So you finish your presentation.
What’s next?
You ask, ‘Any questions?’
And then… silence.
Church bells. Crickets. The howl of the wind…
Bah!
Lack of questions is totally fixable.
First thing you need to do is to think about why you want questions in the first place.
If you do indeed want there to be questions after your presentations, the next step surely is to think about what might be getting in the way of people speaking out.
Barriers to people asking questions
1. They are embarrassed to speak into the silence
First off, it might be the silence. They might be not confident to speak in front of a group. Just think about how nerve-wracking it is as the speaker. You got to plan your session, and still having all those eyes on you can be hard. Same thing might be true for your listeners.
2. They don’t have any questions
It might be that there aren’t any questions to ask. This is likely to come from two factors. Either what you spoke about was totally irrelevant to them (unlikely, but possible) or you were just too comprehensive. If you have genuinely given them everything they need to know, there really might not be any questions left to ask.
3. They haven’t had enough time to come up with a question
If you go straight into the Q&A directly after your presentation, sometimes people haven’t had enough time to process the information and find the gaps. I notice that as a listener I need a few seconds to come up with exactly what I might want to ask about. Often, speakers give up after just a few moments of silence, which might not be long enough.
4. They don’t think their question is relevant/good enough
If there is silence, people might not be sure if they have a question that’s ‘good enough’. They might not be sure if it’s too personal to them, or that they might be revealing their own ignorance. Instead of embarrassing themselves, they keep their question to themselves.
5. They don’t think the speaker actually wants questions
Sometimes the spekaer’s attitude as they ask for questions seems to signal that they would much prefer if the group didn’t ask them questions. Either they just want to sit back down and have the experience over with, or they have a kind of forbidding attitude, where people daren’t ask questions. If people follow the body language more than the words of the offer, they might back down from volunteering a question, thinking that it’s not going to be received well.
6. They need some seeds/suggestions for topics
If you’ve talked about quite a broad topic, people might not be able to choose which question to ask you. This is the opposite of not having any questions to ask. Still means you don’t get any questions, but maybe easier to solve.
7. They’re confused
In theory, being confused should be a reason to ask questions, but, in truth, if people are unsure, it might be that they stay silent.
8. They’ve forgotten their question
Maybe they had a great question but by the time you’ve got to ask them, they’ve forgotten. Used to happen to me as a listener a lot until I worked out how to fix it.
Seeing the barriers leads to solutions
Now we’ve spent five minutes thinking about the problem, I bet you’re already seeing some ways of fixing it, right?
I have some ideas about strategies too (there’s a surprise), but we’ll save those for next week…
Next article: What you can do to encourage interaction after your presentation.
Other articles you might be interested in:
- Why your presentation needs a good Q&A
- How to make your presentation relevant by focusing on outcomes
- How to challenge people’s mindset like Elizabeth Gilbert
- Seven misconceptions that are stopping you speaking slower
- How to invite people to follow your example in three minutes like Google webspam guy Matt Cutts