72. Murder Boards: How Elena Kagan Prepared for Tough Questions

Before the full Senate approved Elena Kagan, President Obama’s second nominee for the Supreme Court, the Senate Judiciary Committee put her through a series of confirmation hearings. Just as Mr. Obama’s first nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, and both of President George W. Bush’s nominees, John G. Roberts and Samuel Alito, and all the previous nominees of all the previous presidents had endured, Ms. Kagan was grilled mercilessly by the senators, particularly those of the opposition. All’s fair in politics, and the party out of power wants to do everything it can to make the sitting president—and that president’s choices—look bad.

In preparation for the grilling, Ms. Kagan spent long hours in mock sessions called “Murder Boards.” This intense practice process, which includes everything from re-creating the setting in the Senate chamber to anticipating the worst-case questions from the senators, was described in a post on realclearpolitics.com by Julie Hirschfeld Davis. One particular item in the article that deserves attention came from Rachel Brand, an attorney who helped prepare Justices Roberts and Alito for their confirmation hearings. Ms. Brand said that the purpose of the Murder Boards “is to ask those hard questions in the nastiest conceivable way, over and over and over.”^F72.1

The triple iteration of over is the operative point. In earlier chapters, you read about Verbalization—the process of rehearsing your presentation aloud as you would to an actual audience. That same practice is just as—if not more—important in handling tough questions. It might seem sufficient to list the anticipated challenging questions and to craft an answer for each of them, but that is not enough. It is far more effective to have someone fire those questions at you and to speak your answers aloud. And you must do it over and over and over. The dynamics of the repeated interchanges in practice will make your responses in real time crisp and assertive.

The CEO of a Silicon Valley company who had taken the Power Presentations program in preparation for his IPO road show decided to prepare for his subsequent quarterly analysts’ call by writing the anticipated tough questions on flash cards and Verbalizing his answer to each card. To his dismay, during the actual call, he found his responses halting. He called me for a brush-up, and I told him that the flash cards were not a substitute—even in mock practice—for having a human voice fire the questions.

The Murder Boards for Ms. Kagan did it right. According to the article, the questions fired at her came from “About 20 members of President Barack Obama’s team ... Kagan’s pals from academia as well as White House and Justice Department lawyers.” They made the mock practice more real.

In preparation for your next Q&A session, have a member or members of your team fire tough questions at you, and Verbalize your answers to them over and over and over.

Think of the repetition as volleying to perfect your tennis game.