As a public speaker, there are few things worse than watching your audience lean back in their seats, drift away, and lose interest.
How can you wake them up and hold their full attention?
Ask a question.
Why? Because questions — especially the rhetorical ones — invite listeners into a dialogue. They may even activate a part of the brain that engages in problem solving. When you hear a question, you naturally look for an answer — even if the speaker isn’t soliciting one. A question may also evoke emotion, or help to emphasize a key point.
The result? Your audience feels more engaged and is more likely to remember what you said later on.
Here’s an example I heard in a recent presentation by an eCommerce software CEO, Laura Behrens Wu. At one point, she asks:
“What’s the one thing you’ve been putting off that, if completed, could change everything?”
Immediately, my mental wheels started spinning as I thought about my answer.
Different Types of Questions
There are many different types of questions a speaker can use. Here are three that work especially well in engaging your audience.
1. ”What if … ?”
This is a way of “thinking out loud.” Here, you are posing a question to the audience and yourself simultaneously.
It’s a way of inviting collective thinking and imagining. Now, instead of being given “the answer,” you are inviting the audience to think along with you.
For example, rather than saying, “It’s important for our organization to do X to improve our bottom line,” you might say, “What if we did X as a way to improve our bottom line?”
Same information, but by framing it as a What If? question, you now get your audience involved.
2. “Can you imagine a world where … ?”
Here, you are inviting the audience into a shared future vision. This is what one of my clients, startup founder Steve Jepeal, asked in a recent presentation:
“Can you imagine a world where bridges and tunnels last not for 30–40 years, but for a lifetime?” (Thanks to their pioneering stainless steel coating for rebar.)
By asking the audience to visualize this future potential reality — one which his innovation can make possible — he is summoning their imagination. He’s inviting them to think “Yes!” In doing so, he underscores his big idea without breaking the flow of his presentation.
3. How did we get here?
If you’re someone like Stephen Hawking, you mean this literally — “Was there anything before the big bang? If not, what created the universe?”
But for the rest of us, we’re inviting the audience into a thought experiment about a story in process.
“How did we get to this conundrum in cancer research?”
“How did we come to a roadblock in our effort to reduce poverty, or provide access to clean water?”
When you ask a “How did we get here?” question, you are waving the audience over:
“Come look through this window, and see the trail that led here.” This gives them the background and context they need to understand the meaning of your work today.
How Often Should Questions Be Used?
It‘s hard to give you a precise number or recipe. But in general, think of questions as tools for emphasis — something you use sparingly, like spices in a meal. They are meant to spark interest, not overwhelm. Too many questions will fatigue the audience and diminish their effectiveness.
As to when to employ them, the short answer is “anytime.” You can open with a question. You can close with a question. You can plant a strong question in the middle of your talk. Just don’t do it too often!
Questions – the Speaker’s Secret Weapon
When you ask a question at the right time, you invite your audience in. Your talk becomes a set of ideas that you and they create, together.
Now, rather than sitting silently as passive (and possibly bored) recipients of information, they are mentally engaged in conversation with you, co-creating the meaning and takeaways you want to give them.
Now: what question might you ask to captivate your audience, the next time you prepare to speak?
