How to Write Panel Questions That Get a Real Exchange

TL;DR

• Four prepared statements is a question problem, not a panellist problem. Questions that invite a position get a position. Set two positions against each other and you get a conversation.
• Write the opener so every panellist can answer in 45 seconds, and so the answers differ.
• Build disagreement in deliberately: forced choices, rankings and ownership questions.
• Keep four follow-ups in your pocket. They get you past the answer a panellist brought.
• Prepare twice what you can use. A 45 minute panel with four guests holds eight or nine questions, not twenty.

Learning how to write panel questions is the part of the job most moderators skip. They book good guests, write six broad prompts on a card, and discover at minute eight that the session is four short speeches with a referee. After twenty years on stage and more than 800 events, I can usually tell from the question card how a panel will go.

A question is a design decision. It decides whether the next three minutes are a conversation or a queue.

Why do most panel questions produce statements, not an exchange?

Because a broad question invites a panellist to present their position, and a position is a prepared thing. Ask “what are the big challenges in this sector” and you get the paragraph they have given four times this year.

Senior people arrive with material, and good panellist preparation is what you want. The trouble is that prepared material does not interact with anyone else’s. An exchange needs two things in the room at once: a specific claim, and a reason for someone else to push on it.

How should you write the opening panel question?

Write it so every guest can answer in about 45 seconds with one concrete thing, and so the answers differ.

Open questions are the right default because they feel less threatening and leave room to answer properly. An opener still needs a fence. A panel on automation in logistics:

Each rewrite asks for one item, is answerable from memory rather than a strategy deck, and produces answers that differ.

How do you write panel questions that make people disagree usefully?

You write questions that cannot be answered the same way by everyone: a forced choice, a ranking, or a question about who owns the problem.

Disagreement about substance is not the same as friction between people. A meta-analysis of 116 studies found the link between task conflict and group outcomes “less straight forward” than relationship conflict, which was reliably negative.

A room enjoys two experts splitting on a question of priority. It hates watching two people needle each other.

Three shapes that produce the useful kind:

• The forced choice. “If you could fix one in the next twelve months, warehouse automation or last mile routing, which goes first?” A choice cannot be hedged into agreement.
• The ranking. “Rank these three risks, most serious first.” The rankings differ, and that is your argument.
• The ownership question. “Whose job is this: the operator, the vendor, or the regulator?” Panellists sit in different seats, so they answer differently.

Then say the split out loud. “So Sam puts the regulator first and Priya puts the vendor first. Priya, why is Sam wrong?” Keep the wording about the argument, not the person. A value-loaded question is a worse question: the classic fix turns “is it hard being a duchess?” into the neutral version, which invites an answer instead of a defence.

Find the split in advance. Read the panellist briefs and you can usually see where two of them must differ. That is your best twenty minutes, already located, and steering it is ordinary panel moderation craft.

Follow-ups: how to get past the answer they brought with them

The prepared answer is a first draft. The follow-up is the question you cannot write in advance, which is why most moderators never ask one. Four to keep in your pocket:

1. The example demand. “Give me the specific instance.” Generalities collapse the moment you ask for a date and a number.
2. The mirror. When a panellist uses a loaded word, hand it back: ask what they mean by “excessive”, as Sawatsky’s interviewing rules recommend.
3. The cost question. “What did that cost you, in time or money, to get wrong?” Nobody has a prepared line for this.
4. The silence. Ask, then wait. Poynter’s interviewing basics put it plainly: be patient, do not break the silence with a new question. Two seconds feels like ten to you and like nothing to the room.

Follow-ups are the most common question type in ordinary conversation, and people who ask them are better liked: around 44% of questions in the studied conversations were follow-ups. On stage, a follow-up signals that you were listening, which tells the other panellists that vague answers will not survive.

Do not bolt a closed question onto the end of a good open one. It is a common mistake that lets the guest answer the easy half and drop the rest.

Which panel questions should you avoid?

Five shapes, all recoverable if you spot them on the page rather than in the room.

The compound question catches experienced moderators because it sounds generous. Pew’s wording guidance gives a political example of asking about two concepts at once, and the research remedy is to break it down. A panellist handed two questions answers the comfortable one.

Dictionaries define a softball as something easily dealt with, and an opener is allowed to be gentle, just not empty. “Leading” has a precise meaning too: a question whose form suggests the answer. Journalism’s version of both rules is to ask one thing at a time and keep it open-ended rather than answerable with yes or no.

How many panel questions should you prepare?

Prepare twice what you can use. For a 45 minute panel with four guests, write 16 to 20 and expect to ask eight or nine.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Four panellists answering for 90 seconds is six minutes per question. Take ten minutes out for audience questions and introductions and you have room for five or six group questions plus a few named ones.

Write twenty anyway, for the choice: the spares cover the panel going somewhere you did not expect, or a topic dying in 40 seconds. Three columns:

• The spine. Five or six you will definitely ask, in order, opener and closer included.
• The named questions. One per panellist, something only they can answer: the version of a one-guest question that works. Use them to rescue a flat stretch.
• The live stock. Eight or ten spares, grouped by theme.

For ready-made wording in any column, the question bank post is a lift-and-adapt list. This one is about writing your own.

What does the finished sheet look like?

Shorter than you expect, and marked up. The spine for that automation panel:

1. Open, round the line: “One job automation has genuinely changed this year.”
2. Forced choice: “Warehouse or last mile, which gets fixed first?”
3. Named, Priya: “You have done this in a unionised site. What breaks that nobody warns you about?”
4. Ownership: “Operator, vendor or regulator. Whose job is this?” Let it run two rounds.
5. Audience stock, pulled live.
6. Close, round the line: “One thing this room should do differently on Monday.”

Six items for 45 minutes, ten more in reserve. Mark two and four “SPLIT” in the margin: those are the moments the room will remember.

The one test before you print it

Read every question and ask whether two of your panellists could answer it differently. If not, you have written a prompt for a statement. Sharpen it or cut it.

That test separates a session that explains a topic from one that argues about it. The second is what people talk about at the coffee break, and it is most of what a panel format is for. If you would rather hand the job over, that is what I do as an event moderator: read the briefs, find the disagreements, write the sheet, keep it on time.