Is It Okay To Go Off Script?

You have the best of intentions. You’ve created, practiced, and are ready to deliver your presentation. You’ve been introduced and are diving into your content, but you feel like your audience is restless and you’re not sure why. So you stop to do a quick check-in with them and find out they have questions related to what you’re speaking about, but that are a bit off topic. You want to answer their questions, but you’re not sure if it’s okay to go off script.

Here are 3 aspects of going off script to consider before you go down this particular rabbit hole:

How much time you’re speaking for: If you only have 10-15 minutes, that’s just not enough time to detour from your scheduled presentation. If you have more time to speak, you’ll still need to decide if going off script will interfere with your ability to deliver on what your audience expects to hear from you—including your takeaways… without going over your allotted time.

On a good note, when an audience starts asking off-topic questions, consider their questions as gifts. First, their questions could mean you haven’t captured your topic in the right light just yet, so now you have obvious content to add, or spiff up. Second, their questions could also be evidence that it’s time for you to create a new talk. Then you’ll have two talks to share with audiences and for event planners to choose from!

How an event planner might view your off-script adventure: When an event planner invites you to speak, it’s because they believe your topic description and takeaways are a good match for their audience. When you accept, you’ve made a commitment to cover that specific topic in a way that provides specific takeaways.

So, before deciding to go off script, you need to be confident in your ability to answer the questions at hand, AND complete the presentation you were brought in to deliver, including your takeaways, within the time you were given. The last thing you want is people complaining to the event planner that you didn’t deliver on what you promised. It’s the last thing your planner wants too.

How much speaking experience you have: If you’re a beginning speaker, going off script is a very challenging path to go down. Obviously, it’s easy enough to go off script in the direction your audience wants to go, but it can be very difficult refocusing their attention back to your original presentation.

If you still want to be able to go off script when it feels like the right thing to do, use a timer. Explain to your audience that you’re using the timer because you appreciate their questions and want to put aside time to answer them. Let them know that when the timer goes off, you’ll be moving back to your “official” presentation.

If you know you won’t have enough time to go off script AND deliver your presentation and takeaways, have solutions ready beforehand for letting your audience know you’re willing to answer their questions outside of your presentation. As always, make sure to clear any solutions with your event planner first, solutions such as offering an impromptu Zoom meeting, sticking around after your presentation to answer questions, and providing your contact information so people can reach out to you to get their questions answered.

So, the answer to the question of whether it is, or isn’t, okay to go off script during a presentation is a definite… maybe. Obviously, the more experienced you are as a speaker the easier it will be. Either way, what I love about this conversation is that it shows how committed we are as speakers to showing our audiences how much we truly do care about their thoughts and concerns… and that we’re willing to take advantage of different opportunities for sharing our problem-solving expertise with them.

‘Til we speak again….

~Beth