On the Art of a Question

Asking questions is one of the most important and easily accessible leadership tools available - but knowing what to ask is an art form of it's own. In the article below, we will go through why open questions are so important but grossly underused, and how to create the right question for the right purpose.

Let us start with a philosophical maxim: A good question is better than a good answer.

There are several reasons for this. We increase our own knowledge by exploring and asking, and allow others to do the same. Asking for somebody's opinion shows you appreciate them, and is seen as a sign of competence by colleagues and coworkers. The questions we ask dictate what people who try to answer it are thinking about, and last but not least, it is an invitation to a dialogue. In short, asking questions is one of the most available leadership tools to use. Answers are important and in the end tell us what our actions should be - but without the right question, the right answer will never surface. Finding the right question is far harder than finding the right answer, and we guide our businesses by asking the right questions about relevant problems. There are few things that are more important than asking the right questions.

Why business problems are often hard

Most business problems have one thing common: they are, for a significant part, problems about how people think. To solve issues of strategy, branding, organisational performance or employee well-being we must understand how people see things and what motivates them. Thoughts, feelings and opinions directly impact what we do, how we do it, and with whom - people and how they think are both the problem and the solution.

As humans, we evolved to co-operate in groups ranging from a couple dozen to a bit more than a hundred. An essential part of that was understanding how and why people think and feel the way they do. Since those early millennia of humanity our lives have gotten progressively more complex: we no longer live and work in hunter-gatherer tribes or small agricultural communities, but in complex, interlinked communities consisting of hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, and understanding what people think and why it is well nigh impossible. To listen, understand, categorise and impartially analyse all of those thoughts, opinions and feelings in any reasonable time frame would be a literally impossible task for any human. This forced us to treat people as numbers, and likely distanced leaders from the people they were supposed to lead. We forgot to ask questions, and have discussions, at group level.

It is understandable why this happened: until recently, we simply didn't have the means to ask and process everybody's honest opinion. However, with the help of an AI, we can now effectively expand our cognitive capabilities: impartially understanding and analysing thousands, or hundreds of thousands, opinions and comments is now fast and feasible. We can now understand the opinions of tens of thousands the same way we can understand the opinions of a few dozen.

The reason we are looking at open questions here specifically is that they are the best way to invite a dialogue and find out both reasons and causes in peoples' thinking. Quantitative questions and analysing social media and discussion forums certainly have their uses, as do various forms of behavioural tracking. However, for reliable understanding what people think we need to query them openly.

Ground rules for good open questions

Open questions very often involve emotions. This is a good thing: humans are social animals and largely emotion-driven, whether we realise it or not. Ideally, we want to know what thoughts, ideas and concepts are linked to what kinds of emotional states in significant amounts. Ideally, we want to gauge peoples' opinions and feelings with open questions. How do we design open questions that work, then? There are a few basic rules we have to observe.

1. First, it should be about one thing - not many. For instance, if you ask about our 'leadership and teamwork' in the same question, you're going to confuse your respondents and end up with responses that have an uneven mix of both, with no easy way of separating the two. Make the question about one thing, and make sure your respondents know what this one thing is.
2. Make sure the respondents both understands the words you use in the question, and has the insight you are looking for. A question that is not clearly understood, or which the respondent doesn't know anything about, is usually worse than not asking the question at all. Respondents should immediately be able to connect the words you are using with the information they have. Sanity-checking or co-developing the questions with somebody who knows your respondents well is a good idea.
3. Keep it short. A good open question is just one short sentence, preferably no more than five words. If you absolutely have to, you can use a second sentence to guide how to answer the question in the first - but never divide the question itself into two sentences. You can, for instance, ask "What do you think makes for good customer service? Please describe in your own words." if you think your respondents are going to just give you a list, and you want to avoid it.
4. Make sure you prompt the right amount of emotional response for what the goal of your questionnaire is. Asking 'please describe ACME as a workplace' elicits very different responses than 'please describe what makes you proud of ACME as a workplace' - both questions have a role, and can be used in various occasions - but it is vital to understand what level of emotion you are looking for. Similarly, a question 'please describe what you would tell of ACME as a workplace to your friends' invites a different kind of emotional load. If you want to elicit an emotional response, do so knowingly.
5. Don't use obscure hints at what you expect the respondents to say. For instance, questions such as "how happy are you", "describe how dissatisfied you are", or "how well are we doing" are contaminated with normative vocabulary embedded in a freely-worded question. Very often this contamination happens unintentionally - but you should remember to check against it. Remember that what you are asking for is honest opinion, which is not necessarily a confirmation for what you expect.
6. Finally, unless you have a pressing reason to, don't ask questions for which you can find answers elsewhere. What is generally considered good leadership or how people typically learn at work can be found through a number of research papers already - unless you have a good reason to believe your organisation views things like this very differently from the norm, asking them might not make a lot of sense.

Now that we have a few ground rules in mind, we can look into the elements of an open question.

The Scope of a Question

For the purpose of finding out what people think, we need to define the scope of the question - which in practice breaks down to three different things: topic, focus and context.

The topic of the question tells us what the overarching subject of the question is. Is it what respondents consider important, or frustrating? Their fears, hopes and dreams? What they feel proud about, or what they consider frustrating? Or perhaps threats or opportunities they see? Carefully selecting the topic of the question also allows you to influence how much and what kind of emotional content you are receiving.

The focus of a question refers to what kind of information are you trying to extract from the respondents' thinking. Are you looking for explanations or causes? Just people's general thoughts? Ideas for actions? Or perhaps a recital of personal experience? Each of these topics requires approaching and framing the question differently. Occasionally the focus is made obvious based on the topic, but very often it is not - and it always makes sense to check that the focus is communicated properly

Finally, the context of the question describes what kinds of the limits we want to impose on the information we want the respondents to deliver. Are we asking about the respondents' daily work, or their thoughts on leadership? Or experiences with either using or delivering a service or product? In short, context defines the content of the thoughts and memories they should be running through when answering the question.

Let's look at topic, focus and context through the following examples.

• What frustrates you in your daily work? The focus here are people's own personal perspectives, and topic lies solely in experiences that are typically linked with frustration for them. Context is the day-to-day work. This a great question for finding out what are the most important practical pain points in how your organisation works.
• What should be done do to deliver information more effectively at ACME? The topic of the question is the delivery of information, but focus here is a different from the first one - here we are not asking just for personal opinions, but proposals for action. Context is remarkably wide: the question invites the respondent to consider the whole of the company, not only their personal work.
• From your perspective, please describe what is important when using ACME products. The topic is what the respondent prioritises as the most important things around usage of ACME products. The focus is again strictly personal experience - in this question, we are not interested in how the respondent might think others view the topic, just themselves. This question is ideal for situations where we want to understand different perspectives around a vital part of what the company does - for instance, between customers and employees who create or deliver the products.
• What kind of leadership do you think is needed at ACME right now? Here, the topic is a leadership, and the question focus is set in a way to make sure person's view of the whole company - not just their own, personal role regarding the company, but what they deem as necessary for whatever success seems for them. The context is ACME right now - not any other place or organisation, and not in the five years' time, but right at this point. This kind of question could useful for a company undergoing a major change, or one emerging from a crisis.

To summarise, topic is the overarching issue you're asking about (e.g. leadership or frustrations), focus the kind of thinking you're trying to extract (e.g. generic thoughts, causes for an issue) and context the 'dataset' you want the respondent to browse through in their minds (e.g. company direction, their own plans). If you pay attention to all three, and keep in mind who the respondents are and the six ground rules above, your question is likely to make sense, and the responses you are getting are likely to be valuable.

Getting started

To many, open questions may seem fluffy, imprecise and laden with messy emotional content and therefore hard to use. This is old-fashioned thinking, and typically based on experience with questions that have been badly designed, or not knowing what to do with the answers. Today, these issues are a thing of the past: it is perfectly possible to find actionable, quantified insights from the opinions of thousands, tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of people easily and inexpensively. The best way to start getting your insights into a new level is to try it.

In both analysing business needs and life in general, questions should be big but not enormous, and definitely not too many at a time. And every now and then, asking the unusual question can be more valuable than anything else.