You will practise handling a realistic question session and closing after it.
Arjun had his ten prepared questions, his "I do not know" wording and a plan for hostile and off-topic questions. On paper, he was ready. But he had never actually stood in front of people and taken ten minutes of questions on his own material, with no idea what was coming next. That is a different skill from writing answers, and the only way to build it is to do it.
This exercise is a rehearsal of the Q&A itself. You give a short version of your talk, take ten minutes of questions, record it, and review how you did. It takes about twenty-five minutes, plus the time to gather two or three people.
Find two or three people. Colleagues are ideal, because they can ask realistic questions, but friends work if you brief them. You can do this in person or on a video call.
Give a five-minute summary of your talk: the opening, the core message, your three points with their main evidence, and the ask. Keep it to that, because this session exists for the questions and a shorter talk leaves more room for them. If you have slides, use a few key ones.
Before you start, tell your audience how you will take questions, as you will on the day, using the approach from lesson 7.1, Predict the questions before they are asked.
Before the session, brief your audience privately. Give them a copy of your outline or a short description of the talk and the audience it is for. Ask them to spend ten minutes asking questions as that audience would.
Then give them two specific jobs. At least one question must be hostile: sceptical, challenging or pointed, the kind of question from lesson 7.4, Hostile, long and off-topic questions. And at least one must be a question you cannot answer. Ask them to pick something detailed or slightly outside your material, so you have to use your "I do not know" wording from lesson 7.3, Say I do not know without losing credibility.
Do not ask to see their questions in advance. The value of the exercise comes from not knowing what is next.
Arjun gave his outline to two colleagues from the analytics team and a friend who works in hospital administration. He told them the real audience would be clinic managers and an operations director, and asked them to play those roles.
Record the whole session with permission from everyone, on your phone or with the video call's recording tool. You need to see and hear yourself answering.
Take questions for ten minutes, using the method from lesson 7.2, Listen, check, answer, then stop. When time is up, or the questions run out, give your final close: the core message in the same words as your opening, and your ask. This step matters as much as the questions. On the day, you will need to bring the room back after the Q&A, as lesson 2.3, Close with the message and the ask, explained, and after a lively discussion that is surprisingly hard, so it is worth getting one practice run in now.
Arjun's session produced eight questions in ten minutes. The hostile one came from his friend: "Isn't this just a way to send more marketing messages to patients?" The one he could not answer was about whether the vendor's system could send reminders in Malay and Tamil as well as English and Chinese. He used his prepared wording and promised an answer by the next day.
Watch the recording once with a notepad, and for each question jot down roughly how long your answer took and whether you led with the point or built up to it.
A simple table helps: one row per question, with columns for the question, answer length, point first (yes or no), and one note. Once it is filled in, read down the columns. Are your longest answers the ones where you did not lead with the point? Did you stop after answering, or keep adding? How did you handle the hostile question and the one you could not answer?
Arjun's table showed that six of his eight answers were under thirty seconds and led with the point. The two that were not were the hostile question, where he got defensive and talked for over a minute, and a question about the data, where he started with how the dataset was built before getting to the answer.
Then pick the two answers you are least happy with. Usually they are the longest, or the ones that did not lead with the point, or the hostile question. Rewrite each one as you wish you had said it: point first in a sentence or two, one reason, then stop. For a hostile question, add the one-sentence acknowledgement first.
Arjun's rewrite of the hostile answer: "That's a fair concern. This is the same appointment reminder we already send, just a day earlier, with no marketing content and no extra messages." Two sentences, where the original had been eight.
The rewritten answers then go into your list of ten prepared questions in place of the weaker versions.
You are finished when you have a recording of a five-minute summary, a ten-minute Q&A including at least one hostile question and one you could not answer, and your final close after the questions. Alongside it sits your review table and two rewritten answers. Gather your questioners and fix a time, ideally a week or two before your real talk, so you have time to use what you learn.
Run and record the mock Q&A, then rewrite your two weakest answers.
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