“Pardon? Could you repeat that, please?”: On how a simple question shifts the power in the room

One of the routine challenges of a PhD is presenting your work. As a poster. Or as a talk. That alone is nerve-racking, but the questions are the worst.

What if you don’t know the answer?
What if a single question exposes that your entire project is fundamentally flawed?

Sleepless nights before a conference come with the territory. So does the fear of failure.

My supervisor gave the classic, well-meant advice: listen carefully to questions. They can help you refine your experiment. It sounded logical. So I tried to do that.

At a major international conference, I got a question from someone I immediately recognised as the expert in my field. She started by asking whether I knew one of her papers. I did. What followed was a long, dull monologue that grew increasingly technical and drifted further and further from my research topic.

Halfway through, I had already lost the thread.

Then came the punchline: “Would you like to comment on that?”

On what? I thought.

What came out of my mouth was: “Not at the moment, thank you.”

Good grief. What a disaster.

The audience began to chuckle. Fair enough. It was too late to recover. I'd said what I'd said. The damage was done.

Back at work, I told a colleague what had happened. She laughed and told me about a modest Japanese man who received a similar question at a conference. The kind that starts with: “Isn’t it the case that such and such?”, followed by “And therefore this and that?”, and which — after a long detour — ends in the polite implication that none of your argument really holds.

The Japanese man listened politely, nodded occasionally, and waited patiently for the question to finally arrive. Then he looked up and said:

“Pardon? Could you repeat that, please?”

Best answer ever.

What I didn’t understand then, but do now, is that conference questions are often not about clarification. They are about position. About who gets to steer the conversation, who gets to claim expertise, and who is expected to justify themselves.

This was my first direct encounter with academic power operating informally, through tone, timing, and expectation.

My answer failed because it was honest. His answer was brilliant because it bought time, neutralised the power dynamic, and placed the responsibility back where it belonged.

So: how not to answer? By assuming that every question is a sincere invitation to dialogue.

And how to answer? By realising that in academia, not every question demands a substantive response — some call for tact, delay, or a politely requested repetition.

That, too, is an unwritten rule, and not something you learn from a manual. You learn it by recognising when a question is not an invitation to explain, but a bid to control the room.