Managing Q&A Sessions and “Bad” Questions

Late last year I wrote about serving as a judge at an MBA competition and made some observations about the performance of the groups, and generally about professional presentation habits.  Here is a link to that post should you wish to see it https://gycz.blogspot.com/2022/12/nervous-energy-and-dancing-during.html

In this previous post, I commented on the management of questions and answers by the groups. While I thought this was a relatively minor point in the post, I received some follow-up comments regarding this.   

During the event, teams of students delivered individual presentations, and then the teams were required to take questions from a panel of judges from the business community.  I noted that in most professional situations someone skilled should field each question initially and either answer the question, or invite a specific team member to address the question.  Someone skilled should manage and control the Q&A session.

At the competition any student on the presenting team was able to jump in and answer, sometimes exposing the line of questioning to a new area. This is not a huge issue during student presentations, but in a professional environment could perhaps expose an area the larger team would prefer not to discuss.  Or perhaps a participant not fully developed professionally manages the question poorly. I’ll offer an example.

“Why Would You Want To Do That?”

In the late 1980s, I worked in information technology holding a variety of positions over a ten-year period. One day, we were pitched some software that wrote new software after the programmers provided a few variables.  I’ve seen other variations of such software in more recent years, but I’ve never seen any version that truly worked well.  But perhaps the industry has evolved, perhaps Artificial Intelligence will finally deliver on this long-promised capability.

On the day we were pitched this product, the salesperson brought along a product demo expert, a technical expert, to demonstrate the application and answer any technical questions. Their well-rehearsed product demo went swimmingly, and a few questions were asked and fielded well.

Then a human resources manager in attendance asked if the product could be developed by the product, that is, could the software actually write itself.   That’s an intellectually curious question. I was early in my career and had some rough edges professionally, but I did appreciate the beauty of the question, although I thought it was a bit odd.  I didn’t state that of course.  But the product demo guy did.  He said “that’s a dumb question, why would you want to do that?”

Then, the sales professional jumped in to try to salvage the sale, but at that point, the demonstration and potential sale was over except for professional niceties. The sales pitch failed.

Experience Must Manage and Control

The point of this story is to illustrate that in most situations, someone skilled should take control of the Q&A session, to answer the questions, or to frame any response, and only invite other team members to comment if required.

In my story, if the sales professional had quickly acknowledged the question, commented that it was an unconventional thought, and managed the question to completion, a sale might have been possible. 

Elements of Public Speaking

There are many elements in public speaking. Team presentations introduce another layer of complexity. There is no replacement for experience in managing presentations professionally.