The question that wasn't on the slide

A quick one about the moment nobody rehearses.

You're two minutes in. First slide, if you're lucky. And someone senior leans back and says, "I don't buy that." Or asks for a number you don't have. Or quotes page fourteen of your own paper back at you. The presentation you prepared has just stopped, and a different one has started.

In that moment the room is finding out what you actually think, and whether you know it. No speechwriter can help you. Neither can the machine that tidied up your slides.

Here's the finding I keep coming back to. Todd Rogers and Michael Norton at Harvard ran a series of studies on what happens when a speaker answers a question other than the one they were asked. More than half the time, nobody noticed. Worse, a fluent answer to the wrong question was rated more highly than an honest, slightly stumbling answer to the right one.

That's the research behind media training. Bridge. Stay on message. Don't get drawn. For a journalist with a deadline, it works.

But the effect collapses under three conditions: when the questioner has the source documents, when they can ask again, and when the exchange is on the record. That's a board. An investment committee. A regulator. A client who has read the proposal more carefully than you'd like. People with your numbers in front of them can tell when you've gone somewhere else, and they will ask again.

And this is where AI comes in. It has made the prepared part of presenting nearly free. The deck, the script, the structure: four minutes. What it can't make is the person who answers the question nobody saw coming, and owns the consequence on Monday. That was always the part that decided things. Now it's the only part left that proves anything.

So what do you do about it? Mostly, you plan for it. The hard question that feels like an ambush is nearly always one you could have seen coming.

On our Planning Canvas, after Point A (where your audience is now) and Point B (what you want them to think, feel and do), comes the section most people skip: the Obstacles. What's stopping this audience getting to Point B? What do they already believe? What have they been burnt by? Whose budget does your idea threaten? Answer those honestly and you've written your difficult questions before anyone asks them. The Obstacles are the questions. They just haven't been said out loud yet.

If you lead people who get questioned for a living, you'll already know which of them this is about.

And if you've a presentation this week, one thing to try. Write down your three biggest Obstacles. Turn each one into the question it will become. Then answer them out loud before you walk in. Not the bridge. The answer.

Say what you know, say how well you know it, and say what would change your mind. Three sentences. They cover nearly every question you can't fully answer, and I've yet to see anyone lose a room with them.

Handling questions under pressure has always been part of what we teach, and we've spent the last few months rebuilding how we do it. The Spotlight is where it starts – in-house, for teams, anywhere in New Zealand. Tell us about your team.

Russell Pickering – founder of The Pickering Group, author of Step into the Spotlight.