Programmer/designer W. Bradford Paley spoke yesterday for the data visualization group here at Columbia. He gave an amazing talk, one of the best I’ve ever seen. One reason I say this is that about half the talk was devoted to an application he built for Wall Street trading–something I just couldn’t care less about, it’s hard for me to imagine a topic I’m less interested in–and, even so, I liked the talk a lot.
The seminar participants–a mixture of architects, computer scientists, and some other people, including a psychologist and even a statistician–had lively discussion throughout. In fact, there was so much going on, that I’ll spread my comments through several blog entries over the next few days.
Right now I want to talk about Paley’s speaking style, which was great in so many ways, but what really got to me was how he managed to get so many questions and comments from the audience—so much that people had to ask him to stop taking questions so he could move forward with the material. This was amazing. When I speak, I always struggle to get audience participation. Usually I get a few questions at the end, but not this kind of barrage all the way through.
What can I do to involve the audience more? I’ve always thought I need more “hooks” but have not been sure how to do it. After seeing Paley’s talk, my new idea is to devote more of my talks to process. I typically present results without a lot of detail on how I got there. But maybe it would be better to talk more about what I did. At least, that worked for Paley.
The funny thing is that I love answering questions, and I think I’m good at it. That’s one reason I get so frustrated that I don’t get more questions when I speak. People typically think my talks are entertaining, informative, and thought provoking–at least, that’s what they tell me–but I’m lacking the hooks that draw people in.
P.S. More here on Paley’s talk.
I think you have to establish a question asking "culture" in your talk. Once people start asking lots of questions, then others tend to chime in. It helps just to get them talking. One technique is to start the talk by asking a direct question to the audience, and taking the time to collect answers from several people. I'd love to hear about more tricks from others.
There are certain people in the room who will always feel comfortable asking lots of questions, either because of their personality (I am one of these) or because they are a high status person in the group. The trick is to get the other people to feel that they can ask questions.
A few ideas:
1) Let the group know, explicitly, that you welcome comments. "This'll be more fun for everyone with some group participation."
2) Eye contact. Look people in the eye, make them feel like you are well aware of them. Look for questioning or eager looks, and engage them non-verbally.
3) Wait time. When teaching, waiting just five whole seconds can work wonders. The same can be true when doing a talk. You, from what I have seen, tend to go through your stuff at a good pace.
4) You don't have many pauses in the middle of a point when people can ask you questions about your thinking. Your pauses tend to come after you've finished a point with a kind of conclusory statement. That feels like shutting a door so you can go on, even if you don't mean it that way.
10) Put them all together. Look at the group for people who might have questions or comments, even if you are in the middle of explaining a point. Make eye contact with them, to let them know that you acknowledge the existence of their question/comment. Pause to give them an opening, and/or explicitly invite them to say something. Or, if you need to finish your paragraph, make sure to come back to them, explicitly and/or non-verbally. (10 = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4)
As Yolio says, once you've done this just a couple of times, the vibe of the room will change. Once they realize you welcome and even encourage comments, they'll happen on their own. Then, the challenge will be to get comments from the more polite people, and preventing the louder voices from dominating.
I do items 1,2,3 already. One thing that struck me about Paley's presentation is that he didn't actually do anything like that. He certainly didn't discourage questions, but, as far as I could tell, he didn't do anything to actively encourage them either. People just asked and asked.
Part of this may be the audience, and part of it may simply be that I was in the audience, which is not the case when I myself are speaking. Also, Paley gave long discursive answers to questions. When I do that, I'm afraid it turns people off and discourages further interruption, but when he did it, it worked well.
Finally, when I teach classes, I do get a lot of participation, partly because I use lots of active learning tricks (see my Teaching Statistics book as well as the items in the Teaching category of this blog). But not so much when I give a formal talk, even when the talk goes well.
I find it so much more engaging when there are questions from the audience. I wish conferences in my field would rebalance from 20 minute presentations + 5 minutes of questions (less runover in the presentation) to 10 minute presentations and 15 minutes of questions. The questions are usually so much more interesting, because they're poking at unstated assumptions, comparing other experiences, showing you what people do and don't understand, etc.
I try to do my presentations at a blackboard (sadly now mostly whiteboards), which is a great way to encourage questions. For one, it leads to natural breaks and prevents early formula overload. It also makes you focus on what's important and pacing.
It's impossible these days with time pressure and projectors only at conferences. I used to sometimes get away with writing on overhead transparencies, but I didn't have the nerve to do that with 100+ person venues and lots of time pressure.
I've often thought about throwing in mistakes on purpose, but never have. Having someone correct a subscript or bound is a great way to break the ice.
I think focusing on process would lead to more questions. The process is often more important than the result. How many results are re-usable, after all? That's why blogs are so much fun — you get to go into the sausage factory and see how the things are made. It's much harder to ask questions on polished, finished pieces of work.
I was really impressed when you (Andrew) stopped my guest lecture in your class and made the students break into pairs and come up with a question. It totally sidetracked the presentation (never did get to LDA), but I think it kept the students engaged more and got them thinking about what I'd already said.
How much the audience takes away is much more important than how many formulas you write on the board. And so much of the takeaway message is process. Especially if you consider the difference between a textbook and a lecture.
As one of my early mentors Rich Thomason said, a talk is successful if you get a single idea across in a way the audience remembers next week.
I like questions too, and am always impressed by people who can integrate that kind of conversation into a talk. I must say that sometimes I give talks to economics or business school audiences and there the challenge is to get them to shut the hell up for a few minutes.
There are just so many variables that go into who feels comfortable speaking. Some of it is the layout of the room, the number of people in the room, the familiarity of the audience with the speaker, familiarity of the audience with each other, the history of that particular seminar series, how competitive the departmental culture is, how fearful of appearing "dumb" everyone is, how intimidated by the particular subject.
Now that I think of it, the speaker themselves is only a minor factor. I knew of a professor who threw chalk at his students when they asked questions, he succeeded at discouraging questions.
I'm looking forward to reading the rest of your posts on this subject. Getting people engaged in a public speaking event seems to be a dark art sometimes. But really, there are things to do to get people engaged. Asking questions and encouraging questions certainly help in that. But making sure that happens is another story.
Perhaps obvious, but if possible provide (background) materials before hand.
(I once gave a series of background seminars/tutorials just before a famous out of town speaker arrived to give a series of lectures and they commented afterwards that there were an unusual number of interesting questions)
Keith
How about putting a shill in the audience to start the questions flowing?
If there is a colleague or someone who you know will attend, you could work out that, at certain points, the person will ask a question.
I think, once questions start, they often continue.