We have been asked to speak or we have punted a chance to speak to an audience. We will have a message in mind for the talk and we begin the process of constructing the talk. Unfortunately we are now in the era of short attention spans, “fake news”, massive cynicism and intolerance. Contending philosophies and diverse experience has been tossed out the window in favour of tribal agreement and solidarity of interpretation. Cancel culture started on US varsity campuses as students began aggressively confronting Professors during lectures, if the students didn’t agree with the content or view. As American politics has collapsed into a bi-modal equation of “us” versus “them”, bi-partisanship has been quietly taken out the back and garrotted.
“A hundred flowers blooming and a thousand schools contending” isn’t fashionable anymore, as foxholes are dug deeper and the sniping has become continuous. Where does this leave us as speakers? It is difficult enough to be a speaker today, without another layer of complexity. Every time we get on our feet to speak, we are putting ourselves up as targets and are exposing our personal and professional brands.
Business topics generally are pretty boring, so the degree of angst being generated isn’t usually substantial. Nevertheless, there are land mine fields a plenty for us to stray into. Diversity, equity and inclusion generates attention around the configurations of the upper echelons of companies. Plastic waste entering the food chain demands changes in the amount of plastic being used and how it is disposed of. Floods alternating with droughts around the world and the disappearance of ice sheets at the poles, has attention focused on what companies are doing to battle climate change. Online hacking and broadcast of personal information and internet security in general, are urgent issues without solutions in sight. I could go on, but let me stop here to make the point that while most of what we say, we may think is harmless, we may be overly optimistic.
Captains of industry and the sub-captains are being scrutinised to an extent not seen before. Audiences are sensitised to their preferred expectations and requirements about how they think the world should be and how companies should conduct themselves. Next thing we pop up to give our talk and walk into any number of potential maelstroms. Are we skill set ready? Are we mentally prepared?
When presenting in business, unlike at some Universities, it is unlikely the audience will try to shout us down and deny us the opportunity to speak and be heard. Generally, hostilities and gun play are reserved for the Q&A. Once we open up for questions, we are now in a street fight, the defining aspect of which is that there are no rules. Audience members can say whatever they like, however unrelated or off-topic to what we were speaking about. They can be rude, arrogant, bullying, condescending and aggressive and there isn’t anything we speakers can do about that.
If we are smart, we will have set the frame of the questions by delineating the time period for the Q&A. This is a critical move because if you ever have to get out of Dodge in a hurry, you can always say, “we have reached the end of our allotted time for today’s talk and let me make some concluding remarks”. We insert this little time control timebomb at the start to enable us to have a dignified exit if we are being bombarded with nasty questions and swept up in oceans of invective.
We can disarm a heat seeking missile thinly disguised as a question by paraphrasing what was asked. With any question time, it is a good practice to repeat the question so that those down the back can hear it. Well that is except for the attack question and we definitely do not want to repeat it. Instead, we paraphrase it to take the heat out of it. For example, if someone asked, “Isn’t it true that you are going to fire 30% of the workforce in the next few weeks?”, we can paraphrase this as “the question was about staffing”. We still have to answer the question though, but we have successfully reduced some of the tension in the room and we come across as cool, calm and collected in the face of incoming hot rounds of fire.
The best plan is to give our answer and smoothly and swiftly move on to the next question by saying, “Who has the next questions?”. Do not ask the hostile interlocutor if they are satisfied with your answer by saying, “does that satisfy your question?”, because if it doesn't the brawl continues. If your antagonist won’t be brushed off so easily and interjects during a follow-up question, denouncing you as a fraud and a charlatan for not properly answering their question the way they wanted it, we need to be careful what we say next.
We need to remember that we cannot win in a street fight with no rules, so we are better to break off hostilities with that person and just move on. We should say, “I appreciate you have strong views on this subject, so rather than occupy everyone’s time right now, let’s you and I get together after the talk and continue our debate”. At which point we again say, “Who has the next question?” and keep moving forward.
If things don’t get this fraught, but we still have a sizeable gap in views on a subject with one of our audience, we need to just acknowledge that and not try to “win the argument” because that is just not possible when we deal with zealots who are locked into their world view on a subject. We can say, “thank you for sharing your thoughts on this subject and I see we are a fair way apart on this topic, so let’s just agree to disagree. Who has the next question?”.
We cannot win in a public verbal brawl, so we are better to avoid it at all costs. The audience expects us to be professional all of the time and many of them will view the antagonist’s activities as ridiculous. We cannot bring ourselves down to that level and so we must stay above the mud and the blood they want to embroil us in.