comes from high-powered questions.
The least used and one of the most productive tools for professional conversation is high-level questioning. But for a number of reasons, questioning has always gotten short shrift. Traditionally, asking questions is thought of as revealing your incompetence, which is then rewarded with a loss of influence. Even today, when the need for intelligent questions ought to be obvious, I meet very few who actually use questions strategically, much less effectively. Furthermore, even fewer professionals, including yesterday’s traditionalist or today’s knowledge worker, understand that questioning is a linguistic device that can make great contributions to the organization—and grant profound influence and power to the individual. In more than 20 years of consulting hundreds of high-powered executives, I have heard no one asking or talking about questioning unless I initiated the subject.
All questions are speech actions that affect the way individuals and teams organize their thinking about people, problems, and processes. And in effective teams high-powered questions are a--and sometimes the--major element of the conversation. The better questions can often positively impact personal influence, relationships, team focus, team organization, problem solving, strategies, priorities, motivation, and decision making. In short, higher order questions can have a huge role in shaping both our thought and our behavior.
Not all questions are created equal. John Hagel has written that the greatest value and personal power in today’s environment comes from questions that no one had even thought to ask but that help to focus attention on promising but previously ignored areas. Although such questions often require more complex, critical thinking and very thoughtful formatting, let’s begin with the basics.
Questioning and conversation
If an interaction among team members goes on for many minutes without anyone asking a question, at least to clarify, then you’re not having a real conversation, much less engaging in problem solving. Technically, it’s usually inept small talk. Team members are merely talking at each other: the typical characteristic and inevitable breakdown of team-based work. My skepticism on the use of questions in business is profound. People often sit at a session for a full hour without a single question passing anyone’s lips. I’m aware that this is a harsh statement. Yet if you sit as an observer in most any team, it’s the rare group of people in which you’ll find questions being asked. Try an experiment: when possible, sit for a few minutes and listen solely for questions, and then see what you get.
There are two basic reasons that questions, even for basic clarification or information gathering, rarely get asked. First, business has a long history supported by a very fundamental “myth”—dating back at least to the auto assembly lines—of not asking questions, of keeping your mouth shut and “working hard.” To ask questions in that world was to reveal your vulnerability, and the safest strategy was to keep your mouth shut. My dad, who was an assembly line “leader” at Ford during WWII and my brother who was a foreman and supervisor at General Motors years later, operated on the same mythology. My interaction with directors and vice-presidents at major companies around the world would talk about the fear of vulnerability whenever I asked about questioning in a private conversation.
Myths are unusually powerful. They are dense, thick story lines, created in the past—sometimes centuries ago—that are very persuasive and have rarely been analyzed, much less called into question. These narratives are often behind mindsets. The fundamental myth about not asking questions because it’ll “make you look bad (incompetent or inept) to the powers that be” has been around since at least the beginning of the industrial age of the late nineteenth century and came into full flower in the early twentieth century in the auto assembly line.
Like the questioning myth, all myths are narratives simply taken for granted about conditions or events in our world. Since they’re always assumed, they operate unconsciously. You’ve got to have a lot of educated self-awareness to recognize them. The myth surrounding not asking questions is one of the most powerful work models in our heads. And that fear of vulnerability is just as operative today, even though the context differs and the assembly line for business professionals is just about nonexistent. And that’s one basic reason we fail to ask questions.
The second reason we fail to ask questions flows out of the first: since we don’t ask questions, we simply don’t know how to ask questions. Before you reject my conclusion, let me explain exactly why that conclusion is so accurate.
Understanding and behaving come from two distinct locations in the brain. Understanding a behavior DOES NOT IMPLY THE ABILITY TO PERFORM THE BEHAVIOR. Understanding and ability are very different processes. You can understand how to do something and not be able to perform that something. I understand clearly how to play the clarinet. Put the mouthpiece to your lips, blow and finger the valves appropriately for a melody. I tried it in college once, just for kicks—and the sound was horribly painful. And I’m a trained musician with a lot of understanding about wind instruments like the clarinet.
The fact is that in order to perform any behavior you have to act—typically from early observation and mimicking--get feedback (verbally from others or from obvious failed responses), keep trying and practicing, get more feedback and stay in that process until you are finally successful. Obviously, if asking questions makes you feel vulnerable, that’s a major strike against practicing and learning the competency. The only possible way you can learn to ask questions, like any other verbal or physical behavior is to practice, practice, practice and continue getting feedback until you are regularly successful. So given the power of the mythical fear, very few people know how to ask useful questions, aside from the most basic information, like, “I’m on Truman Street. How do I get to MacArthur Avenue?” And plenty of people, especially guys, won’t ask that kind of simple question.
Background
All question formats overlap and morph from the basic information question, all resulting in variations of shape, objective and consequences. Their success is determined by the professional’s competence with question framing, audience adaptability and situational knowledge. Situational knowledge is the beginning place for higher order questioning, followed by an enhanced knowledge of your colleagues and their motivations. Without a base in these two, your questioning is largely limited to information gathering—unless that is you can analogize from previous experience. Even then, if the question is not framed adequately, you’ll get audience feedback very quickly, feedback that might not be very pleasant. Though sometimes, the feedback will surface as silence. And silence, remember, is a very clear-cut form of feedback with many meanings. In the culture in which I taught for eleven years in Minnesota, silence meant rejection. But in the culture in which I grew up in metropolitan Detroit, silence meant agreement.
Information questions. The most familiar shape of question is the request for information. The speaker wants to know something—“information”--and assumes the hearer has the information. “Would you like a glass of wine?” But depending on the context, the basic question can be used to test, challenge and control as a teacher, a lawyer, or an executive might intend. It easily becomes an exercise of power over others. In other kinds of situations, the information question might have the intention of surfacing creative options and affirming the competency of the listener. Knowing how your audience will respond is often the key to successful use of the information question. Sometimes the information question moves into a focus format.
Focus questions. Especially in team settings, a facilitator or even a member of the team might summarize a discussion with a focus question. “Based on our conversation thus far, what do you see as the implications of each of these tentative solutions?” This format typically takes control of a discussion, reordering and facilitating it in the direction preferred by the questioner. Focus questions are inevitably control and power oriented. Since that is the case, tone becomes very important for getting what you want and what is needed.
Intervention/subversive questions. Intervention questions are especially useful when a team is wandering or when a person is attempting to control the agenda. Typically, the subversive question hitchhikes on something a controlling person has said but asks a more relevant question that needs to be addressed. “I agree, John, that this approach will handle a number of our problems. But what happens if we fail to . . . ?” Subversive questions are useful for wresting control from others and forcing the other to think about different issues.
Influence questions. It’s important to recognize that though we ask questions to get answers, the implicit purpose of a question may strongly support other agendas.
Like intervention and subversive questions, the overt form and purpose of a question may be quite different than its implicit purpose. This “pull” can be useful in the future. Formatting questions like those in the list below can connect people and exercise influence beyond your initial resources. In addition to impacting organizational strategy, this creates a personal influence that is much more effective than simply having the correct answers to questions.
Major influence questions. Fundamentally, also, the formats below can invite others to explore a new domain, and as Hagel has written, help to generate new ideas and insights. Hagel proposes that in today’s environment there are four especially valued questions:
--Questions that have the greatest potential to influence are broad ones that create space for many people across many different domains and disciplines to participate.
-- Questions where there’s a lot at stake, where enormous value and wealth can be generated by those who are most successful in generating insight.
--Deep questions that call for sustained effort over a long period of time to generate insight. They are the questions that will keep a growing number of people occupied for many, many years.
--Questions that can be tackled without massive investment of funds and years of effort before any insight is generated. The best kinds of questions are the ones where early “a-ha” moments can occur so that early participants in the questions can get positive reinforcement for their efforts and yet at the same time realize that there is so much more to be explored.
Tidbits for learning
The best way to learn to ask efficient questions is to start small. Start with the basic information question. Put the formulation together in a way that’s simple, gives room for a response, and to the degree possible, friendly. Keep trying your question formats on in various settings, changing the words until you begin to get comfortable with achieving your objectives. If you google “question” you’ll find all kinds of samples, a few with which you feel comfortable. On average, it takes at least a full month to learn a very basic question form—if you try it at least 3 to 5 times a week in several different contexts. Watch for the response to your question and its format and keep track, especially, of what works well, paying far less attention to what doesn’t work well. That’s the opposite of how most of us learn, but it’s the best way to add tools to our toolkit. Once you’ve hit on a simple word format that works well, try it in several other situations with other audiences and other subjects, adapting until you get comfortable.
By focusing on questions rather than on answers, professionals will find powerful dynamics where learning and innovation are set into motion. Indeed, often the most modest approach to problems through the power of questions can quickly cascade into significant impact that affects the organization’s bottom line in surprising profitability. Furthermore, hard core questioning expertise can provide the personal power and influence that’s best suited to today’s world.