But throwing chalk works. Don’t get me wrong I wish all the people I value the opinion of or need to get adhesion from were full of confidence and perfectly fine speaking in public. It would make my life easier. Sadly they are not so I sometimes have to push them in the swimming pool. Hopefully at some point they will realise they are perfectly able to swim. In the meantime, well, tough love it’s gonna be.
I think throwing chalk could just be gaming metrics. If people are interested it shows that what's happening is valuable, they benefit from what's being presented or have input that the presenter needs and they want to get that across. What the organization should care about is not that people ask questions or give feedback, it should care that time is being used well. That is we know this meeting isn't a waste of time because people are interested active participants and if people just sit quietly and wait for thing to be over maybe it wasn't that useful.
When you force people to talk you are getting the metric (people asked questions) but because you are forcing it the metric becomes disconnected from what you actually care about - was this meeting a waste of time. You haven't actually improved things you've just obfuscated the problem.
I have worked with people who will just sit quietly and wait for things to be over even if they have questions just to not have to talk in a meeting and might ask them to you later if you are lucky.
It "works", but with negative side effects whose impact you seem to be underestimating the importance of. Meanwhile it's quite easy to encourage people to speak up more (and to take risks while doing so) via other, infinitely more decent and respectful means.
