Preparing Without Scripting

C · Plate 10 in the On the Record series · Other Communications

There are two kinds of preparation for speaking in public, and they behave completely differently under pressure. One assembles sentences to be delivered. The other assembles knowledge to be drawn on. The first is faster to produce and fails the moment the conversation departs from the expected shape, which it always does.

The failure is specific and recognisable. A speaker working from prepared sentences meets an unanticipated question and reaches for the nearest prepared sentence, which does not fit. The audience hears the mismatch immediately, well before they could explain what they heard. The impression created is of evasion, even when the speaker is being entirely straightforward and simply has nothing prepared.

Preparing material rather than wording

The alternative is to prepare the underlying material in a form that can be recombined. For any subject, that means a small number of facts the speaker is certain of, the reasoning that connects them, the limits of what is known, and the two or three things that would change the conclusion. Between them these cover an enormous range of questions, including most of the ones nobody predicted.

Material prepared this way survives rephrasing because it was never phrased in the first place. The speaker constructs the sentence in the moment from things they know, which is what fluent speech is. The result sounds unrehearsed because it is unrehearsed at the level of language, while being thoroughly rehearsed at the level of content.

The question behind the question

Most difficult questions are two questions stacked together: a specific one that can be answered and a general one about whether the speaker can be trusted on this subject. Answering only the specific question technically satisfies the exchange and leaves the general question hanging, which is why a factually complete answer can still feel unsatisfying to everyone present.

Addressing the general question usually takes one extra sentence acknowledging what makes the subject difficult. This is not a concession or a technique for managing an audience. It is the accurate description of a situation that the audience can already see, and declining to describe it is what makes an otherwise sound answer sound rehearsed.

What to do with what is not known

The most useful preparation is often a clear list of what the speaker does not know and is not in a position to say. Having that list in advance converts the worst moment in any exchange into an ordinary one. A speaker who can say precisely where the boundary of their knowledge lies, and why, is more credible than one who never reaches a boundary.

The phrasing matters less than the specificity. There is a large difference between declining to comment and explaining that the figure is being checked and will be published when it is. The second tells the audience what will happen and when, which is information; the first tells them only that a door is closed, and invites them to speculate about what is behind it.

Preparation of this kind takes longer than writing lines and is harder to review, because there is nothing to approve. It produces a person who can be asked things rather than a person who can deliver something, and only one of those is useful in a conversation. The reviewing habit worth building is to test preparation by asking questions nobody expected, rather than by reading the answers to the ones everybody did.