Dealing With Questions When Presenting
Japan is quite interesting in the sense that you often don’t get any questions after your presentation. Screaming silence at the end. Before the presentation, we often spend our time thinking what would happen if I can’t answer the question or what will I do if I get a tough question? Japan has the opposite issue where the talk falls flat on its face, because there are zero questions for the speaker. The whole construct collapses into anti climax. Having no questions has the inference that the topic wasn’t interesting or that the speaker was a boor, rather than it was a brilliant presentation, which answered everything perfectly and comprehensively. After calling for questions and then being left stranded high and dry, it feels quite embarrassing. On the other hand, getting questions you can’t deal with is also tricky. This is either because you have no idea how to answer them and look a fool or because the question feels more like someone is trying to inflict grievous bodily harm upon you.
The no questions outcome is in fact, a result of lack of planning from the outset. The speaker has prepared a talk where they are focused on transmitting information to the audience. The crowd received it and that was that, game over. We need a different approach. In the planning stage, break your talk up into brackets of around five minutes. At each five minute point, we need to liven things up a bit. We should anticipate our audience might start flagging. We know their attention spans are increasingly microscopic and audiences are so easily distracted today.
Asking a rhetorical question is a good way of dragging everyone back into the room with you. This works because they are not sure if they have to actually answer it or not. Normally we allow the tension to build a little, before we spring the trap and answer it. Sometimes we can just leave it there, hanging and not answer it at all. If you are worried about facing a sea of blank, silent faces at the end of your talk, this is a good seed to plant, to inspire the audience to ask you later about the answer. You have tempted them with your question. However you didn’t sate them with the answer. They are vaguely dissatisfied as a result and may raise it in the question time, because you have sufficiently piqued their curiosity.
We can also pose a straight question to the audience and ask them to consider their thoughts on the subject. We don’t answer it ourselves and we don’t extract any answers from them at that moment either. This is another seed planting expedition to inspire them to ask their questions or make a comment. Or we can invite them to go deeper on a topic or specify we can have more clarification during question time, if there is an interest.
Being the first to do anything in Japan or to volunteer, pushing yourself forward is frowned upon. That is why deathly silence sweeps the room when we get to the Q&A. Therefore as the speaker, we have to create some momentum ourselves. After seeing there are no hands going up, we pose our own question and then we answer it. We can say, “A question I am often asked is....” Having answered our own question, we may find the coast is clear enough for one of the members of the audience to ask their own question. We can also use a sakura or a plant in the audience, to ask the first question, if we worry the atmosphere will collapse when no one puts their hand up. I am sometimes asked by event organisers to ask the first question, if they think the crowd is a bit shy. My job is to get the ball rolling and in all instances it has worked.
In some cases, the question will be outside your scope of understanding or knowledge. Don’t try and bluff your way through it or give some half baked answer to make it seem as if you know the answer. Just say you don’t know and if the questioner will exchange business cards with you later, you will do your best to get the answer. Move on quickly and smoothly, by saying, “who has the next question?”.
Now nasty, hostile, angry, smarty pants questions are a different matter. Either the audience member thinks you are full of crap or grossly mistaken. They think you need correcting and they are just the person to do it. They want to draw your attention to all the other possibilities you have neglected. Sometimes in internal meetings, they may be an ambitious, competitive colleague who wants to take you down. Their aim is to make you look like a numbskull in front of everyone. Or they may be trying to take the whole conversation off piste, on to a mad tangent. They try to highjack the proceedings.
What do we do about that?
We need to understand that the distance between our ear and our mouth is too close. We need a circuit breaker, an injection of rational thought to ward off the default emotional reaction. This is almost impossible to do once the chemicals in the body kick into gear. So we have to get in early to regain control of our brain and mouth. We will usually have some words already formed in our mouths, poised for release. We need to stop that process and switch to another tack. We want to make an initial quite bland, vanilla, neutral statement, which neither extinguishes nor encourages the incendiary question. In the few seconds time it takes for us to make that short filler statement, we can mentally regroup. This allows us to move on to our second or third possible reply. These will always be better thought through than the first one that just bolted out of our mouth.
One little bonus tip.
When you do get around to answering the hostile questioner, maintain direct eye contact with the instigator for six seconds and smile. Then continue with your answer while make eye contact with everyone else in the audience, one person at a time for six seconds each. Never ever give the nasty question originator any more eye contact after that point. Ignore them completely from then on. They were smug, arrogant, narcistic. They were secretly saying to everyone, “look at me, look at me. I asked a zinger question because I am so tough and smart”. They want everyone’s attention, to be the star of the show, to eclipse the speaker, to trample over your presentation. We can’t have that. After that first six seconds of direct eye contact with them to face them down and show you are not scared of them or their zinger question, you simply blank them. Take all the air out of their sails by not giving them any more attention whatsoever, throughout the remainder of the Q&A session.
Action Steps
Plan the speech content for the possibility of no questions Organise your sakura in the audience to ask the first question Say, “A question I am often asked is….” When facing a hostile question, use a buffer sentence to allow the brain to select a better answer Eyeball your torturer for the first six seconds of your answer then ignore them completely