Here’s a central truth about Q&A: When taking questions, your main responsibility is not to the person who’s asking. It’s to the rest of the audience. You are their steward; you must save them from boring discussions.
To do so, your single best technique is what I call hijacking the question. Simply put: If a question won’t add value, you should gently take control and guide it to a better place, in the service of the audience.
To be clear, hijacking doesn’t mean you should evade or ignore the question, like experienced politicians sometimes do. (Evading a question can work, but it’s better saved for more adversarial settings.) Hijacking is more benign; it is about using the question as a bridge to a good discussion.
An elegant hijack stays with the topic the person raises, but answers the question they should have asked. The question is the raw material from which you craft a good response. The real art of hijacking is to find the nugget of a good question in what they said.
Here are three good scripts for hijacking:
“Your question highlights a crucial issue, namely…”
“A helpful way to think about this topic is…”
“Right! What I love about what you’re bringing up is…”
It takes a little bit of practice to do this fluently, but once you master hijacking, you can create Q&A sessions where every single question leads to an interesting discussion.
This guide is part of my series Speaking for a Living. Also check out Seven Common Q&A Problems and Q&A: The Basics.