Answering Questions: A Key to Presentation Success

The ability to effectively answer questions is critical to presenting, teaching, and learning. 
One could argue that even the worst instructional or presentation design gets 'one more chance' to be effective when the audience starts asking questions in their search for clarity. 
The ability to effectively answer questions has a number of components:

1. The presenter must invite and recognize questions. This involves building rapport, establishing a safe environment, allowing time and space for questions, actively asking for questions, recognizing non-verbal indications of a question that may or may not be asked out loud, and understanding cultural barriers to asking questions (then creating strategies to overcome the hesitation).
2. The presenter must understand the question. This requires active listening, including paraphrasing and seeking confirmation of understanding.
3. The presenter must answer the question clearly. It helps to learn and practice a model or framework for responding to questions - such as the PREP model. Answering clearly may seem straight-forward, but the presidential debates showed that even accomplished speakers struggle to provide clear responses. How many times did you listen to a candidates response and think, "Did he/she answer the question?".
4. The presenter must employ multiple tools in answering questions. Each learner has different triggers for understanding. Merely quoting a textbook answer to a question will often not suffice - otherwise the learner would probably have understood from reading or hearing it the first time. The ability to draw models, flows, and diagrams can make all the difference for some learners. Other learners are looking for stories that put the 'textbook' answer into context and examples.
5. The presenter must be willing to say "I don't know - but I'll get back to you". Enough said on that one!

I can often determine the quality of an presenter by the way they answer their first question.

Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 5 on each of the above items. 

If you score less than 17, you have some opportunities for growth.

Five Great Quotes about Presenting

Here are some of my favorites:

• "It's not about having a 'good story', there is no such thing - stories are simply good or bad in the telling."
  ~ that presentation sensation by martin conradi and richard hall
• "The only reason to give a speech is to change the world"
  ~ John F. Kennedy
• "It is not faults that kill a talk. It is a lack of virtues."
  ~ Dale Carnegie
• "Designing a presentation without an audience in mind is like writing a love letter and addressing it ‘to whom it may concern’."
  ~ Ken Haemer, AT&T
• "Make sure you have finished speaking before your audience has finished listening."
  ~ Dorothy Sarnoff