Background

The principle of activating questions goes back to the research of the American psychologist and educator John Dewey. He was one of the first to describe the “active learning” method. Here, participants actively engage in the discussion and reach a common understanding through questions. A further development took place in the so-called “FlowTeam-Design”* by Martin Gerber and Heinz Gruner. Their “Integrative Presentation”* uses the potential of colleagues, partners and superiors and has the audience take over personal responsibility for the presentation. In short, “commitment” is created.

Basic Assumption

If several people are brought together in one place (virtually or physically) and synchronously follow a presentation passively, it is quite costly for an organization/company. Just add the hourly salary of each person and multiply it by the time you are sitting together. You can do this by using this meeting cost calculator app.

But besides distributing information a presentation can also have other purposes, such as receiving feedback, taking decisions or – in general developing the content of the presentation further. The “activating question” can help to achieve that. It involves the audience actively. In addition, activating questions can provide a closer inner connection and support a shared result, which everyone buys into.

We will look at how to ask a good “Activating Question” in the next section. We would like to point out that activating the audience through the instrument of the “Activating Question” is not a simple matter. This is because both, the presenters and the participants would have to change their inner attitude and engage in a joint (albeit brief) co-creation.

Step-by-step Instructions

1. Think about one aspect of the content of your presentation that you would like to develop further. Maybe you need feedback or you want the audience to take a decision after your presentation. Doing this will force you to really think about the desired outcome of your presentation: Why are you holding it in the first place?
2. After you have identified this aspect, formulate a question for your participants. As a rule, activating questions should be asked right at the beginning of a presentation so that the listeners can think about the answers to the question right away during the actual introduction/presentation.
3. Collect the answers after the presentation. You can collect individual voices from the audience or invite them to share the answers to the question in written form, e.g. on an online collaboration board.

Some Tips

• Explain the purpose first: “Why are you presenting today?” & “What do you need from your audience?”.

• Present your activating question(s), if possible in a visualized form.

• Ask open question(s).

• Make sure that it is a specific (content-related) question (not a boring general question like “How was I?”).
  
• Think of the audience as your first customer whose input you can now use to move one step forward.

Examples

We have collected a few examples for you from our consulting contexts with other organizations. Of course, you lack information about the context to fully understand the content of the question. Nevertheless, these examples could give you some orientation:

• Presenting a paper prototype of a new dashboard: ”What work-around can we use in order to get the data from the SAP R-II into our new HANA database?“
• Presenting an internal communication strategy: “We will now outline some strategies on how to reach our internal customers; please give us feedback on whether the channels we want to use are the ones you would also use. Where do we have a blind spot, if any?“
• Presenting a transformation strategy: “We want to make our success measurable. This is not trivial since we are dealing with rather soft topics. During the presentation, we will show some KPIs. Please give us feedback later; do you have any other suggestions?“
• Presenting to the board: „What else does the board need to take an informed decision?“

Source

* The terms “FlowTeam” and “Integrative Presentation” were created by Martin Gerber and Heinz Gruner: “FlowTeams – Selbstorganisation in Arbeitsgruppen“, Die Orientation, Band 108, page 27 and 33.

RELATED METHODS