • When Using Storytelling In Business Don’t Lead With Your Insights

    When Using Storytelling In Business Don’t Lead With Your Insights
    May 5 2025
    When I read this quote from Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon from 1971 that “ a wealth of information would create a poverty of attention” I thought about its ramifications for presenters. Today, we are firmly swimming against a King tide of information overload, so Simon’s dystopian prophecy has come to fruition. This is the Age of Distraction for audiences. They are gold medal winning poor listeners and yet we have to present to them. We know that storytelling is one sure fire way to snaffle their attention and yet that path is littered with landmines. Very few business presenters tell stories at all in their talks. They are enamoured with their high quality content. Which usually means the results of surveys, research or data collation. Data is rarely strong enough to linger long in our memories. This is because usually there is a ton of data, each morsel, each three decimal tidbit vanquishing the one before and so on and so on, until we recall nothing, as Simon predicted. Business presenters imagining their data is enough are fooling themselves, because their messages are not breaking through that wall of distraction and that poverty of attention. For the few who do tell stories they are freelancing, going free style with no structure. They just relate what happened. What is the point of the story? Is the delivery getting the key messages in front of the audience in a way that they will remember it? Are the listeners seeing any relevance for themselves in this story? Where do we start with the story? Do we get straight to the point, do we go to the key take away? “Hey, get to the point”. We often hear this from bosses and we mistakenly follow that direction with our storytelling. Why is it a mistake? We have to grasp the fundamental difference between writing a report, where we start with the conclusion we have reached from our analysis, otherwise known as the “Executive Summary” and giving an oral presentation. When we launch forth with our recommendation, we open up the flood gates of rampant critique. Many who are listening start thinking that we are wrong, have misfired with our analytical findings and have failed to account for important alternate considerations. Why do they react like that? We have put forth our main point completely naked and unprotected, so that is all they have to go on. In the sequence, our explanation of how we came to this conclusion follows next. Critically, the critics are not really listening now because they are consumed by what they think is wrong with it, so the justification portion gets lost for them. We should instead begin with our context, the background which has informed our conclusion, based on the data and experiences we analysed. We need to populate this context with people they know, places they can see in their mind’s eye and lodge it in a temporal frame which the audience can process. The genius of this approach is that while sitting there listening to us warble on, the audience are racing ahead and reaching their own conclusions about the insights to be gained from this context. Given a certain set of circumstances, there are a limited number of conclusions to be drawn and the chances are very high, that they will have reached the same one you did. When you announce it, the listeners mentally say to themselves “that’s right”. Bingo! Now instead of facing an audience of doubters, one uppers and thrusters, you are dealing with fans of your work. The key is to make the insight download very concise. When we teach this formula, invariably people want to jumble a number of insights together and run through them. Each additional insight dilutes the power of the one before it and so on. It is critical to select the strongest, best insight and only pull the velvet curtain back to reveal that one. The final step is to take the context and the insight and then package it up and place it on a silver tray for the audience to take home with them, when we outline the relevance to them. Although we have produced an insight, it is an inert outcome. What does that insight do for us, how can we use it, where will this be valuable for us, when can we apply it? When we receive the insight wisdom with that relevancy formula attached, it makes sense. We feel attending the speaker’s presentation today was time well spent. We got something worthwhile which will help us navigate the future that little bit better and more easily. Again, this has to be done very concisely, for the same reasons discussed about explaining the insight. So the formula is context, insight and then explain the relevance. If we mix it up we are making things hard for ourselves, so resist any calls to get to the point, by being forced to put up the insight like a sacrificial lamb about to be slaughtered. Hold it in reserve until the scene has been set. Sherlock Holmes and Poirot, great fictional ...
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    11 mins
  • Presenting When Your Organisation’s Leaders are Struggling

    Presenting When Your Organisation’s Leaders are Struggling
    Apr 28 2025
    The largest meeting venue in the office complex was big enough to handle hundreds of people and it was packed. This presentation involved all the senior heads of the Department going through their strategies for the coming year. One after another, we took to the stage and spoke about our areas of responsibility. I was one of the five who spoke. My turn came after a particular colleague who was a numbers wiz, a brainy technical expert. He didn't like the way I presented. He went around telling other colleagues I was all style and no substance. I just laughed when I heard that flat earth comment. Over the years. I have heard versions of the same idea. These comments weren't necessarily being directed at me as a put down by a sharp elbowed thrusting colleague, but toward the activity of presenting in general. There's a fundamental misunderstanding of presenting in play here. Of course, the material has to be high quality, valuable, and insightful. That is a given. If you don't have that basic requirement covered then what on earth are you doing presenting at all? Instead, you should be sitting in the audience, listening to people who know what they're talking about and be kept away from the dais. My evil colleague at the all team presentation was reacting to the flagrant contrast of his pathetic presentation skills on stage with mine. There was nothing wrong with my content, my substance, because I was representing the Department and so the materials were reflecting the results gained and the plans for the next year. What he didn't like was being upstaged by someone who could command the room, engage the audience and deliver clear messages in a professional way. Nothing he could ever be accused of, so he went for the personal down to assuage his own inadequacies and perceived loss of face. As we climb the ladder of our career growth, we will be placed in situations where we have to represent our team or company and make professional presentations. It is almost inescapable. If we cannot even grasp the importance of mastering the nitoryu（二刀流） or two sword method of going into business battle with both high quality content and high quality delivery, then we wouldn't be moving very far up the totem pole within our organizations. I was coaching a senior executive in a multi-national organization. Recently when I asked for the three most important things to be gained from the one-on-one training, the first mentioned was quality content. Uh oh! I had an alarm bell go off in my head because quality content has to be a given. I asked to see the slides to be used for the presentation to the big boss. Uh oh! On the first slide there was lots of content. In fact, a veritable forest of content hiding all the key messages. The other slides were all the same, overwhelming amounts of visual stimulation diluting the points which we were meant to absorb. I suggested that each of these slides be broken up and the same information be spread over three slides. If there was a need to show, a build or a contrast, then only show the left slide of the slide at first. Then grey that information out and bring up the middle of the slide and so forth and so on. In this way, we funnel our audiences’ attention to just the section we want to highlight and cut down the distraction. This executive was open to the advice and actually told me what I was looking at was the “slimmed down version of the deck.” My mind boggled, wondering what the original looked like. While my mind was under assault from this revelation, another bomb was dropped. Today, all of their presentations are being done online. Okay, fine, however, this executive’s colleagues, who are also senior leaders in this massive organization, do not switch on their own cameras when they present. That little morsel just stopped me in my tracks. What? I get it. Because you are presenting slides, the platform relegates you to a tiny box on screen and does the same to your audience. Does that mean though, as a leader in the organization, you lead by turning off the camera? Getting people who are working at home engaged during business calls is tough enough, without fostering a no camera culture of hiding. There is a slippery slope here to the wondrous joys of multi-tasking in the background of calls and no longer paying attention to what is being said or shown during the session. Yes, we are trapped in a tiny box, but we have to do our best with what we have. We need to look at that camera lens, get the lens right up to eye height and use 20% more energy than normal to work in this visual medium. These are absolute basics. And beyond that, we need to be using gestures and even more energy to engage the audience. Let's master nitoryu presenting and be strong on content and delivery quality. No matter the limitations of the medium we are employing. If we are leaders, we have to set the pace and the standards. There are no excuses.
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    12 mins
  • Business Storytelling For Fun And Profit

    Business Storytelling For Fun And Profit
    Apr 21 2025

    I listen to some podcasts on writing, trying to better educate myself on the craft. I was hopeless at English at school, so the rest of my life has been a remedial fix in that department. Fundamentally, these podcast authors are aimed at fiction writers, rather than non-fiction scribblers like me. A lot of what we do in business on our dog down days may seem like we are living a fiction, when the numbers are not there or the results are dragging their sorry backside along the ground. Despite these self-recriminations about our situation, we are in the non-fiction storytelling business for business purposes, not for winning literary or public oratory awards. What are some of the elements we need to consider when deciding, “right, time to get a bit more serious about storytelling in my presentations”.

    Welcome to the one percent club of presenters, who actually incorporate stories into their business presentations. Usually getting into the top one percent in any professional field is diabolically difficult, but here we have an open field in front of us, devoid of worthy competitors. They have all stayed at home. That is the type of field I like play in.

    Now are we going to tell a deadly boring or basically dull story? Are we going to lose our audience’s attention? Are we driving them to their phones for escape to the internet, to get away from us. Have we forced them to search for something more interesting, better suited to while away their time?

    What would make for an interesting business story? We need personalities to come to life in this story, preferably people the audience already knows. These might be executives in the company or people from the rank and file. Something happened and they were involved. We need to describe them in such a way that the listener can visualise that person in their mind’s eye, even if they don’t know them. We need a location for our central characters in this story. Where are we? Which country, which city, which building? We don’t need a riveting recounting for the fans of Architectural Monthly, describing the building in deadly detail, but we need some remarks to set the scene. Are we in a massive skyscraper, are we downtown, are we in a restaurant? What season are we in? Is it blazing summer now or deep snowy winter? Just when are we experiencing this incident? How long ago was it?

    We need drama. Yes, I know there is a lot of drama in business and we are up to our armpits in drama on a daily basis, but that is what makes it so appealing. People know about their own dramas well enough, but they are superbly curious about yours. Maybe yours is worse and that puts their regular meltdowns in perspective. Maybe your drama is a dawdle, compared to what they are being served up every day, “you were luuucky” they think. Check out Monty Python’s Four Yorkshireman skit, for a humorous masterclass on great one upping someone else’s problems.

    Something bad is going to happen, unless something else happens instead. This is the fare we get fed from television and movie action dramas all of the time, so we know the format. The damage will be great to the firm, an individual’s career, the survival of the business, etc. Even if you have some great news to relate, set it up from some bad news dramatic context. No one really relates to perfect people. We can’t identify with those who are blessed with great everything and glide through business, untouched by any blood and gore. We want to hear about the struggles and eventual success. We need a tale of hope, a saga of eventual success, an overcome all odds story of ultimate triumph.

    At the end we want a punchline that teaches us something. Give us some guidance on what we should do, genius ideas on what we could do, hints on the possible. The climax has to be soaring, elevating, buoying us up, encouraging us to bear the pain of the present. We all want hope for the future in these grim times. Obviously, the delivery has to match and we need a crescendo call to action at the end, something to have people leaping out of their chairs and punching the air, ready to run through fire. Okay, I got a bit carried away there. I have never seen that happen to date in any business presentation. But we do need a finish that becomes a start for the rest of us, a trigger to go forward, bursting with a lot of heart.

    Let’s tell our business story so well, that everyone remembers the point we were making and they remember us, as someone they would enjoy to hear from again.
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    10 mins
  • How To Question Your Audience

    How To Question Your Audience
    Apr 14 2025
    Presentations have become tediously monochrome. The speaker speaks, the audience sit there passively taking it all in. After the speaker’s peroration, they get to offer up a few questions for about 10 to 15 minutes or so and then that is the end of it. With the pivot to online presentations, the fabric of the presentation methodology hasn’t changed much. We sit there peering at the little boxes on screen, hearing a monotone voice droning on. We listen to enquiries from others submitted beforehand or we may actually get an open mic opportunity to ask our questions directly, although that has been rather rare. We may be directed to the chat to make our question known to the organisers. The formula is basically the same and has been the same since our antediluvian origins. Why can’t speakers vary their presentations to sometimes include more interaction? Why does it always have to be the same format? Obviously, we have to pick our moment to go off piste. The audience composition, the topic of the talk and the organiser’s latitude for doing something different, will be factors for consideration. One of the tricky aspects of asking questions of your audience is getting people to contribute and to do so in a way that they can be heard by everyone. The obvious answer is to have a team of your people armed with handheld mics, which they can ferry at warp speed to the individual asking the question. Here is a word to the wise. You should choose who you want to question, but also allow some free styling as well. Events where the guests are seated at round tables are great for this and long rows of schoolroom type seating are not. We are not switching the presentation to a continuous dialogue with the audience – that is a different type of presentation altogether. I am talking about livening up a standard presentation with more interaction with the audience. The reason you select the people is because it allows you to control the affair more closely. It is also more surgical. You know who is in the room and there may be some people who are very well informed, articulate and confident. That type of individual would be a prime target. We have five arrows in our question quiver. If we want a yes or no answer then the Closed Question is ideal. It might be regarding a fairly macro question, that would have relevancy for everyone in the audience. “Should Tokyo continue to pursue the holding of the Olympic Games this year?”, would be an example. In this case, we can ask the entire audience the question. We can ask for a show of hands as to whether they agree with the point or not? I have been to some events where two sided paddles have been distributed to each seat beforehand, with one side saying “Yes” and the other “No”. A simpler method is just ask those who agree to raise their hands, then after that, ask those who disagree to raise theirs. Everyone can clearly see the survey results immediately in real time. The Open Question cannot be answered by a “Yes” or a “No” and requires an actual answer. “What do you think about ….”, “How do you feel about …?”. This is why selecting your interlocutor is a good idea. If you select one of the punters at random, you may be putting someone on the spot. Next thing they are spluttering away lost and wholly embarrassed. They will hate you for it forever. If only you are selecting the people, then there is the suspicion you are using sakura or stooges in the audience, whom you have cunningly planted beforehand. So it is also wise to open the floor up as well to those brave and informed enough to offer their opinion. Don’t worry if no one goes for it, you have at least demonstrated your embrace of true democratic ideals of free speech. If the opportunity presents itself, we can ask a Follow-Up Question to take the discussion down a few more layers for deeper insight. Often people will give a high level answer and it is more interesting to get them to go further with their thinking, experience or detail. We have to be careful this doesn’t become a dialogue though between some person in the audience and the presenter. The danger is everyone else is sitting there bored out of their minds and feeling excluded. Probably one of those follow-up questions per talk is about the right distribution. From within these dialogues, we can take a person’s viewpoint and Floodlight it to the entire audience. We can ask those who have had a similar experience to raise their hands. Now we have switched from the micro discussion between two people to a macro level of involvement of the whole audience. This is a good way of overcoming the feeling of exclusion by those listening. We can also go the other way and Spotlight a question. Someone made a point and we can then call out someone else in the audience for their experiences. We have to be careful we don’t ignite a war of words...
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    12 mins
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