The other day, I witnessed a pretty much perfect table topic session delivered by a fellow Toastmaster Jeff Gunther. Heck, I have to say that I’m terribly excited to see what he will bring to our Dawnbreakers meeting in the Toastmaster role. Before the meeting started, I was handed his Competent Leadership manual and asked to provide him some feedback in his role as Table Topics Master — quite frankly, I had very little that I could suggest to Jeff except for the fact that now that he had mastered table topics, it was time to add his own imagination and creativity to them.
I suggested him a Jeopardy-style table topics — one in which the answers were given first and then the questions are ‘made up’ by the Table Topics Master. The idea is one in which both the members and the topics master are unprepared and have to come up with something on the spot. The more I thought about it though, the more I wondered whether an idea like that would really work.
- How would members come up with topics to talk about? Would the table topics master have to assign someone to come up with topics on slips of paper to be passed out during table topics? The table topics master could not do this themselves otherwise it would ruin the aspect of the topics master coming up with topics.
- What kind of topics would be appropriate? I notice that many topics (specifically table topic speakers) are structured with a repeat of the question at the start or are relatively easy to guess the subject of even if you do not listen to the whole speech. As you can imagine, a table topic that starts off with “What items would I bring on a desert island” would not be a challenge to the topics master to come up with the question. That means that the topics have to have some degree of silliness to them and that the table topic speakers would have to know beforehand that a vague table topic can make things more fun for the table topics master
- This idea is related to the Backwards theme meeting. If the backwards theme is done right, table topic speakers have an idea of what they will be talking about but nothing concrete.
In the hands of a club that knows exactly how the Jeopardy-style table topics work as well as a quick minded table topics master, this can be a lot of fun for all the members as they watch their table topic speeches get twisted and turned when they hear the actual question.
Wang