It’s Hard To Ask Good Questions

It’s amazingly hard to ask good questions.

I’ve been in investigative mode over the last month; trying to understand the root cause of a performance issue and also designing a potential new business model. Both projects mean I’ve had to ask a lot of questions. And they also mean I have had to remind myself how to ask questions.

In my experience, the key to asking a good question is to know why you are asking the question. When people ask questions, they do so for one of three reasons:

• They want a well-reasoned point of view
• They want an opinion from an expert
• They want a factually correct answer

That’s right; people don’t always want a factual answer to their questions.

As a result, asking a well-formed question is incredibly important – especially if the answer is a point of view or an opinion. Unfortunately, people usually ask questions which are unintentionally vague. Vague questions produce vague answers.

I had been looking for a memorable way to make the point about ambiguous questions when I re-watched the movie Die Hard with a Vengeance on a recent plane flight. The villain gives the good guys thirty seconds to telephone him on the number “555 plus the answer” or else a bomb will detonate.

The question is the well-known nursery rhyme:

As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives, Each wife had seven sacks, Each sack had seven cats, Each cat had seven kits: Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,

How many were there going to St. Ives?

Most people try to multiply the sevens to get to the answer. But, if you look closer, the passage never says the group is travelling to St. Ives. So the answer should be one: the narrator.

But wait. We don’t know if the narrator is traveling alone so perhaps a better answer is at least one.

On the other hand, a plausible answer is zero. The last two lines of the riddle state “kits, cats, sacks, wives … were going to St. Ives?” The narrator isn’t a kits cat, sack, or wife, so shouldn’t count as part of the answer.

Since the nursery rhyme is supposed to be a riddle, it’s intentionally vague. But it makes the point. There is no factually correct answer so you can only have a well-reasoned point of view.

Ask better questions. Or as the French philosopher Voltaire said, "Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers."

This article was originally published on my personal blog, Manage By Walking Around.