I am just back from a highly pointless presentation. The bureaucrats who run the Tokyo Metro subway system and the Tokyo Government Planning Division were presenting on their plan for a new subway line to be constructed in my neighbourhood. This is my second occasion to attend one of these types of presentations. The previous one was about changing the direction of aircraft landing at Haneda and for planes to fly low over our neighbourhoods, which unfortunately are in the new direct flight path. These “explanation sessions” are pointless for many reasons, including the way they are conducted.
There is no real appetite to entertain the viewpoint of the assembled residents and so the design is to obscure, divert and suck up as much time as possible with administrative aspects of the meeting, in order to limit the question time.
Interestingly they had a slide show, which had an announcer read the whole content to us. Why was that required, when everyone can read what is on screen? To use up the question time of course. Question time itself was interesting in the way they handled it. Somewhat surprisingly, they do what we teach regarding hostile questions. They had a navigator take the hot question, then paraphrase it, removing all the venom and spiky bits, before handing it over to the supposed experts.
You might be thinking, “well these are government bureaucrats, so there is no relation to the world of commerce”. Often we can see the flaws in others, but ignore those same flaws in ourselves. Japanese business presentations are very formal. There will be a navigator to tell us things, like where the exits are located and to turn off our phones. The President giving the talk will often not be highly familiar with the slides prepared by the underlings and will read the whole thing to us.
Sometimes, if there is a screen located behind the podium, they will unhelpfully turn their back to us and their head toward the screen and then read the whole content to us. Often, there will be a slick corporate video shown, the main purpose of which is to reduce the President’s speaking time burden and which adds very little value to the presentation.
Taking the sting out of questions is a legitimate technique, but you still have to handle the questions. Today there was a lot of dissembling of answers and that is never satisfactory. The same things happen in business. You can see the speaker is flustered by the question and doesn’t know how to handle it. The first problem is they go directly to answer mode, instead of creating a little brain space to think about the answer. Invariably, we have all had the experience of coming up with the killer answer about two hours too late, for when we needed it. What came out of our mouth though was the first thing which popped into our mind and obviously that will never be as good as a more considered answer. Our mouth was too close to our ear and our brain wasn’t engaged fast enough, before we blurted out our response. We can wind up sprouting nonsense in reply to the question.
Just adding a little cushion makes a world of difference. The cushion is that space between the question ending and the answer proper beginning. You might ask them to repeat the question or you can paraphrase what they said or you can make a neutral comment such as, “that is a very important consideration” or all three, to gain thinking time. Five seconds does a wonder of good when it comes to contemplating how to handle tough questions. Naturally, our answers won’t always be satisfying for certain members of the audience, but we need to explain the logic of our approach, decisions or our actions.
If we don’t know the answer, then trying to snow the audience, instead of admitting the truth is a guaranteed way to destroy our reputation. Audiences will accept it if you say to the questioner, “I don’t have an answer for that point at the moment, but let’s exchange business cards after my talk and I will find the answer for you. Who has the next question?”.
Now this only works when the question is very specific and the answer is not something that you would be expected to necessarily have at your fingertips. If it is within the scope of your subject and you don’t know the answer, then that is a black mark on your professionalism. You see this sometimes from jet setting VIPs who swoop in to give their talk, before they head off to their next engagement. It is a PR exercise which can go wrong very quickly. Their presentation was prepared for them and they think their job is to just read it out to us. Again, it is better to be honest and admit you should know that answer, apologise that you don’t and promise to get the answer to the questioner. None of us are perfect, so we will accept your odd flaw and imperfection.
We should always keep in mind that every time we get up to speak, we are punting our personal and professional brands out there for all to see. Prepare thoroughly and rehearse, rehearse, rehearse is the right formula. If we do that, people will come away impressed with us and feel the time spent was worthwhile and they will be looking forward to hearing from us again in the future.
