Tips on Public Speaking: Asking Questions

I mentioned in my origin story that before I was working in patient experience, I taught in college for a couple of decades.  The other day, I came across a bio blurb I wrote about myself for a conference introduction.  I wrote that I have spoken to college students and emergency room doctors and was mum on which audience was worse.  This started me down a rabbit hole, thinking about which work was more challenging.  Both are for different reasons, but I realized that my work trying to inspire bored college freshmen about the magic of political science gave me the skills to address annoyed emergency room staff about the importance of patient experience.  I will start a series of essays on things I learned in teaching that helped me connect with healthcare audiences.  Today I will talk about the power of asking good questions in a presentation.

One of the scariest moments for any speaker in any setting is silence.  You ask a question of an audience, and you get crickets in response.  The seconds feel like minutes, and you feel the sweat pouring out of you.  You cannot stand the pressure and after what feels like five minutes, but is actually seven seconds, you break and start talking again.  And you vow to never do that again.  Until you do it again, twelve minutes later to the same result.

But silence is a part of communication.  Pacing is a part of communication.  If you are saying things that are worth hearing,¹ then you should allow people to process what you are saying.  If you are asking questions, you should allow people the time to process the question and formulate an answer.  Even if you ask a question that is rhetorical, you still need to give the audience a chance to answer it for themselves. 

The challenge is that we have been trained by being in literally hundreds if not thousands of classes, lecture halls, or conference sessions that questions asked by the speaker don’t require us to respond.  Either some attentive a-student will chirp the answer, or the question will linger in the air for a few moments before the speaker uncomfortably moves on.  In those experiences, we have trained ourselves to be passive listeners.  You speak about something I care about and I write it down.  You speak about something I don’t care about, and I play games on my phone.  Many of us have seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with the classic Ben Stein character, who, as a high school teacher, would ask questions of the class, pause maybe one second, and then answer his own question.  We have been trained to not answer questions asked by speakers because we don’t think we will be given a chance to think of an answer, so we don’t even engage with the question.  Even rhetorical questions don’t get much internal dialog because we know that the speaker won’t pause long enough for us to actually consider the question.  It sets up a vicious cycle, where a question doesn’t get much thought in an audience, which creates deadly silence, which causes the speaker to panic and end the tension, which means that future questions will be ignored because the audience knows that the speaker won’t provide the space to consider an answer.  If, though, you want to ask questions and get interplay, or if you want to generate more attentive enthusiasm in your speaking, I have a few suggestions.

Know Yourself

My primary advice in all public speaking is to know yourself and tailor your approach to who you are rather than trying to be something that you are not.  Again, a broader topic for another day.  When it comes to engaging with an audience, you need to fit your approach to what works for you.  First off, if you don’t want to engage with your audience, don’t ask questions.  This is not throwing shade.  I have frequently been asked to deliver a 60-minute message in 45 minutes.  I already know that I am going to be moving faster than I want, so taking time to ask questions will only slow me down.

If you have a quiet voice or have an accent that can be difficult to track, then you will need to underscore your question by writing it out on a board or in PowerPoint.  Otherwise, your audience won’t hear you well enough to answer the question.  If you don’t know if you have a quiet voice or an impenetrable accent, consider this question.  In everyday life, how often do people ask you to repeat yourself?  If people struggle to pick up your point in random conversations, you will need to consider ways to assist your audience in understanding your question, be it with volume, pacing, or a visual aid.

Know the Room

Different kinds of rooms demand different approaches to public speaking.  You cannot expect the same connection with an audience when you are a keynote speaker in a darkened auditorium in front of a thousand strangers as you would have in a bright hospital conference room, in front of 30-50 people you may actually know. 

• What is the distance between you and the audience?  This is not just physical distance, but conversational distance.  If everyone is sitting around a conference table it will be more intimate than standing in front of an audience of thirty people.  Speaking in front of a conference room is more intimate than standing on a dais in front of a few hundred people.   
• What are the dimensions of the room?  This is not about simple square feet, but the nature of the space.  For example, most keynote conference spaces are wider than they are deep.  This means that you need to make a point of surveying the entire room.  If you speak only to the center of the room, those on the edges will get disconnected.  If you ask a question, it is likely that those on the sides won’t try to get your attention, if you have not given it to them already.  The strangest room that I ever taught in was a room that was only ten desks wide, but about twenty-five rows deep.  Here, if I did not try to reach the back of the room, that was where the disconnected would sit. 
• What audio/visual is available?  Will you have a lapel microphone or a podium microphone?  Will there be a PowerPoint?  I have a lot to say about PowerPoints, but for the moment, if you have one, some people will be reading the slide before they listen to you, and others will listen to you and then review the slide.  In other words, your audience is never going to be at the same place as you are at any moment.  Asking a question too early means losing the read-first audience, as they are not listening to you.  Ask it too late and the question loses its punch, because everyone has metabolized the message and have already moved on.

Break the Fourth Wall

If you want to ask an audience questions, you need to prepare them for this.  The fourth wall is theater parlance for the wall that separates the actors from the audience.  The play, TV show, or movie wants the audience to think that they are at a Victorian dinner or a grimy back alley and not at a community theatre or in their own living room, watching an intricate set in Culver City, California.  So, you don’t break the fourth wall by acknowledging the audience.  This helps set the mood, but it also commits the audience to being passive observers.

Whenever I present, even before I start to present, I make sure to break the fourth wall.  I will greet people as they come in, I will start conversations with folks sitting close to me.  In the universe of Zoom meetings, I will greet people as they log on.  “Hey, Alice, thanks for joining.  Oh, I see we have John in the house now as well.”  If they have a fake background up, I will ask if they took the picture, or where that picture is.  If they are showing their real background, I might ask about a painting or poster behind them.  Failing all of that, I can ask them how their day is going.  As other people file into the meeting, either literally or virtually, they will hear the conversation, and settle in.  I don’t have to talk to or greet EVERYONE, so much as I want to set the tone that I see them just as they see me.  This may seem silly, but it helps set the audience up for interaction.  If, during the presentation, someone makes a face in response to what I said, I will call that out.  “Hey, I am glad that Jim got my joke” or “Steve, did I say something you disagree with?”  The key is to keep the tone calm and conversational.  As long as your audience does not think you are being antagonistic, you will allow them to see this as a real conversation.  Even if you are not going to ask questions, this approach makes it easier for your audience to break the fourth wall and ask questions.  Even if they are used to being passive in presentations, by doing this, you put them on notice that this won’t be like other presentations. 

Ask a Question, not a Series of Questions

One mistake the speakers make when asking an audience a question is that they end up asking multiple similar but different questions which confuses the audience.  It usually goes something like this:

• “Has anyone ever had their imaging department get backed up?”  [Three seconds of awkward silence]
• “What are patients thinking in this situation?”  [Three more seconds of painful silence]
• “How are your staff managing this?”  [Flop sweat forming]
• “Are they good at managing this?”  [Oh, dear God, please make this end!]
• “OK, well I have observed that staff often…”  [I will never ask another question as long as I live]

All of these questions are related, but each one has a different answer.  So which question are you expecting the audience to answer?  The first one, the last one?  Just about the time the audience formulated an answer to one, you shifted to another and they had to start over again.  They are likely going to give up rather than trying to keep up with you.

It gets worse when the questions make the answers confusing.  Just this weekend, I asked my wife, “Is the temperature OK in here?” followed by a brief pause, followed by “Should I put the AC on?”  She answered “Yes” and I realized that I had no idea which question she was answering.  We do this all the time.  “Do you want another helping of dinner/Should I take your plate?”  There is an implied “OR” in there as in, “Is the temperature OK in here, OR should I put the AC on?”  But if you don’t connect the questions like this, the whole conversation gets confused.

Ask the Right Question

The other error people make in asking questions to an audience is in the nature of the question.

• Sometimes they ask questions that have only one correct answer.  Asking a question to an audience that has a single right answer puts too much pressure on them.  Not only do they have to break the inertia of speaking up in a crowd, but they also will be judged on the accuracy of my statement.  Most audiences will give that a hard pass.  Normally the audience needs to understand the question and formulate an answer.  But here, they have a third hurdle, which to evaluate how confident they are with the answer as they risk reputational capital in the answer. 
• Sometimes they ask questions that have only one correct side.  These valence questions remove any real dialog.  “Should we care about how patients perceive experiences?” might make a adequate rhetorical question, but as a real question expecting an answer, you end up putting everyone on one side, so it doesn’t even feel worth answering.  And then there is that one person who wants to be a contrarian or a troll and will say NO.  Either way, the question does not foster a real conversation.
• Sometimes they ask questions that foster no conversation.  Asking questions that require a Yes/No response don’t foster any discussion.  Likewise broad questions that don’t require detailed answers don’t get detailed answers.  So, the question “How is work going today?”  will get a “Fine” or “OK” and doesn’t set up any follow-up discussion.³
• Sometimes they ask questions that are too vague or open-ended.  Again, you are putting too much pressure on the audience, especially if you won’t give them the time to process or any cues on how to answer the question.  My least favorite question speakers ask is, “Can anyone think of an example of this?”  You think, “We were talking about how sometimes we speak in a language that our patients don’t understand and now I have to run through my brain to try and think of an example of this?  Yeah, in my office I could probably come up with four or five, but here, with the clock ticking, my mind goes blank.”  You have again added an additional hurdle to overcome.

The key is to ask a question that focuses on the audience’s own opinion and calibrates the right stakes for the question and response.  You want them to come up with an answer quickly and feel comfortable in saying it in a group.  It should do most of the computational work for the audience.  It means balancing between that which is too vague and that which is too simple. 

For example, after talking about the importance of narrating care (the act of telling a patient what you are doing while you are doing it), a question like “Why do you think that some staff struggle with narrating care?” can work to generate responses.  I am asking what you think, implying that there is not one right answer.  I refer to care narration because I don’t want you to consider all aspects of communication with patients, but keep your focus narrowed to a specific topic.  I use the phrase “some staff struggle” implying that, again, there could be different answers for different staff and that it is not about staff completely failing, but something that could be improved upon.  All of this lowers the obstacles to answering. 

This question also has the ability for follow-up.  You say, “They are so focused on their job that they don’t remember to do it.”  This allows me to follow up with “Yeah, I agree with you.  What could we do to help them remember?”  I can ask this of the person responding, or I can throw that open to the whole group.  Now I have taken this from a call/response to an actual conversation.  Even if you don’t answer, you are now thinking about problems and solutions in your own department.

People want to feel like their opinion matters, that they have things that are worth sharing.  Using a respondent like a foil or using their answer simply to launch into your next point or simply ignoring the comment will teach an audience that they are not important to the point of the presentation.  Successful speakers can deliver their presentation without ever asking anything from the audience.  So, most of the mistakes here are unforced errors.  Asking questions to avoid awkward silence or because you feel like you should will set you up for failure.  The only successful questions are those you ask intentionally.

¹If you don’t think what you are saying is important, well, that is a completely different problem.  More on that in another essay.

² For those who have not seen this, take 36 seconds and watch this clip  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOHbyuanbY

³For those would point out that I just recommended that questions at the beginning of a session, I would respond that (a) this was suitable question before the session started, (b) it was the question of last resort, if I had nothing else to go on, and, (c) I will usually follow up a “fine” response with something totally off-beat, like, “I am glad it is going fine, how many tire-fires do you need before you go from ‘fine’ to only ‘so-so’?”