How to Start Conversations That Get Results with Chris Fenning.

Welcome to Public Speaking with Peter George. I'm Peter George, public speaking trainer, speaker, and award-winning author of The Captivating Public Speaker. Today, work conversations should be clear, concise, and get to the point quickly. The problem is we don't always know how to do that. What does it mean to be concise? How do you summarize a complex topic in just a few lines? My guest, Chris Fenning, has the answers. Chris is an engineer by training whose career path led him from project management into senior leadership, Toastmasters, and eventually a deep focus on the intersection of public speaking and workplace communication. He's the author of The First Minute: How to Start Work Conversations That Get Results. Here's my conversation with Chris Fenning.

Stop Asking for a Minute

Peter: Before we get into your book, what's one tip our listeners need to know?

Chris: Stop asking for a minute. Which is ironic, given the title of the book. But when we start communicating, one of the first things we say is, "Do you have a minute?" And almost none of those conversations actually take a minute. In fact, most of them take more than a minute just to get to the point. By saying it, you're setting yourself up to miss your own self-imposed target — and the other person knows it. So instead of asking for a minute, take ten seconds before you approach someone and think about how long this will realistically take. Do you need three minutes? Five? Ask for that. If you come in under, you win. And if someone genuinely has three minutes available but hears "do you have a minute?", they may still say no — because their experience tells them it won't actually be a minute.

Why the First Minute Matters Most

Peter: Why is the first minute more important than all the others?

Chris: It's the foundation of the conversation. In a TED-style presentation, you need a hook to draw your audience in — you have to be engaging, you have to create clarity, or you lose them. But we tend to forget about that foundation when we get to everyday work conversations: the team meeting, the update with a colleague, the three-person check-in. Those are still forms of public speaking — and in all of them, the first minute is doing the same job. It's helping your audience tune out everything else in their head, understand what you need from them, and get ready to actually listen. Think about the news: if they skipped the headline and the brief summary and simply dove into the story, the audience would be disoriented. That thirty-second setup makes everything that follows land.

The Three-Step Framing Framework

Peter: What should someone actually do in that first minute?

Chris: The first fifteen seconds of any conversation is what I call framing. It has three parts. The first is context — tell your audience, in just a few words, what you want to talk about. Of all the things in the universe, you want to talk about this project, this sales meeting, this account. That's it. Four or five words. Once people hear it, they stop thinking about the meeting they just left or the one they're heading to. You've moved them from where they are to where you need them to be.

The second is intent — let them know what you need, want, or expect them to do with the information. Are you asking a question? Looking for a decision? Just sharing an update? Until the other person knows the answer to that, their brain is spending its energy trying to work out what's expected of them rather than actually listening. So you state it directly.

The third is a headline — a one-line summary of the key message, just like the first line of a news broadcast. This tells your audience: here is the main thing. I'm now ready to listen to the rest. Do those three things, and you'll bring people's attention to your topic, relieve them of the uncertainty of not knowing what's expected, and give them a clear frame for everything that follows.

Peter: No one has ever read a magazine article without first reading the headline. You could extend that analogy — imagine starting an article at paragraph seven with no idea what it's about. That's what it feels like when someone dives straight into detail without any framing.

Chris: Exactly. And I want to add one important caveat: the first minute starts when you switch to the work topic — not at the beginning of the conversation. Start with the human side: ask how they are, talk about the weekend. Relationship-building is critically important. But once you transition to the work topic, that's when framing begins. That's when communication shifts from social to transactional — and transactional communication has a very different set of rules.

Emails, Meetings, and Everything in Between

Peter: Does this work in written communication as well?

Chris: Absolutely — in emails, meeting invites, presentations. Emails are particularly important because when someone opens one, they need to know immediately what it's about and what you want from them. Context, intent, key message — those same three elements apply. As for meeting invites, I'll say this clearly: if you ever send me a blank meeting invite, you'll get a blank response. Don't do it. When you write an invite that includes context, intent, and what you're hoping to get out of the meeting, you've given attendees a reason to show up prepared. And you've given yourself the first thirty seconds of the meeting already written — you can literally read those bullet points to open. It helps people who are nervous about facilitating. It re-orients people who didn't read the invite. It gets everyone on the same page instantly.

The Business Case for Clearer Communication

Peter: How much time can companies actually save by applying these methods?

Chris: A study by Siemens found that in a company of 100 people, more than 800 hours a year are lost just from people having to go back and validate what they heard. And that figure only accounts for the time spent double-checking. It doesn't include work that had to be redone because someone misunderstood a message, or meetings that ran an hour instead of fifteen minutes.

And this is part of a broader gap. Communication is typically categorized as a soft skill, which means training dollars flow almost exclusively toward leaders and future leaders. But every job description in existence lists communication in its top three requirements. We say it's important — and then we provide very little training to the people who need it most. Communication at work is genuinely different from social communication. It can be taught. It can be tested. It can be measured. Treating it as something people will simply pick up on their own is what creates those 800-hour losses.

What Transformation Looks Like

Peter: What's the biggest change you've seen in someone you've worked with?

Chris: A face came to mind immediately. She was a highly capable project manager — genuinely excellent at her job — but she was being blocked from promotion because she was essentially silent in meetings. When we dug into it, the issue was that she never quite knew how to structure what she wanted to say. So we worked through the framing techniques, talked through examples, added some vocal confidence work as well. And after applying these methods, she spoke up in every single presentation, meeting, and executive update that followed — with confidence and clarity.

What I picture when I think of her is this: when she spoke up, other people in the room sat up straighter. She went from being very quiet to being the one who made everyone else pay attention. The credit belongs to her entirely — she put in the work to make it happen. But that's what structured communication training can do.

Peter: And once you realize people are sitting up when you speak, the confidence builds on itself.

Chris: Exactly right. One final tip worth leaving people with: when you stop someone to ask for their time, also check whether they have the ability and availability to actually help you right then. They might not be the right person to answer your question. They might be on their way to a meeting. Give them a polite way out before you share all the details. It's considerate — and people will appreciate you for it.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Public Speaking with Peter George. To connect with Chris Fenning and learn more about his work, visit chrisfenning.com or connect with him on LinkedIn. The First Minute is available from all good bookstores, including Amazon, or directly through his website. Are you ready to be calm, confident, and credible every time you speak in public? Then visit petergeorgepublicspeaking.com and let's make it happen. I'll see you next time.