Questions Please!

When making presentations, do you try to answer every potential question or do you leave time for questions from the audience?  Questions from the audience demonstrate whether or not your main points have been understood and perhaps accepted.

Encouraging questions benefits from a more subtle approach than a pro-forma request at the end of your presentation.  Design the upfront part of your presentation to include all your key messages; however, reserve some supplementary points for responding to the audience’s interests.  Following are ways of enlivening your presentation with audience questions.

• Stop frequently: Rather than holding questions until the end of the presentation, design your information delivery in a way that allows for interaction at planned intervals.  For example, present one main point supported by two or three facts.  Then ask for questions.  Keeping in mind the time available, move on to the next main point.  As much as possible, design the presentation in a manner that develops logically, to avoid questions leap-frogging other main points.
• Ask for specific questions:  If you ask for specific feedback, the audience is more likely to absorb the information presented and to analyze it as they listen.  Simply saying “Any questions?” means that most people will keep quiet.  Instead, engage them in dialogue by asking something similar to “Do you have any concerns regarding how we arrived at these figures?”. 

• Reduce the information:  Often we attempt to answer all possible questions within our presentations.  Not only does this promote passive acceptance by the audience, often it cuts out discussion time.  For a half-hour presentation, your information needs to be handled in 15 to 20 minutes.  This gives the audience a little less than half the time to express their concerns and for you to handle them.