Tag Archives: Questions

Do You Need To Answer That Question?

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We’ve all been in a situation where we’re listening to a presentation or in a class where someone is sharing knowledge. The presenter or expert finishes a point and stops to take a breath or move on to the next point when you hear a voice.

“What they meant to say was…”

You can already picture the person doing it. I don’t need to describe the kind of person that does this. We all know who it is and, if you’re like me, it drives you crazy. I know it because I’ve found myself being that person several times and it’s something I’m working hard to fix.

Info to Share

People that want to chime in feel like they have important things to share. Maybe they know something deeper about the subject. Perhaps they’ve worked on a technology and have additional information to add to the discussion. They mean well. They’re eager to add to the discussion. They mean well. Most of the time.

What about the other times? Maybe it’s someone that thinks they’re smarter than the presenter. I know I’ve had to deal with that plenty of times. It could be an executive that needs to clarify the message or add in the important talking points that marketing has decided on so that everything sounds right.

In the latter cases, the reason why someone needs to jump in and answer the question is less egalitarian. They’re not trying to raise the body of knowledge or educate the people in the room for a noble reason. They’re looking to be the center of attention. They want to take all the agency of the presenter and show how smart they are or make sure everyone knows how important they are.

I’ve been at the point where I’ve almost asked out loud, “If you’re paying this person to talk why do you feel the need to talk over them?” For a CEO of a company that should be the end of the discussion. For the smart person in the audience they’ll probably have a more pointed response. The result is hopefully the same. Why are you the one talking when everyone came to hear the person you interrupted?

Ask Your Own Questions

I’ve struggled with this myself many times. I’ve wanted to add to the conversation. I’ve felt like if I could just clarify this point things would be way more clear. While I may feel like my info is the most important to impart what I’m trading away by doing that is robbing the person presenting of all their agency.

It really hit me last year when I was a Wood Badge course director. I was intimately familiar with the curriculum and knew every lesson we were trying to impart to the participants. We had also chosen our staff members to present on specific lessons. Each of them had time to prep and understand the material and knew what they were supposed to accomplish. Someone without awareness might have thought they knew the material better than anyone.

I found myself wanting to add to the conversation after every presentation but I also knew it was my place to watch and make notes, not jump in. How would it look to the participants if I kept interrupting the presenter to add my points? They would have stopped listening to the real presenter and just waited for me to speak. That’s not the preferred outcome for someone to present material.

The other thing you have to ask yourself in that situation is “what does this do to the presenter”? How would you feel if someone kept interrupting you if you tried to make a point or teach a lesson? I’m all for deferring to people with more knowledge or experience but if someone is constantly interrupting me for pointless reasons or to restate something I’ve said I would be furious. I’d never want that person to be in the same room as me when I’m trying to present. Minimizing your presenters is a great way to ensure they never want to work for you again.

To me, the best way to support your presenter and the lesson they are teaching is to stay quiet. If you feel like you need to add something wait until the very end so they don’t feel like you’re stepping on them. Even if they say something incorrect and you feel the need to call it out, do it quietly with the presenter instead of making a scene. If the presenter corrects themselves it looks way better than having someone else do it. And above all, remember that everyone’s skills and viewpoints are valid and you aren’t an authority. You’re a voice in the conversation.

Tom’s Take

I really love sharing info and answering questions. I like teaching. But I have learned over the years that there is a time and place for things. And if I’m not the one that is designated to be teaching or talking I really need to keep things to myself. Stealing someone’s agency makes me look bad and makes the presenter look weak. I would rather help where I can and build up a future rock star presenter than steal their thunder and make them look silly. I still have moment where I need to work on it but I hope that I’m better than I have been in years past.

Choosing the Least Incorrect Answer

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My son was complaining to me the other day that he missed on question on a multiple choice quiz in his class and he got a low B grade instead of getting a perfect score. When I asked him why he was frustrated he told me, “Because it was easy and I missed it. But I think the question was wrong.” As usual, I pressed him further to explain his reasoning and found out that the question was indeed ambiguous but the answer choices were pretty obviously wrong all over. He asked me why someone would write a test like that. Which is how he got a big lesson on writing test questions.

Spin the Wheel

When you write a multiple choice test question for any reputable exam you are supposed to pick “wrong” answers, known as distractors, that ensure that the candidate doesn’t have a better than 25% chance of guessing the correct answer. You’ve probably seen this before because you took some kind of simple quiz that had answers that were completely wrong to the point of being easy to pick out. Those quizzes are usually designed to be passed with the minimum amount of effort.

This also extends to a question that includes answer choices that are paired. If you write a question that says “pick the three best answers” with six options that are binary pairs you’re basically saying to the candidate “Pick between these two three times and you’re probably going to get it right”. I’ve seen a number of these kinds of questions over the years and it feels like a shortcut to getting one on the house.

The most devious questions come from the math side of the house. Some of my friends have been known to write questions for their math tests and purposely work the problem wrong at a critical point to get a distractor that looks very plausible. You make the same mistake and you’re going to see the correct answer in the choices and get it wrong. The extra effort here matters because if you see too many students getting the same wrong distractor as the answer you know that there may be confusion about the process at that critical point. Also, the effort to make math question distractors look plausible is impressive and way too time consuming.

Why Is It Wrong?

Compelling distractors are a requirement for any sufficiently advanced testing platform. The professionals that write the tests understand that guessing your way through a multiple choice exam is a bad precedent and the whole format needs to be fair. The secret to getting the leg up on these exams is more than just knowing the right answer. It’s about knowing why things are wrong.

Take an easy example: OSPF LSAs. A question may ask you about a particular router in a diagram and ask you which LSAs that it sees. If the answer choices are fairly configured you’re going to be faced with some plausible looking answers. Say the question is about a not-so-stubby-area (NSSA). If you know the specifics of what makes this area unique you can start eliminating choices from the question. What if it’s asking about which LSAs are not allowed? Well, if you forgot the answer to that you can start by reading the answer choices and applying logic.

You can usually improve your chances of getting a question right by figuring out why the answers given are wrong for the question. In the above example, if LSA Type 1 is listed as an answer choice ask yourself “Why is this the wrong answer?” For the question about disallowed LSA types you can eliminate this choice because LSA Type 1 is always present inside an area. For a question about visibility of that LSA outside of an area you’d be asking a different question. But if you know that Type 1 LSAs are local and always visible you can cross off that as a potential answer. That means you boosted your chances of guessing the answer to 33%!

The question itself is easy if you know that NSSAs use Type 7 LSAs to convey information because Type 5 LSAs aren’t allowed. But if you understand why the other answers are wrong for the question asked you can also check your work. Why would you want to do that? Because the wording of the question can trip you up. How many times have you skimmed the question looking for keywords and missing things like “not” or “except”? If you work the question backwards looking for why answers are wrong and you keep coming up with them being right you may have read the question incorrectly in the first place. Likewise, if every answer is wrong somehow you may have a bad question on your hands.

What happens if the question is poorly worded and all the answer choices are wrong? Well, that’s when you get to pick the least incorrect answer and leave feedback. It’s not about picking the perfect answer in these situations. You have to know that a lot of hands touch test questions and there are times when things are rewritten and the intent can be changed somehow. If you know that you are dealing with a question that is ambiguous or flat-out wrong you should leave feedback in the question comments so it can be corrected. But you still have to answer the question. So, use the above method to find the piece that is the least incorrect and go with that choice. It may not be “right” according to the test question writer, but if enough people pick that answer you’re going to see someone taking a hard look at the question.

Tom’s Take

We are going to take a lot of tests in our lives. Multiple choice tests are easier but require lots of work, both on the part of the writer and the taker. It’s not enough to just memorize what the correct answers are going to be. If you study hard and understand why the distractors are incorrect you’ll have a more complete understanding of the material and you’ll be able to check your work as you go along. Given that most certification exams don’t allow you to go back and change answers once you’ve moved past the question the ability to check yourself in real time gives you an advantage that can mean the difference between passing and retaking the exam. And that same approach can help you when everything on the page looks wrong.

I Hate Excellent Questions

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I was listening to a recent episode of the Packet Pushers Podcast about SD-WAN and some other stuff. At one point, my good friend Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind) asked the guest something, and the guest replied with, “That’s an excellent question!” Greg replied with, “Of course it was. I only ask excellent questions.” I was walking and laughed out loud harder than I’ve laughed in a long time.

This was also a common theme during Networking Field Day. Everyone was asking “great” or “excellent” questions. I chuckled and told the delegates that it was a canned response that most presenters give today. But then I wondered why all our questions are excellent. And why I hated that response so much.

Can You Define “Excellent”?

The first reason why I think people tend to counter with “excellent” praise is because they are stalling for an answer. It’s a time-honored tradition from spelling bees when you don’t know how to spell the word and you need a few more seconds to figure out if this is one of those “i before e” words or not. I get the purpose of defining something of non-native speaker origin. But defining a simple word? It’s such a recognizable trope that we incorporated some of the fun into a video we did a few years ago at Aruba Atmosphere:

Watching my friends “stall” while they’re trying to figure out how to spell a made up word still cracks me up.

More importantly, in technology this response is designed to help the engineer or tech person spend a few critical seconds formulating their response and matching it to the question that was asked. Even just a second of memorized, practiced response repetition means you can think about how to answer the question without leaving silence.

We live in a world today where silence is bad. We’re so used to hearing noise and other kinds of filler that anything regarded as contemplation or thinking is negative. Instead, we must always be talking and making an audible effort to answer things. Even if it means repeating the same phrases over and over again. It’s bad enough when it’s a pause word. It’s really bad when it’s the same word at the beginning of a sentence for almost an hour. “That’s an excellent question” is quickly becoming the response equivalent of “um” in the vocabulary.

High Praise, Indeed

The other reason why I think people are quick to praise “excellent” questions comes from a bit of social trickery. Sadly, too many sales opportunities descend into an antagonistic relationship where salespeople feel they have to use every trick in the book to separate people from their money. They use tactics designed to inflate egos and make people feel more important so they feel like their making a good decision.

Think about the suspect phrasing here. It’s not a “good” question. Or even a “great” question. It’s almost always an “excellent” question. And I’d argue that the more likely a person is to sell you something, the more likely that person is to remark that all your questions are excellent.

This kind of puffery can be infuriating to people. It’s not unlike the standard “have you lost weight?” opening when you see someone for the first time in a long time. It’s verbal garbage. You don’t believe it. They don’t believe it. It’s rare that people even acknowledge it. And yet, we find ourselves repeating it over and over again. “That’s an excellent question” is ego stroking at its finest.

And the worst part? You’re not praising the person! You’re praising their question. You’re really saying that the words they used were good enough to merit praise. It’s not even that you are praising the person as much as their output. If you really, really, really feel the need to do this, think about doing it in a way that calls out the person asking the question instead:

  • Wow, you’re really paying attention here!
  • Did you read ahead?
  • You’re really getting this.
  • I’m very impressed with your grasp of this topic.

See how each of these responses is designed to work with the person in mind and not just the question? Sure, there s a bit more ego stroking here than with a simple “excellent” question. But if you’re just trying to flatter the person and you don’t even care about the quality of the question why not just sell out all the way? If the point of the response is to make a person feel good about themselves then just go all out.

Tom’s Take

I’m not likely to change the world overnight. Lord knows I’ve lost the battle against GIF and on-premises enough already and those are grammatically correct. The “excellent” question thing is a quirk of speech that isn’t going to just disappear because we bring it to light. People are still going to stall or try to boost the questioner’s ego. They’re still going to fill silence or make people full of themselves. Instead of falling back on the tropes of bygone eras, be a different person next time. Instead of the knee-jerk reaction of excellence, take a moment to think and praise the person asking the question. Then give a solid answer that they need to hear. You’ll find it a lot more effective. In fact, I’d venture to say it’s an excellent strategy.