Who’s Listening? Know Your Audience

Public speaking training typically focuses on content and delivery. It’s all about the person speaking – what he or she has to say and how it is said.  The message, the signal, is paramount.  However, this orientation only addresses half of the communications process and can lead to highly ineffective speaking.

Communication by its nature is a two-way process. On one side are the message and the messenger, the origination of the signal. But this signal is useless unless it is received, and has a valuable effect.  On the other side are the recipients and their reaction, what the process really is all about. So truly to share meaning in a complex world, you have to know who’s listening, you must know your audience.  Years ago in his seminal management book “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” personal development guru Stephen Covey wrote,  “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”    So start with your audience and work backwards to the message.

First things first.  What is the occasion of your speech?

Why are you there?  Is it a crucial  interview with a potential employer, a technical address before clients and colleagues, an amusing after-dinner speech?  Or, what is the essential purpose of your speech?  Is it to persuade, to inform, to entertain?  Is it simply to mark a special occasion such as a wedding, funeral, commencement, or other memorial event?   If you are merely informing, entertaining or memorializing, your approach to researching your audience will be very different, in some ways less crucial from persuading them to believe and/or to act in new ways.  When you persuade, you must assume some or all of the listeners are neutral at best, perhaps even hostile.  It’s a real challenge.  (Otherwise your remarks are “preaching to the choir” and not nearly as satisfying.)  You have to change their current mindsets.  You have to think through what their resistances to your ideas are likely to be, both rational (quantitative – logic and facts) and emotional (qualitative – faith and fears) .  In other words, you have to probe both their heads and their hearts for who they are.

What are the physical conditions of the audience at your speech?

Where?  Will you present on stage before a large group out there in stadium seating in the dark, or are you talking in a more intimate setting, perhaps at a well lit table with less than a dozen participants whom you can easily see, just a few feet away?   For large groups, instead of hugging a podium, moving around the stage and focusing progressively on different sections of the audience can help keep their attention.  For a small group, shifting eye contact from one individual to another around the room, staying several seconds with each (hopefully timed to coincide with major speech points)  makes each listener feel engaged with you.  Especially in formal situations, visit the space where you will present beforehand and get a feel for the room, the lighting, the acoustics, etc.  If you can rehearse there, even better.

When? Are you talking early in the morning, just after lunch, late at night?  Are you one of several speakers?  If you are part of a sequence of speakers, it is important to know where in the order you will appear.  If you are the first speaker, your audience is probably fresh but maybe not fully awake. You should be upbeat, energetic, and raise the bar high for everyone after you.   If you are the last speaker in a long day, the audience is likely to be restive, tired of hearing an avalanche of information.  You might acknowledge the situation with a joke (“I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to leave!”) or maybe just be soothing in your tone.

I was once the very last speaker at a multi-day design conference.  My topic was “paperless practice”.  I got up to speak to a nearly empty auditorium.  Looking around the vast volume, I improvised this comment,  “I knew I was talking about paperless practice today, but I did not know I would be audience-less!”   It definitely got a laugh, and their attention,  from the few hardy souls that remained.

Most important, what are the needs and wants of the audience. This is where understanding of sociology and psychology come in.

What is the sociology of the audience?  Or, how is the group of listeners constituted and interrelated?  A key issue is whether there is a hierarchy of influence in the audience. By that I mean, are some members of the audience more important than others to reach?  For example, if you are seeking approval of some sort, such as being hired or having a project green lighted for implementation, who controls this process, who are the ultimate decision-makers in the group?  Other attendees may be advisors who influence the immediate deciders. They matter too.  Others may be just onlookers with very little stake in your message.  They are less important   Try to find out who is who. Among other clues, a published, up-to-date organizational chart helps determine the relative importance of your individuals listeners.  Find out who reports to whom.

One time my design colleagues and I were creating a major presentation for a government agency.  We were hoping to be awarded a big new construction project management contract.  The competition was intense.  While preparing, I had found an internal phone book for that body that showed agency subdivisions and individual titles of staff.  It allowed me to figure out the relationships among the half dozen or so selection panel members that we were informed by letter would be our audience.  We prepared accordingly and got the job.  Panel members revealed to us later that our team was hired because it understood best how the agency was organized!

What is the psychology of the audience, both as a group and as individuals?

Regarding the group, an audience as a whole often shares a certain culture and worldview to which you can appeal en masse.  Figure out what beliefs, ideas, and spirit they embrace in common – what their “zeitgeist” is.  If the culture is a casual mix of highly creative people,  you should be casual and creative in return. Speak about vision and sky blue thinking.  If the culture is more traditional, be more traditional.  Speak above structure and protocol.

When I lead tours at a local museum, I gauge the audience as a group before giving my introductory speech.  If they are tourists, I keep it light, with colorful anecdotes to start, fun facts and interesting stories about the history of the institute.  Mostly, I am entertaining them.  (“Our founder was a billionaire who was married five times.  He ruefully acknowledged he was better at business than at matrimony!”)  If they are professionals,  for example a group of academics with serious interest in art history, I use more substantive remarks such as references to the museum’s mission and the philosophy behind its design.  Mostly, I am informing them.  (“The built forms around us represent a ‘Euclidean nirvana’.”)

Perhaps most interesting to study are the psychologies of key individuals in your audience.  This is especially necessary in a smaller group setting where only a few people are important to reach.  I tend to follow 20th Century Swiss psychiatrist / pyschotherapist Carl G. Jung’s theories of psychological types that characterize individual persons by each’s dominant behavioral style.  The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator system, a popular psychometric instrument used by many companies and institutions today, was developed from Jung’s theories.  I have employed a simplified Jungian / MBTI analysis to determine how to connect with and influence a multitude of listeners over two decades.

Jung’s theories of course are quite complicated, but I can summarize certain concepts that I have found relevant to public speaking.  Jung said that each person favors one of four cognitive functions: thinking and feeling, which are rational approaches to life, and sensing and intuiting which are nonrational.  Objective, logical cognition dominates the thinking person.  Subjective estimation rules the feeling person.  Conscious sensory input is key to the sensing person.  Unconscious perception is primary for the intuiting person.  Of even greater importance, each person also tends toward one of two core personalities, extroversion and introversion.  The extrovert is outgoing and sociable, likes action and is assertive.    The introvert is  more concerned with his or her own mental life and thus is prone to reflection and solitude, favoring thought and a more reserved nature.

Synthesizing what I have read and learned from practice, I have found that rating psychological types of people along two axes is helpful.  A horizontal X-axis charts how a person perceives reality, a cognitive continuum from  logic to emotion.   A vertical Y-axis, records what someone does to interact with the real world; it is a behavioral continuum from thought to action.  The two axes set up a grid where each person’s distinct psychological type can be found.  Four broad categories of listeners result.  You can develop your speaking content and delivery style accordingly.  They are:

The Controller:  objective perception, active interaction

The Advocate:  subjective perception, active interaction

The Analyst: objective perception, passive interaction

The Facilitator: subjective perception, passive interaction

Controllers and Advocates (extroverts) tend to be leaders, highly placed individuals in an organization.  Analysts and Facilitators (introverts) more commonly play supporting roles deeper in the org chart.  Controllers and Advocates decide, with advice from Analysts and Facilitators.  All four personalities can appear in audiences, even relatively small ones.  You should conform your speaking to match their personalities.

To appeal to the Controller, typically a senior executive, stress results, talk of quantitative goals achieved on the past.  For the Advocate, an innovative, dynamic leader, show visions, since this person is future and big picture oriented.  For these two use the head (facts) and the heart (stories) to pitch “high concept”, as they say in the movies business.  Show them you make things happen and fulfill big goals.  You are outgoing like they are.

To reach the Analyst, emphasize logic, indicating in a careful, deductive manner how outcomes happen.  This person is numbers oriented, so use statistics, nuts-and-bolts facts, tangible examples.  To connect with the Facilitator, someone very interested in human relations, stress people skills that develop trust.  Use qualitative proofs, analogies.  For these two, again connect the head and the heart, only in a more detailed yet intuitive manner.  Show you have reliable processes and understand them as people.  You are sensitive like they are.

Sometimes, you just don’t know your audience in advance. What then?  Well, with all four types above and indeed any audience, you still can achieve broad appeal by certain proven techniques.  These are fail-safe measures if your audience is uncertain, or even not what you expected.  First, play your self down. Admit weaknesses; we all have them.   Honest humility is very popular.  Second, talk to the listeners’ interests but don’t be afraid to connect those parochial concerns to a greater issues, i. e. talk locally, but aspire globally.  Third, give sincere appreciation; tell them about themselves.  Fourth, building on point three, identify with the audience; say “we”, not “you”.  Show you are one of them; you are in their group. It is hard for them to ignore someone on their own team.  Fifth, engage the audience physically.  This is especially good with tired groups whose interest is apt to wane.  Ask questions and call upon them to respond, such as with a collective show of hands or with individual suggestions.     Some speakers’ whole acts (comedians especially) are based on scenarios given by the audience.   In that case, the audience gives the speech along with you.  If skillfully done, they will derive a sense of satisfaction beyond the speech topic.  Self discovery is powerful.

When you know your audience, your presentation develops a relevance that really resonates.  You become the method actor who is just like them, yet brings sometime new and interesting to the endless party of life.  Even if you only appeal to them as human beings, you are acknowledging their existence and the importance of their existence.  When you know who is listening, you craft a better message that says, ” I care about you.”  If they hear that, they will respond.  When you successfully communicate, you say to your listeners, “You matter to me.”  In return they inevitably will respond, “You matter to us!”