Coherence Is Overrated (in public speaking)
We’ve all been there. A speaker, possibly even a famous one, steps up on stage. They start out interestingly, but after a while they seem to… skip. After a while, you realize that the speech doesn’t really hang together, and is rather like three different talks, stitched together into a Frankenspeech. Depending on your personality, you’re either bemused, annoyed, or angry. Afterwards, you want to talk about this with someone, so you open up about how annoying it is when speakers just skip around and don’t stick to a theme. The person you’re telling this to looks at you and goes: “Oh. Well, I thought it was great!”. What’s going on?
Speakers are always exhorted to make sure their talks are coherent, consistent, on theme. That’s why many advise you to do so much planning, to create a flowchart or similar when laying it out, and to practice until it is all just one smooth flow. Speakers are terrified of seeming disjointed when on stage, which is why so many make sure they have a numbered list or similar rhetorical device to structure their talks. Well, let me let you in on a little secret:
A speech can be incoherent and still succeed. Coherence is overrated.
A lot of speakers and speaking coaches (or similar) will be vehement in their anger and protests against this claim. They will call it nonsense, or worse. Still, I maintain I am right, and I have quite a lot of evidence to back it up. Evidence 1: I have given disjointed, borderline incoherent speeches, and received rave reviews and the best scores of the event. Evidence 2: I have heard some of the greatest speakers in the world give speeches that made no internal logical sense, and seen them receiving standing ovations. Evidence 3: I have, as stated in the beginning, been angered at a Frankenspeech, and met with confusion when I complained to smart people who were also in the audience about it.
Now, before we get any further, let me clarify a few things. I am not saying that incoherence is a superpower (unless you’re Tom Peters, but the rules simply don’t apply to ol’ Tom). Nor am I saying that making a speech more disjointed will make it better. Not all disjointed speeches are good, nor should you aim for incoherence. On the contrary, in most cases I would urge you to try to keep talks internally consistent and logical. However, this doesn’t mean you should get all that neurotic about it, for a degree of incoherence doesn’t necessarily derail an otherwise good keynote or similar publish speaking performance. What I am trying to say is:
Don’t worry too much about coherence, for audiences always fill in the gaps.
A speech, such as the keynotes that are my main interest, is never the perfect transmission of a set of insight regarding a theme. Instead, it is a performance around such insights, one where numerous things are equally important as the core messages of the speech — delivery, narrative arc, even choreography (yes, the way a speaker moves on stage counts as this). Perhaps even more importantly, it is a performance that is interpreted by the audience. The audience doesn’t just listen and look, they take in the totality of the e.g. keynote and form their own image and meaning from it. Put somewhat more bluntly:
Speakers don’t create coherence, audiences do!
Imagine a business event, focusing on artificial intelligence. The audience consists of managers, few of whom know the field all that well. There are two speakers, one a true specialist, the other a pundit. The specialist comes on first. Her talk is well-structured, methodical, and almost merciless in its logic. It contains an astounding amount of fact and insight. It is, however, rather difficult. To appreciate just how its parts follow in perfect order, you need to keep up your focus, and if you do not understand a term or if your concentration breaks, odds are you will get lost. The pundit comes on second. His talk is a loose collection of anecdotes, with a nice framing. It uses very few technical terms, and a great deal more motivational quips and amusing visions. It doesn’t even try to always explain how one thing connects to another, and it will pass over several critical problems. That said, it gives the audience a number of nice little cases and examples to ponder. Which keynote will be better received?
Granted, I have caricatured to approaches to keynoting. Still, the reality of the matter is that when push comes to shove, logic only gets you so far. The reason a pundit's somewhat disjointed speech will almost always go over better is a simple one:
Human beings are masters of pattern recognition — even when there is no pattern to recognize.
There is an almost magical way in which audiences can take the ideas of a speech and find a pattern, a coherence, that you neither planned nor even necessarily recognize. I’ve had people thank me after a keynote for addressing problems I had no idea about, and for standing up for people I hadn’t thought about when I designed the keynote (but now wish I had). I’ve listened to people discuss the keynotes of people I know well and read into them a logic that I know the speaker had never entertained.
The fact of the matter is that no-one in your audience will hear every word you say. They will miss parts, mishear others, and misunderstand a whole lot. If you tell a joke, at least 20% of the audience will not get it, or understand it in a different way than you intended. When you tell a story, the same holds. I’ve had a person think that I was talking about a company that sold ties, one called Tie-Land, when I was referring to Thailand, the country. You would think that this would have marred his enjoyment of the keynote, but no. He was fascinated about just how much I could get out of a case about selling ties…
When a person in your audience doesn’t get something — because they misheard, or because you simply made a little skip in coherence — their brains will not go “I refuse to continue until someone bridges this logical gap!”. Instead, their brain will start trying to piece things together, looking for a pattern even when there is not one to be found. Their brain will create a context, do an interpretation, tie things together in a way that works for them. If there are logical gaps, the audience's brains will start filling them in. This interpretative work will at times create creative new wholes that you never intended, and every good speaker will come up against interpretations of their speech that are actually better than the speaker intended.
A speaker who gets neurotic about coherence will thus miss out, for their work will often make their speeches more stilted and patronizing. They too will get misunderstood, but often in less interesting ways than the keynotes of their more freewheeling colleagues. Now, we can’t all be as gloriously disjointed as the aforementioned Tom Peters, who seems to take great pleasure from contradicting himself at least once in every speech, but we can all just relax a little.
That’s the whole point of this post: Relax.
Don’t fret so much about whether that great example you found really fits. Don’t worry about that transition. So what if your third case isn’t really in line with the first two? We all slip up from time to time. The audience doesn’t just forgive, they didn’t even realize the slip was there. Sure, there will always be a smarty-pants or ten who will ask you about the incoherent bits, but they are always the minority. For every person calling you out for this, there are ten who created a novel interpretation of what you said. Cherish this, and stop caring so much about always being perfectly structured, ordered, logical.
Human beings are not, by default, that coherent. We all slip and slide, are less than perfectly logical, make leaps of faith in our thinking. Speakers who fight this, and attempt to be as coldly logical as Spock from Star Trek, will win in coherence but lose in humanity. Yet our audiences consist of humans, with the human tendency to forgive the occasional incoherence and the very human capacity of creating their own patterns and their own interpretations. Lean into this. Don’t overrate coherence when speaking. Be human, and allow your audience to be.
Oh, and if you feel that this text has some flaws when it comes to logical coherence, ask yourself: Is that by mistake or by design?
