Curiosity May Have Killed the Cat. But it Also Saved Your Presentation.

This article originally appeared on Andrea Backman’s LinkedIn post on April 18, 2017.

Many times in my career, I’ve given a presentation to a committee or board. Time and again, it seems that no matter how much I prepare, a committee member poses a question that my team and I didn’t anticipate.

Once when thinking through ways to better anticipate and answer these questions it hit me: We’ve got to use our curiosity to dig deeper into our own material and really put the work in order to understand every possible angle. Boards and committees (and good leaders!) continually come up with these tough and smart questions because they’re thinking deeply and are truly interested in a presentation—they are highly intelligent, curious people. As I’ve written before, we should all strive to harness the power of our innate curiosity.

Here are some tactics we can all employ to stoke our curiosity leading up to a presentation:

  1. Prepare. And then prepare some more. Although some may disagree, I believe that there’s no such thing as over-preparing. And the first step to preparing is to be curious about every aspect of what you’re discussing. You should read everything you can get your hands on, not just on the topic up for discussion but also on tangentially related topics. Then make a list of questions that may arise and be prepared to address them—or just go ahead and add the answers to your presentation.
  2. Create a murder board. Especially for very important presentations, you’ll want to create a murder board. Invite a group of colleagues who will ask you all the toughest questions they can conceive with an eye to bring you down. If you can withstand these tough critics, then you should be able to withstand your actual presentation audience.
  3. Present to an outsider. If you can’t pull together a murder board, bring in a colleague outside of your team and present to them ahead of time. This method can be less formal than a murder board but still brings in that necessary and irreplaceable outside perspective. Sometimes we get too close to a project and we can no longer see the missing pieces or logical gaps. Either our familiarity or our personal interests blind us. Bringing someone in, then, with no emotional or time investment is sometimes the only way to get a fresh view.
  4. Prepare to be unprepared. There’s no way to prepare for every question you’re going to hear—trust me, I’ve tried. But I would argue that unexpected questions just means you’ve done your job—you’ve made your audience curious. So when you receive a question you haven’t prepared for, you have a few options:
  • Defer to someone in the room signaling that they are confident about the answer (ensure that all on your team are ready for those kinds of deferrals). Or, if no one is prepared…
  • Say “Great question, I need to look into that and can get an answer to this group after the meeting.” Be sure to tailor your response to your audience.

When you put this much effort into a presentation, not only will you be better prepared to face your audience but also you’ll build a terrific understanding and enthusiasm about your topic. Watching someone present on a topic they really care about can be truly inspirational—and leads people to engage more.

I’d love to hear from you – how do you ensure you’re looking at all sides of an issue before a presentation? 

 

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