This is a (long and probably over-detailed) post about something that we do not pay enough attention to – the Question and Answer session after a presentation by one or more “experts”.
If you care about progress on issues (be it climate change, homelessness, education or – well – anything – I think it’s worth your time to read and chew on. But MRDA – I would say that, because I was both one of the “experts” and also the facilitator of the Q&A.
The basic points are these –
- The “normal” way of doing Q&As is accepted without hardly anyone thinking much about them
- This normal way is intensely alienating to some people, who vote with their feet and don’t come back.
- There are some simple ways (some of which are described in the post) that you can disrupt the normal way and make life less alienating (even, gasp, welcoming) to more people.
The blog goes through what I did on Thursday 30th January 2025 at a “Curiosity Club” event in Glossop, a town in the north of England.
The event seemed to go pretty well. People were engaged, and engaged with each other. Of the nine questions, five came from women, representing the balance in the room (this does not always happen!)
I kept an audio of the Q&A (and indeed the whole event) and ran it through transcription software, then tidied it up. That will be posted. I shared this article with several people who were present on the night, some of whom asked questions. They were invited to make comments on the post. One good point was about the risks in the “talk to someone else” aspect.
“Success” for this post is that this post is read, shared, and sparks conversation among organisers, experts, facilitators and attendees on what we currently expect from Q&As, what we get, what we could do differently.
In a separate post (yet to be written) I will look more into these questions, the persistence of “ego-fodder” and so on.. For now, I simply go through the audio clips of relevance and write about
- what i said and did,
- why.
- What i could have done differently (better)
- The benefits
- The dangers
I know this all seems fantastically egotistical, but, well, the Greater Good.
Contents
At the outset of the meeting. 2
The beginning of the Q and A 4
Presenters and facilitators don’t mix – Marc abusing his power. 5
After the formal end of the meeting 7
At the outset of the meeting.
“So this is before my 20 minutes. Okay?
“So you have come not to a Listening, but to a Meeting, which means you meet people.
[MH – Cute line – i think i may have coined it.]
“So what I’d like to do now is turn to the person near you who you don’t know, and if you have to get up and walk a couple of things, then fine. And just nothing, nothing big, nothing big. Just say hello, because these people will become friends, colleagues, whatever, and blossom.
So you’ve got two minutes to introduce yourself to someone you don’t know.”
[MH – so, even if someone has to leave before the Q&A, they get a chance to talk to someone they don’t know.
What I could have done better – given introverts a chance to opt out! People should not be forced to engage with people, after all. And there are also issues about women being forced to engage with creepy men. I don’t know how to finesse that, tbh.]
“Okay, everyone, if you could take your seat. So you can listen to the old white men at the front of the room who will tell you what to think.”
[MH A little lampshading/self-deprecation never hurts. Also, Kevin is old. And as for me, well, it’s weird being the same age as old people…]
During Kevin’s Presentation
Kevin was about 55 minutes into his presentation. There had been a couple of people asking questions earlier, to which he responded. Then the questions started coming thicker and faster – people were clearly keen to engage with what they’d been told, and tease out the implications. We were moving – de facto, into the Q and A. I was sat in the audience, and stuck up my hand.
““Can I make an observation?”
“Yeah”
“It’s 830, This meeting was going to finish at nine, and what’s happening is people are desperate to have to ask questions, and some of them are. But the people who are asking the questions are more confident and more well-informed. So there is a structural thing going on which we are trying from your presentation and mine to undercut
So my proposal is that you finish, we have two minutes for people to talk to the person next to them and the people who haven’t spoken get a chance to answer ask their questions.
And if we don’t do that, then the structural inequality and unfairness that you and I both think is baked in continues to be baked in.”
[MH This kind of “backseat facilitation” is not good. It should never have come to this, and that is on me. I should have stayed at the front of the room, (I wanted to see the slides though!) and should have agreed a hard time limit, with perhaps a “clap clinic”.]
After Kevin’s presentation
[It was heavy – the prospects for our species’ look bleak af.]
“Is everyone feeling sunny and optimistic?”
[MH – important to acknowledge heavy feelings, but not wallow in them. Irony as deflection or coping strategy…. ]
“Hey, what I’d like you to do is another two minutes, please, with the person you spoke to before, or someone else. If you have a question that is five sentences long, [laughter] get help boiling it down to two. If you have like, half a question, you’re not quite sure if it’s good enough. Number one, it probably is. Get help turning into a two sentence question.
“We’ll come back in two minutes, and we will start with people of any gender, any age, who have not yet spoken.
“And yes, we have been keeping eyes on all your faces. Two minutes. Thank you.”
[MH this is key, this two minutes (and I gave people closer to three.) The laughter at the fie sentence comment tells me that people recognise the problem.
If you can only get one innovation past the gate-keepers, then imo this is the one… it gives people a chance to think, talk and it gives you a chance to select ppl ‘at random’, meaning women etc. In my experience the people who get irritated at this are the ones who are used to being recognised by the person at the front choosing who will ask questions – because of their gender, or because they are part of the same tedious Trotskyist or Bakuninist groupuscule, and they realise that this format will open up the space and deprive them of their quasi-monopoly on asking questions/preening/
The beginning of the Q and A
“Thanks everyone. Hi, we’re going to come back and start taking questions
“Two things. One is the Labour Club would love you to buy beer or chips, crisps or whatever.
[MH = venue need to make money! If they do well at the till because of your event, it’s that much easier to rebook’]
“Number two, we do not have a hard stop at nine o’clock, but I am conscious that some people here will have babysitters or fatigue or work in the morning or whatever.
“If you have to go at nine, don’t feel ashamed that you’re somehow, you know, a flake.”
[MH – people who have to leave early may fear they are being judged as insufficiently interested/committed. It’s important to help them not see it that way. There’s a 1991 book about Californian anti-nuclear protests that has a great section about how people who were held in pens developed an ad-hoc ritual so those who had – for work or family reasons – to take the offer of bail – were not perceived as lunchouts by those who wanted to stick it out for as long as possible. Yes, this is how my mind works most of the time.]
“Kevin. you can find online, and he’ll respond to your emails if you’ve got questions. You can find me online, and I won’t respond to your questions, except for cash.
“So let’s have a show of hands from the people who want to ask questions who have not already asked questions.
“We’ve got number one, number two, number three.”
[MH – According to a) personal experience b) common sense and c) at least one academic work, “If a woman asked the first question, women in the audience were more likely to ask subsequent questions.”
BUT explicitly asking for women to ask questions is in my opinion almost always a bad move, and a sign that the meeting has been poorly designed, or facilitated or both. It iis going to a) irritate some men [but who cares tbh] and – far more importantly – b) put so much extra pressure on women because their question then has to be ‘excellent’ or they are letting their gender down.]
“So before we go to the third question, let’s have another show of hands if people want to ask questions who haven’t already. We’ve only got one at the minute. Two, so one, two. Next.”
[MH – I try to keep ahead like this, don’t let the queue get to zero, because it gives you as question chooser fewer options, and because it signals to some that the conversation is over when it might well not be.]
Presenters and facilitators don’t mix – Marc abusing his power.
I had as one of the “experts” answered a question about what is to be done. Then, when I was going to the next person with the mike, I remembered something else I wanted to say…
“And sorry. to come back to your question about what is to be done
When you hold meetings, try and get people meeting each other, and give people who haven’t had a chance to speak to speak like we’re doing tonight. We forget how – sorry this is me abusing my authority. You can’t take the conch from me. – we forget how alienating it is to go into a room where you don’t know anyone, to be talked at, and then for the Q and A to be dominated by confident people. And it’s those people who come to one meeting and then don’t come back who are lost forever. And they tell other people that they had a bad experience at the meeting, and then those other people don’t come back. And then I’ve seen waves in the mid, late 80s, in the – I was involved in climate camp -, I’ve seen XR – I’ve seen these waves where they hold a big public meeting. There’s lots of people who you’ve never seen before. They are at one meeting or two meetings that are badly designed and badly organized and dominated by old white men who won’t let go of the microphone [laughter] , and those people don’t come back. So design your meetings better. “
Keep hold of the microphone
marc hudson 16:35
“pro tip for anyone who’s holding the conch in this sort of public setting; never give the microphone back to the person who’s got a second question.”
[MH – obviously you have to allow for a bit of back and forth between a questoner and the presenter to whom the question has been directe. But that can tip over into a dialogue – or worse – dick-swinging contest. And if the microphone is physically in the audience-member’s hand, it can get super awkward (To be clear, it was not going to be that on this occasion, but there is a general principle)]
End of Q&A
“But now I’m going to manipulate you all. So when I was a physiotherapist, I knew that when I was doing a treatment session rehab with someone, they would go home, and the things that they would remember was the most vivid part of the treatment session. And the final part, this is a well known psychological thing called the peak end effect.
“So if you are holding a public meeting and the last question is really depressing, yours was not, sadly, what people will remember when they go home was the final bit and being depressed.
“You have an option, as the organizer of meeting to plant someone to ask the last question, which is, like, more upbeat or whatever. That’s kind of manipulative.
“What I like to do in these meetings is, what you’re going to do now is you’re going to talk to someone who you’ve not talked to tonight and just ,,,,
“Yeah, I know, I know it’s really like icky,”
[MH – I saw someone – an older man fwiw – grimace and eyeroll. This was absolutely fair enough. It was late, and I had already “forced” people out of their comfort zone twice that evening. It was all becoming a bit like some sort of happy-clappy Sunday School meeting.]
“but talk to them and just share your feelings and thoughts about what happened, so that you leave this meeting having met other people.
“We’re going to go into that, but before we do, I want a round of applause for me, [laughter] for Kevin, for Jonathan, and for you guys who asked questions, and for you guys who sat here for over two and a half hours, two hours and listened intently and challenged us both, round of applause.”
[MH – Applause is something all can join in. It’s tactile and loud and gives a final punctuation. But also, Sunday school]
“And now and now, the coerced mingling, the enforced mingling.”
[MH Coercive is usually the wrong word. But again, lampshading.]
After the formal end of the meeting
Some people left, but others did start talking to someone they hadn’t spoken to, and in some cases (I witnessed this) exchange contact details. This warmed the cockles (what ARE cockles?) of my ancient shrivelled cynical heart.
Thank you to Jonathan for letting me “run” the event.
Thank you to Kevin, who stuck around for ages afterwards engaging with people
Thank you to all the people who tolerate it, who went with it.
Finally – what did you think? What could have been done differently/better?
If you were there, did you appreciate (as distinct from enjoy) the facilitation. Was it cloying? Unhelpful? Irrelevant? Good?
Further work
Dey de Pryck, Jennie, and Marlène Elias. “Promoting inclusive facilitation of participatory agricultural research for development.” Development in Practice 33.1 (2023): 122-127.
Jasuja, I., Vanderkolk, J., Weston, E., Arrowood, H. I., Vore, A., & Starr, M. C. (2024). Gender Differences in Question Asking at the 2022 American Society of Nephrology Annual Kidney Week Meeting. Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, 19(2), 241-243.
Rakedzon, T., & Van Horne, C. (2024). “Curious Is as Curious Does”: Fostering Question-Asking in a Sino-Foreign Engineering School—A Case Study. Sustainability, 16(17), 7308.
Rezaee, M., Verde, A., Anchang, B., Mattonen, S. A., Garcia-Diaz, J., & Daldrup-Link, H. (2022). Disparate participation by gender of conference attendants in scientific discussions. Plos one, 17(1), e0262639.
Sandstrom, G. M., Carter, A., Croft, A., & Gibson, H. (2022). People draw on gender stereotypes to judge question-askers, but there is no such thing as a gender-stereotypic question.