In last week’s Tuesday Reading, Questions: How many have you asked today, we argued that the practice of asking questions is more important than any one of the answers we may be given, as asking builds our knowledge, teaches us about people, engages others, communicates value, sets an example, and develops others.1 Judith Ross, writing in How to Ask Better Questions,2 reminds us that asking questions can help develop those whom we ask, provide yourself with fresh and powerful ideas, and reduce the burden you place on yourself to have all the answers.
This, then, leads us directly to the question, “How do I become better at asking questions?”, which is the subject of today’s Tuesday Reading.
Formulating good questions is hard work. As we are asking a question, we are exploring a space of “knowns” and “unknowns.” Former U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it this way: “There are known knowns; these are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say that there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And … it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”3 Sometimes the unknown can be daunting. However, as Clayton Christensen likes to observe, “Every answer has a question that retrieves it.”3 And, Elon Musk points out, “A lot of times the question is harder than the answer. … If you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.”3
So, where do I begin if I want to ask better questions? The best advice I’ve found is to be willing to get curious about any and everything, and to make sure that you have regular “quiet times” on your calendar so that you can have ample uninterrupted time for doing some clear thinking about the issues before you. And, to have this alone-time, you may find it necessary to get away from your desk. Find an empty conference room at some distance from your office, find a quiet place in the library, take a walk outside, go sit in a park by yourself; the possibilities are there for the taking. All you have to do is discipline yourself to take advantage and create the opportunity.
Ross2 also tells us that our most effective and empowering questions create value in multiple ways. They can:
Having this insight into questions, is helpful, and leads to wanting suggestions for actually creating questions that will help us do this? Here are ten helpful ones I found on the dummiesTM website:4
So, now it’s up to you. You’ve now seen the value that asking questions can bring and have a set of suggestions about how to use questions to elicit the information you need. I encourage you to make use of these approaches to formulating questions as you lead those around you in the coming week. I think that you’ll see a big difference. However, getting value from what you’ve read is really up to you.
Make it a great week for you and your team. . . . jim
Jim Bruce is a Senior Fellow and Executive Coach at MOR Associates. He previously was Professor of Electrical Engineering, and Vice President for Information Systems and CIO at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
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