What happens when you assume?
An hour before I was scheduled to speak on stage, I sat with my team to do one last run-through of the talk. I trusted them completely and valued their input. They had helped me develop the topics, the examples, and the audience activities. It had all the components of a great talk.
I’m comfortable with public speaking, but I always get nervous at the start. Once I get going I’m fine. In previous talks, I’d calmed my nerves by starting with a joke. Someone once told me, “Get them to laugh in the first few minutes, and the rest will be easy.” It’s great advice — if they laugh.
Minutes before walking on stage I shared with my team a joke I’d been thinking about using. I’d soon regret not paying more attention to their reaction. “Um, maybe… but I really don’t think you need it.” They began to explain why I didn’t need it, but my name was being called, and I decided to commit to the joke.
What was the joke, you ask? Well, it pains me to even retell this, but here goes. At the start of my talk, I spoke about how important it was to check your own assumptions about a problem people are experiencing before getting into possible solutions. Some audience members flashed guilty smiles, silently acknowledging they’d done exactly that. I nodded and made eye contact with them. Hey don’t feel too bad, I’ve done it, too. This early audience connection gave me the perfect moment to deliver my joke.
“Never assume you know what problems your customers are experiencing… because you know what happens when you assume. Right?”
Blank stares. Silence. Sweat. Terror.
I wanted to hide. I wanted to run for the exit. I’d just started my talk and was scheduled to be up there for another sixty minutes. What now? If you totally missed the joke, then you know what it must have been like to be in that audience. They didn’t seem to know either. It was originally told in an episode of the popular television sitcom The Odd Couple in 1973. In that scene, one of the characters breaks down the word “assume” and points out that it is dangerous to assume because you might make an “ass” out of “u” and “me.”
I’d seen clips of that scene replayed over the years. I thought it was kind of funny. The message behind it aligned well with the message I was trying to convey. The studio audience laughed when it originally happened on the show. What could go wrong?
The painful irony was that I’d managed to ignore the exact point I was trying to make. I’d made a very incorrect assumption that people in the audience would know that joke. I also assumed that, even if they knew it, they would laugh. I was wrong on both counts. It bombed spectacularly. I fumbled through my next couple of points and recovered enough to deliver the rest of my talk. It certainly wasn’t my best work, but I survived.
When I walked off the stage, my teammates couldn’t even look me in the eye. Unlike the audience, they knew this joke was coming and they were powerless to stop me. They had tried to warn me. When we made it back to a quiet space, I said with all the seriousness I could muster, “I think that went really well.” We all burst out laughing hysterically until tears streamed down our faces. We still laugh about it to this day.
*This story is 100% true and is an excerpt from my book, Question to Learn.