The Fart In A Hurricane

Q&A at the end of your talk is like opening a loop, which is really difficult to close.

Look I have no problem with Q&A.

I believe it’s an absolutely valuable part of the work we do with speakers with an audience, because you are trying to connect to your work and what you think people need to hear with what people in the moment tell you is important to them.

The default is normally that you finish your speech and then it’s, do you have any questions?.

Sometimes those questions come in really easily.

Sometimes you have to plant a few.

Sometimes you offer a “question I got asked recently was...”

It does make sense to some degree and perhaps is the default.

But what if we did something different with it?

What if we treated Q&A as a really integral part of the structure and framework of our delivery?

For this we need to consider the concept of primacy and recency.

(Or if we want to get fancy, the “serial position effect”)

We have a tendency to remember things which are at the beginning of a list or at the end of a list. The first and last things.

The bit in the middle often gets missed.

Which is why I quite often say that you could have the most amazing sandwich filling but if the bread’s crap it’s going to be less enjoyable.

When I’m working with clients one of the things we talk about is having a really strong open and a really strong close.

When you do Q&A at the end, what you’re doing is you’re really weakening that close.

You might get a question which you can’t answer in the moment.

Or someone asks about the design of your slides.

Perhaps you get the “audience member showing off their expertise while hiding a statement in a promise of a question”.

(Yeah we’ve all had those… perhaps we’ve even been that person… ooops)

When you go to Q&A at the end, that powerful beautiful clear ending that you constructed gets lost like a fart in a hurricane.

It opens a loop.

In fact it probably opens many loops.

And I’ll bet that it doesn’t leave you feeling great.

Instead, when you are writing and planning your speech, make a point of putting time for Q&A in before you do the close.

Give yourself a specific amount of time for Q&A - 5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever - but be entirely clear on when that time ends and you’re going to finish off your speech.

You’ll need to brief the organiser and the host and also brief your audience somewhere within the introduction.

Make sure they clearly know what is going to happen and what the boundaries of it are.

This is something I did in a closing keynote online recently - dropping the Q&A in before the final close, with very clear instructions on what I was doing.

And what was cool is that another speaker did the same and it made a huge difference to what people took away.

(Although I might take a little bit of credit for that because I’ve worked with them)

As speakers we are there to inspire and motivate and ultimately transform people’s lives.

(Yeah, I know that sounds grand)

Which is why how we structure our speeches is so important.

You might think that this is something which happens at the delivery or stage part of your work but it actually happens in the writing and the planning.

Next time you are building a speech or talk with a Q&A element, be really intentional about where that Q&A is going to be placed.

The first time you do it won’t be easy because the accepted standard is Q&A comes at the end.

You might not be able to change the layout of the room.

You might not be able to predict what questions you’re going to get asked.

You might not be able to change the weather.

But you can change the structure of your delivery to make sure you have the biggest impact possible.

I’m running a one-day workshop in Bromsgrove early in November and you’ll find the details of that in my featured section.

And if you want to have a chat about this and how it could work when it comes to structuring your speeches, drop me a message.