Grabbing your audience's attention and putting it on your message

In my recent posts, In It’s not always what you say and It’s just like an analogy, and It’s your call, we’ve been talking about different ways of indirectly communicating our message to the audience. It’s always going to be more powerful if the audience feels that they have independently come to a conclusion, rather than having one stuffed down their throats.

The last way of doing this, or at least the last one I can think of, is to build your presentation around a question.

Rhetorical questions can be very powerful as a way of getting your audience to think about the issue you are going to address. It can be risky, however, to rely on questions that require input from your audience. I’ve seen so many speakers derailed by question openers.

As the famous Green Bay Packer’s (American football) coach, Vince Lombardi once said about throwing the football, three things can happen (a completed pass, an incomplete pass or an interception by the defense) and two of them are bad.

Your audience might respond promptly and in the way you expected, but sometimes they won’t respond at all, hanging you out to dry unless you can coax, coerce or cajole answers from them. Other times they’ll give you answers that are either irrelevant or contradict the thrust of the message you are trying to deliver, putting you on the defensive right off the bat.

What you can do, however, is prepare the ground by laying out the evidence that will support the conclusion you want them to reach, disarming any possible objections or counter-arguments and setting up the line of reasoning that will allow them to take that final step. Then end on the question.

One great example of this might be if you were presenting the famous Drake equation that estimates the number advanced civilizations that must logically exist in the universe.

It states the number of civilizations in our galaxy with whom we could communicate equals (The average rate of star formation in our galaxy) x (The fraction of those stars that have planets) x (The average number of those planets, per star, that can support life) x (The fraction of those planets on which life develops) x (The fraction of those the develop intelligent life) x The fraction of those civilizations that develop technology that emits signals that would be detectable from space) x (The length of time that those signals are emitted into space).

I don’t pretend to know those figures. No one knows them with any certainty. Each member of your audience would have to supply their own estimates. So their answers would be dependent on the figures they supplied. They might disagree with your methodologies, but they can’t disagree with their answer, because it came from their own estimates.

After running through the various estimates of probability, letting the audience supply their own values for each step, and calculating the number of extraterrestrial civilizations that each set of estimate produces, you might end with, “What do you think the odds that we are alone in the universe?”

Whatever answer they come up with will be far more powerfully persuasive to them than any answer you could give them.

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It occurs to me that in my last post, It’s Not Always What You Say, I broke a cardinal rule. It’s pointless to tell people what they should do, if they don’t know how to go about it. So let’s talk about how we can communicate our message without stating it explicitly.

One way is the method that I used in the speech about misleading history text books. Analogies allow you to make your case implicitly, without raising the audience’s collective hackles by pointing directly at an uncomfortable issue.

It’s rarely productive to address an issue as inflammatory as racism directly, particularly for a middle-aged, white guy. Yet living as a visible minority in a very foreign culture for nearly twenty years has taught me a lot about the subtly corrosive effects of both overt and covert racism.

If I were to speak of my own experiences in Japan to an all-white audience in America, I don’t think it would be much of a stretch for them to apply the same insights to their own attitudes about those of other races, even if I never make that point directly.

You can also use analogy to frame an issue explicitly, yet indirectly. In a government budget debate, you could use describe the issue of government debt as similar to the way rising interest payments on credit card debt puts pressure on a household budget. As more and more income has to be diverted to service credit card payments, there is less and less to spend on piano lessons and dinners out.

You could make specific points about the inevitable end result of such profligate borrowing, without calling out your political opponents by name or pointing to specific programs as wasteful.

Relating the arcane details of a budget debate to a household budget also allows you to both personalize the issue, as everyone can identify with personal finances, and to make it more concrete

Of course, there are times when you need to name names and point fingers. If that is what is called for, then by all means, fire away. But often, you’ll get more cooperation and be more effective in reaching your goals, if you let the audience extrapolate the point from an analogy.

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