Be a Q&A jiu-jitsu master.

What happens when a Q&A session turns nasty? Sometimes the questions at the end can be the most enjoyable and rewarding part of a presentation. At other times it can feel more like a firing squad! There are some people who enjoy being aggressive and see an opportunity to take you down. You have no script, no slides, and no knowledge at all of what is coming. How is it possible to retain composure when attacking questions are fired your way?

One of our favourite solutions is The Jiu-Jitsu Approach, named after a martial art with a yielding principle at its core. If an opponent directs force against you, you do not counter with force of your own. Instead you absorb it and redirect it.

How can we apply this principle to an aggressive question? Here are a few good yielding moves:

• Find something in the question that you can agree to.
• Accept that the attack is true up to a point, used to be true, or is true elsewhere.
• Turn the question into a hypothetical before analysing it.

By yielding you safely absorb the questioner’s aggression. Now you are ready to turn their attack to your advantage:

• Point out something critical the questioner has overlooked.
• Attribute the question to a common misconception.
• Take the opportunity to differentiate yourself.

The aim is to turn a negative into a positive. We do not want to humiliate our questioner. But if they are being especially nasty, once in a while we might not be able to resist throwing them to the floor!

For a great Jiu-Jitsu Approach, rewatch the first couple of minutes of the video we posted last week: