Does Public Speaking Have to Be Surprising to Be Interesting?
You probably think you know what it means to be a great public speaker.
The Truth?
It's not what you think.
It's not about… whatever you think it's about.
It's about… something else.
You're welcome.
(I never get tired of sharing this video. It’s a highly valuable educational resource.)
This is familiar, isn’t it? You've been on the internet once or twice, so you'll recognise this kind of attention-grabbing schtick.
Oh no! - if it sounds 'familiar' then I've failed at the first hurdle, because sounding familiar, and predictable, and obvious, is the worst possible sin if you want to communicate effectively, right?
Let me explain where all this is coming from.
I subscribe to public speaking coach Alex Merry's newsletter Founder to Thought Leader - and I suggest you do too.
As someone who trains people in communication and presentation skills, I'm always finding something in Alex's output that gets me thinking.
And with no disrespect at all to Alex and his successful coaching practice, what I'm sometimes thinking is, 'really, though??'
AI Prompts for Better Public Speaking
He recently put out a newsletter, 🧠 5 clever prompts that will make you a better speaker.
As the title suggests, it's a series of AI prompts that Alex says will help you structure and create better talks.
The first two prompts are about identifying assumptions your audience might have about your chosen topic. And then getting their attention by challenging those assumptions.
What are assumptions for, if not to be challenged, right?
Another prompt is again about challenging assumptions, 'so you can say something memorable':
What are 3 surprising or counterintuitive facts, perspectives, or insights about [topic] that will challenge [audience’s] assumptions and behaviours.
Articulate each in the following format:
Ultimately, it’s not about [assumption], it’s about [realisation].
Look at that structure: 'it's not about THAT, it's about THIS'.
And then the two remaining prompts are about finding relatable examples of success ('look how great it could be if you do THIS') or failure ('look how awful it could be if you don't do THIS') linked to the chosen topic.
But even these are about surprise:
The examples should be surprising or less obvious to make them impactful.
There's a very heavy reliance on being 'surprising'.
I suspect - ironic, no? - that this is all sounding very familiar to you.
Like I said, you live in the modern world, so you're used to having your nervous system ambushed on an regular basis by popups, news headlines, social media shares, email subject lines…
You're so used to having your attention 'grabbed' you've got bruises on your prefrontal cortex, so to speak.
This kind of public speaking feels a lot like marketing.
I'd go further: in a lot of the communications skills coaching that I see, or read about, 'communication' is almost synonymous with marketing.
Alex's suggestions for training your AI helpers to turn up 'surprising' content for your public speaking got me thinking.
Does a message have to be surprising in order to engage the attention?
In other words, is being surprising the only way to be interesting?
That’s interesting! - these listeners are all clearly spellbound by the surprising counterintuitive insights of… meh
That’s interesting!
There's a fascinating paper published in 1971 by the late American sociologist Murray S Davis called That's Interesting!
In it, he wrote:
A theorist is considered great, not because his theories are true, but because they are interesting. … In fact, the truth of a theory has very little to do with its impact, for a theory can continue to be found interesting even though its truth is disputed—even refuted!
Davis goes on to produce an 'Index of the Interesting' with 12 logical categories by which you can classify an idea as 'interesting' or not.
According to Davis, they all boil down to this:
what seems to be X is in reality non-X or what is accepted as X is actually a non-X.
So basically, yes: in order to be interesting, an idea needs to challenge assumptions and reset the audience's notion of reality.
Or in Alex's formulation for our AI helpers:
Ultimately, it’s not about [assumption], it’s about [realisation].
Interesting vs important
So you've said something interesting.
So what?
Is it true? And does it matter?
As Davis says,
a theory can continue to be found interesting even though its truth is disputed—even refuted.
There is no evidence to support the existence of Atlantis. But people continue to talk, think and dream about a lost underwater city, because it's fascinating.
Atlantis: never existed, sadly. But still talked about. There’s a big hotel in Dubai named after it
The dark side of ‘interesting’ for effective communication
This tendency to prioritise what's interesting over what is true, or important, can have malign implications.
Responding to Davis's theory about interestingness, the management scholar Laszlo Tihanyi writes about how the quest for interestingness can skew academic research away from investigating important and difficult problems, towards topics that are interesting but irrelevant:
“it might be true that abusive supervisors are good parents, and a small group of scholars studying leadership could consider this finding interesting. However, it is more important to answer how to respond to or eliminate workplace abuse”
This rabbit hole potentially goes very deep: it's one reason conspiracy theories develop: we are drawn to ideas that are counterintuitive and 'interesting' ('9/11 was an inside job!' 'vaccines don't work') especially if the reality seems boring.
Conspiracy theories: more interesting than the truth
What's this got to do with effective communication?
I'm coming to that.
To be clear, I'm not trashing Alex Merry's approach. Public speaking is hard, writing speeches is hard, and if you're not a confident or established speaker, you probably are going to have to fight for an audience's attention. Use his tools: they work.
I sometime find, though, that unconfident speakers - speakers who are nervous about the physical act of speaking in front of even a small group of people - put a great deal of focus on content, as a way to avoid having to deal with their delivery.
Striving for 'interesting' content becomes an insurance policy against underwhelming delivery.
And it's not always going to work, is it? Because maybe you don't have anything 'interesting' to say!
If it were always easy to identify 'counterintuitive' or 'surprising' angles about your quarterly sales report, or your client's legal case, or your latest research that confirms (boo! Boring!) the existing evidence, then you probably wouldn't need Alex's prompts to help ChatGPT make you sound 'interesting'.
And the good news is: it doesn't matter.
Effective speaking, the way I see it and they way I coach, is not about saying something 'interesting. It's about sounding and being 'interesting' - you the speaker, not the speech.
(See what I did there? Alex would be proud of me! And I didn't even use AI to come up with that!)
Using the techniques I work with - which by the way are not 'surprising', they're all things you do already when you're on particularly good form that day - we can remind ourselves of what good speakers do to earn and hold an audience's attention, so that the message gets across, whether or not it gives their brains the dopamine hit of novelty, or triggers a threat response ('wait - she says everything I thought I knew is wrong? Sh*t, I'd better pay attention to this person if I want to be right!')
IMPORTANT NOTE: by the way, we can and do work on how to make the content of your talks more interesting, as well as 'interesting'.
You know how to find me if you want to chat more.
Many thanks to Alex Merry for reliably providing me with something to get my teeth into :)