On answering tough questions

A complement to the previous post. What do you do if you’re asked a tough question?

The best response to a tough question is to answer it. No dodging, no spin, no bulls**t–just answer the question. There really is no substitute for having thought long and hard about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, how you’re doing it, what it means, and how it fits in with what others have done and are doing. That means being thoroughly familiar with how others have approached the same problem and related problems, the advantages and drawbacks of alternative approaches, and much else besides. If you really know your stuff, there really aren’t any tough questions, in the sense of important or interesting questions which deserve an answer, but which you cannot answer. If you don’t feel like you’re at that point, and if getting to that point sounds difficult or daunting, well, whoever told you ecology was easy was lying. The truth is that the best people are hardly ever caught out by a question which they haven’t already thought about, or (at a minimum) about which they can’t say something sensible off the top of their heads.

Having said that, if you do get a question you don’t instantly know how to answer, it’s perfectly ok to stall for a bit of time. If you’re not sure you’ve understood the question, you can ask the questioner to rephrase or elaborate. Or rephrase/summarize the question yourself and ask the questioner if you’ve gotten the gist (this is especially useful if the question is a long, involved one). Or answer the question briefly and then ask “Does that answer your question?” Or just say something like “That’s a good question, it deserves a good answer; let me think for a moment” and then think about it.

If a tough question is based on an explicit or implicit assumption that you deny, and which you have a cogent reason for denying, go ahead and deny the assumption (politely).

If the tone of the questioner is very aggressive, it’s usually best to respond calmly and confidently, especially if you’ve got a good answer. You never want to come off as cocky (you’re aiming for calm and confident, not arrogant and dismissive), but replying in a similarly aggressive tone just makes it look like the questioner has touched a nerve and makes you seem defensive.

You should be able to distinguish tough questions from questions that are just “out of leftfield” (i.e. strange questions, which often indicate a questioner from a very different area who has failed to follow your talk, or perhaps a questioner trying to draw an odd analogy between your system and their own). Don’t panic if you get a question from out of leftfield; chances are many audience members find it a strange question too. So any reasonable answer is ok, including an answer that denies the premise of the question (e.g., an answer which denies the analogy the questioner suggested, for some cogent reason). Obviously, you should never actually say that you think a question is strange.

If you’re really caught out, you can say something like “That’s a great question, I’ll need to think more about it and I’d love to talk to you afterwards,” or “That’s a great question–how would you address that?” But again, the best people hardly ever have to resort to such answers (unless the question is out of leftfield). If you have to resort to such answers more than once in a great while, you are (fairly or not) going to get a reputation as someone who doesn’t really know his stuff or can’t think on his feet. Resorting to such answers looks especially bad when the question should not in fact have been a difficult one.

Any tips I missed?