This article is written by Alain Ruche – a longstanding contrarian.

  • The problem: Speakers often preach new thoughts, but too rarely show us how to think for ourselves.
  • Why it matters: Often centred on the presenter’s ego to please an audience, speeches rarely impact audiences in a transformative way.
  • The solution: Engage in a conversation instead of making a speech, putting all your being into your knowledge, your feelings, your emotion and take the audience on a journey.

The 1995 floods covered a great part of Bangladesh: at that time, I was assigned as a European Union official at the EU Representation and decided to make an assessment mission at Bhola Island. All the houses were underwater. Inside, their inhabitants had built raised floors at a 1.5-metre height. A woman told me she had been living in such conditions with her three children and one goat for two weeks. As the guest of honour, I was offered a chair and invited to sit with my feet literally under 30 cm of water.

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The village chief was an old, proud man and we started to talk. He described their extreme living conditions, so much worsened during floods, but throughout the year with an everyday life of insecurity caused by local thugs attacking people in harvesting time, and a colossal loss of land due to erosion. I listened to him and asked him, “Chief, tell me what you most need here under the current situation?” I obviously had in mind that the EU as a big donor could bring in emergency aid like foodstuffs, oil, blankets and construction materials.

The chief looked at me, then quietly answered: We need peace on Earth.

I had difficulty breathing, as I had in my mind our available resources and the corresponding finance we could offer. This extraordinary answer cornered me in my Western logic of development and aid to poor people. I was assuming that nothing happens unless we make it happen, and that everything that is good must be seen as a result of our effort and intervention. Once again, people who had nothing and were facing incredible obstacles would give me a lesson in simplicity, humility and wisdom.

Definitively, my question was not good, and I feel lifelong gratitude for this wise man who showed me the importance of asking powerful questions…and giving good answers to poor questions.

Find the nub of the question

My first thoughts over today’s question were: How can I be a great speaker? How could I interest my audience? Could I share some tips from my experience? Should I tell them about events with the president of Haiti and Dominican Republic, my keynote speech for 800 researchers in Colombia, or my address to 2,000 destitute women in Bangladesh? This would only be ‘telling’ things. What if these questions were not good questions, only centred on my ego to please an audience? What if we looked at things with another eye?

Today’s question is ‘How to BE a great speaker’, not ‘How to make a great speech’. So, I invite you to engage in a conversation instead of making a speech, putting all your being into your knowledge, your feelings and your emotions. Being a good speaker implies a multi-sensorial approach, also expressing empathy, generosity and compassion. Not being afraid of showing vulnerability. In a complex world, it is critical to create space for making sense of what is emerging. Also, silent pause: keep silent for ten seconds while looking at a murmuration. All these qualities, now in the vanguard of management techniques, are attitudes rather than skills or competencies.

How to BE a great speaker means asking powerful questions that open new insights and nurture action. Questions that give you the desire to experiment, making mistakes and new discoveries along the way. Being driven by your curiosity and awe. Our questions today define the future we want and will have. This is why artists play a critical role in making visible futures already unfolding in front of us.

Take the audience on a journey

Grasping collective intelligence, a great speaker invites the audience to make a special journey together, more than telling people how to fix things or being right. It is about following the waves – like the jazz groove. Speakers often preach new thoughts, but too rarely show us how to think for ourselves, and discover the power of knowing what we don’t know. As speakers, we should always remember that we cannot change others, and rarely can we motivate someone to change. Holding a mirror instead, we empower them to examine their beliefs, their behaviour and their worldview. Reflexive listening is indeed critical in a speech, inspired by a quantum approach of management as proposed by Danah Zohar.

Back to my Bangladesh episode, I understood that we need to consider experience as a permanent process of growing awareness of how our worldview evolves, rather than as an accumulation of facts or events. This allows us to fit our world. In a reflexive way, I also became aware of and revisited major episodes in my life. I realised I could harness the power of experience for personal and business breakthroughs, as an expression of my “experiential intelligence”, as called by Soren Kaplan.

Who we are as speakers depends on what we value, not what we believe. This gives us the flexibility of updating our practices in light of new evidence. This allows us to detach our present from our past, and also to detach our opinions from our identity. Being a great speaker implies changing our minds as the world changes and knowledge evolves. This is why unlearning is so critical. In this respect, asking counterintuitive questions – questions that go against our natural instincts or common sense – is a powerful tool to captivate your audience.

Bombarding the audience with huge data does not pay off. Let’s complement these cold data with ‘warm’ data suited to complex systems, digital data, ethnographic data as used by Shannon Jensen for refugees in South Sudan, and even moist data (dryness of computer + wetness of biological systems) to express an organic worldview.

Let’s be creative! Creative thinking is the most rapidly growing competence in today’s world (WEF and The Future of Work Report). The blurring boundaries of intercultural exchanges are a fascinating world, but be careful with humour!

Let's remain humble. The era of overpowerful experts who claim to have all the answers is over. It is time to restore common sense in an age of experts and artificial intelligence.

My call for action is:

  1. Ask powerful questions

  2. Dare to unlearn

  3. Trigger meaningful conversations

  4. Be yourself.

I leave you with a question:

‘What question, if answered, could make the most difference to the future of policymaking?’

Done reading? Make sure to share your own tips by leaving a comment below ⬇️

(Image credit: Unsplash)