by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n
A speaker can lead an accepting or friendly audience just about anywhere. Hostile audiences, however, can uncover holes in thought. I recommend the questioning group\u2014especially when the stakes are high.<\/strong><\/p>\n It was a senior-level course in Electrical Engineering. The teacher, I can’t recall his name, but I do remember that he didn’t have a PhD, just a Master’s<\/em> and several decades of experience, walked us through the solution to a quirky design problem for 45 minutes. We had it. We knew what to do.<\/p>\n Then he pulled it on us. He showed us how all that stuff he just told us was wrong and would never work.<\/p>\n The Lesson:<\/strong> If you are a friendly audience, i.e., you are not skeptical and you don’t ask any questions, the speaker can lead you through all sorts of nonsense.<\/p>\n The Hostile Audience:<\/strong> the attitude is, “I doubt you, whatever it is you are about to say, so convince me.” Note: the hostile audience holds no personal animosity. It does, however, hold healthy skepticism and asks lots of questions. Sometimes we need the sharp questions, the uncomfortable poke with a stick.<\/p>\n The Friendly Audience:<\/strong> like the classroom full of seniors I was in. We were in awe of the speaker and had no inclination to question anything. There are occasions when a friendly audience is better for all of us. There aren’t many of these situations when we work with adults. They sort of dry up once we become teenagers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Dwayne Phillips A speaker can lead an accepting or friendly audience just about anywhere. Hostile audiences, however, can uncover holes in thought. I recommend the questioning group\u2014especially when the stakes are high. It was a senior-level course in Electrical Engineering. The teacher, I can’t recall his name, but I do remember that he didn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119,20,247],"tags":[120,142,248],"class_list":["post-2502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adults","category-learning","category-questions","tag-adults","tag-learning","tag-questions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2502"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2503,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2502\/revisions\/2503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}