Giving a talk? Here’s how to avoid the tricky questions

Successful executives are adept at it. Slippery politicians thrive on it. But for most of us, fielding difficult questions during a big presentation is harder than it looks.

Taking evasive action when faced with a tricky question is an art form so we went to question-and-answer site Quora for some insight on tips for the craftiest way to dodge a question during a presentation?

Here’s what they had to say:

Acknowledging your interrogator can go a long way, says Vadim Zaytsev, a software language engineer. “I once attended a PhD defence where a scientific opponent asked a question [along] the lines of ‘what are going to do about X?’. The answer was absolutely brilliant because it started with ‘We mostly rely on the method published in your book’.

Saying that you are aware of the work of the person who asked the question and saying you agree it is related can help you dodge “very heavy accusations and/or redirect them to a broader community,” wrote Zaytsev.

Another hint: say the question will be addressed in subsequent slides. Still, “some rude listeners will actually come back at this by the end of the presentation and raise the question again, but most of them will be cut off, especially if the talk is long and there are others who want to ask something else,” Zaytsev wrote.

One common phrase Jon Mixon, a tool and die machinist, hears is, ‘that's a good question’. It is “a timeless dodge in the field of question avoidance,” he wrote. “This statement and the act of moving away from the original by creating a discussion about your perception of the question's ‘quality’” are key to redirecting the questioner’s attention.

Feigning a lack of attention also works. If you pretend you did not hear the question or that you weren’t paying attention, “this is usually a sufficient enough irritant to have the questioner either ask another person the question or to lose their composure enough to forget the question which they originally asked,” Mixon wrote. Another ploy: answering the question with a question, “stymies further questioning, or throws all but the most advanced interrogators off-track.”

Pretending you know the answer to a question can be devastating to your career, particularly in high-risk areas such as looking after astronauts, wrote Robert Frost an engineer and instructor at NASA. “They are putting their lives and careers in our hands when we train them,” he wrote. “They have to have 100% confidence that we can be trusted.”

Once when Frost was teaching a crew-member “he asked me a question. I didn't know the answer so I immediately said, 'I don't know’. We continued and he asked another question and again I said, ‘I don't know’,” Frost wrote. “For a brief moment, I felt panic that he was going to walk out of the room because he thought I was a moron that didn't know my subject.”

Instead, “he shook my hand and said, ‘Thank you. You don't know how many people are unwilling to say that to me’."

Frost advises presenters to always be honest: “You either know the answer or you don't. If you aren't sure, you risk providing negative training by giving bad information.”

Often during a presentation, computer software operations manager Doug Dingus gets “a correction” or someone will volunteer more detailed information. To that, he  will say “’Nice catch!’ followed by some banter that helps me understand their background better and perhaps exchanging contact info for a follow-on later.”

To handle “hostile” questions, Dingus suggests: “‘Let's have a talk after this thing, I want to hear what you have to say’ or some variation on that where they know I'm going to hear them out. But in return I'm asking for some consideration to get through the event.” He adds this could “result in drinks somewhere to hear them out entirely”.

Politicians have an adept way at handling difficult questions, wrote Ed Caruthers a retired physicist.. In short, they “stay on point”.“All modern US politicians have learned some variant of, ‘What we really need to do about that problem is,’ and then deliver a standard talking point.” He adds: “It avoids the possibility that the candidate will have an original thought in public, since anything new is unpredictable and may cause problems.”