How 5% of quality time is wasted at every event!

After we started denture Capital, I have been attending a lot of startup events to gather ideas & generally network. While I believe there is something for everyone at any event, I have been really annoyed by the time wasted in

“Choosing who will ask a question to the panelists or speakers.”

The audience asking questions to the speaker or panelist is a common occurrence at every event. They way this is handled is really a time waster.

The people on the stage choose whom to take questions from, and the spotlight on them makes it difficult to see who is in the audience.

Then they say “that gentleman on the right wearing the blue shirt” or “that lady at the very back” or “this guy has been raising his hands for a while”

How did I arrive at 5% time?

Assuming any full day event consists of 8 sessions of 60 minutes each.

Of the 60 minutes, about 15 minutes on a average is Q & A

About 3 minutes per session is spent on deliberating who will ask the next question and passing the mic around

So, that’s 3 X 8 = 24 minutes in total wasted.

24 minutes is  5% of 8 hours or 480 minutes.

Isn’t there a better way to do this?

I am afraid thousands of Indian attend events abroad and we have not been able to take some learnings from events abroad.

To make taking questions from the audience easy, here is what we have to do

1, Have a stand with a mic in the centre of the hall. Put one spotlight there.

2. Ask people who have questions to queue. Don’t squabble, just stand in the queue

3. Ask your question and go back to your seat. Don’t give people the opportunity to enter into a debate or cross question. There are some people who start with “Actually, I have two questions and then they go on forever” Also, disqualify people who try to be the focus of attention talking for minutes about themselves or their companies.

4. When its time up, the people who did not get an opportunity get back to their seats. They can curse luck.

Simple and easy. This is not something novel that I devised. I’ve seen this happen all the time when I attended events at one of my previous workplaces, CareerBuilder in Chicago.

A novel idea would be a startup that turns smartphones into microphones - read here

And of course, this works very well if the guys who are asking questions are not planted by the organisers or the speakers.

I’d love to hear from event organizers what they think?

This post originally appeared on Medium