Are quality questions the answer to better business?

This is a difficult topic for me to write.

It's less the content, more the process of articulating it because I know for a fact that most founders of organizations are interested more in going for concrete results rather than surmize theories. Unfortunately for me, when my mind wraps itself around one idea, I'll find it hard to let go of "how" to think about the thinking.

So first let me explain what I intend to do in this article, why it matters and why business evolution, in my opinion, centers around this.

As a coach, I do my best to ask great questions to help my coachees to think well and think deeply. But I also think learning to ask great questions is a powerful skill whether or not you are a coach.

Occam's Razor

In the good old days, selling vegetables on the streets was an everyday occurence. For instance, I recall days passing through the town of Air Hitam in Malaysia as a boy, and while passing through the town, farmers would be peddling their vegetables as the cars passed through.

That's as simple as it gets. Grow your veggies. Harvest them. Bring them to a place where there's lots of people. Try to sell them. Sounds about right, yeah? But imagine this. All of us business owners now stand in the middle of the most crowded mall in your biggest city and try to pitch people your service or product. Now it sounds a little wacky, right?

I'm sure many have heard of Occam's Razor, where "all else being equal, simplicity is best". But some things are complex, and cannot really be made simpler. There is a level of complexity around thinking of a business model that many people try to simplify to a point of being too simple.

I suppose that new business founders have the ambition but not the inquisitive smarts to ask mentors or experts in order to maximize their learnings. I mean, you can ask "what is your business model" or "how did you do it", but a more superior question to elicit good knowledge comes from learning about mental models and assumptions, something that I discovered through an book by Peter Senge called The Fifth Discipline.

The Question is the Answer

After running another Supernova event where I ran a fireside chat with Joel Chue who sold his business for an 8-figure sum, I came to discover that some people don't know how to ask questions to expand their learning. It's the same as a fireside chat that I had with CEOs, where high potentials gather to ask questions. It seems that enlightened questions are far and few in between the rest of them.

It follows that if we get great answers, it must be because we asked great questions, right?

Let's say you came to know of someone whose business is valued at $1 Bn and you had the chance to short cut your learning by interviewing this person. You'd want to prepare powerful questions, no matter how short a time frame.

But if you don't learn how to ask good questions, you are likely to get simplistic answers, and I know smart people would prefer not to settle for simplistic answers?

Then why do people NOT learn how to ask great questions?

Not of thinking in dimensions

I remember being introduced to the concept of the 2x2 matrix. The earliest one was the Boston Consulting Group's Growth Share Matrix.

This approach can enhance thinking, by forcing a business founder to have to think about the assumptions and applications of the categories being used. I won't belabor the use of this specific matrix, but essentially, thinking can be enhanced when we can look at things dimensionally.

There are probably dozens of dimensions I can think up:

• Reflective vs Action based
• Broad vs Specific
• Present vs Future
• Empathetic vs Analytical
• etc

The idea is to think categorically in order to become more systemic in our thinking. However, I am going to be quite blunt. After dabbling in a bit of epistemology, it's not going to be easy to write an article that everyone will appreciate or even understand, even if it might mean better returns, culture and learning. But hey, I'll bite the bullet in this article and see what happens.

Perceptual Orientation

Everything we learn begins with the way we perceive things. If perception is a reality we create, then learning is about recreating reality.

If we know how to orientate our ability to "see" and "experience" the world better, we can develop a better awareness of the world around us.

Miller, Galanter and Pribram's (1960, 2013) work Plans and the Structure of Behavior highlighted an important fundamental unit of thinking called the T.O.T.E., a term commonly used in the study of cybernetics, which is an acronym for Test-Operate-Test-Exit, a familiar feedback cycle we see in programming architectures. Take for instance a thermostat. Until a certain temperature, the thermostat is not activated. It requires feedback from the temperature of its environment (e.g. a kettle) in order to determine when a set of actions is completed.

This has been responsible for me extracting deep talent (e.g. thinking processes) that others deem to be impossible to extract or transfer. It supported the 2002 SAF Shooting Contingent in its championship win. It supported me as a bestselling author (2007), championship speaker (2002) and go to market leader in various businesses. It even helps me currently in understanding my student/patient's ways of thinking as a coach, therapist and trainer.

Timelines

Another dimension of reality is time. As business founders, we have the ability to reflect on our past and imagine multiple possible futures. Expanding on this, is Robert Dilts developed the S.C.O.R.E. model, a similar feedback and problem solving framework that stands for Symptom, Cause, Outcome, Resource, Effect. It has been the singular most influential dimension of thinking I have come across, and denotes a set of powerful questions that present a macro awareness of your direction of thinking.

I see the TOTE as specific processes within the broader frame of the SCORE, where one can have TOTEs related to each category of the SCORE.

Levels of Thinking

So now we have direction, feedback, causal relationships and ways to bridge problems to solutions. The thing now that is missing is the assumptions behind each of the cause-effect actions. If I want to see how a billionaire thinks, I need to understand his actions as well as his mindset that caused those actions.

Enter the Neurological Levels, also by Dilts. The topic itself will warrant a book, but I'll attempt to be succinct, even though there is a high level of complexity in this model.

Most questions about business center around the lower levels. These are more concrete: where and when (environment) did you do something, what you did (behavior), how you did it (capability). But to get to psychological drivers and depths of what a person thinks will center around higher-order levels: why you think a particular way and not another (beliefs and values), who you are being when you think, do or don't do these things (identity), and who else and why else you are doing this for (purpose).

When I stay superficial, I focus on the concrete levels of questions. When I go deep, maybe some may say philosophical, I might go to abstract levels of questions. I believe that the higher levels influence and impact the lower levels profoundly, leading me to think that without them, actions are empty. Knowing how Jeff Bezos does what he does, for instance, doesn't help me enter his reality and connect with his sense of belief and identity that allowed that behavior to happen in the first place.

Going Far By Going Deep

Depth of thinking is really an issue of appreciation rather than necessity. I'm sure that leaders of business don't deny that thinking deeply is useful. The question is always the level of payoff there is for going deep. Going deep means delays and potential investment of time that may not pay off. Also, not everyone will be able to see a value of thinking deeply, just like how some people might never value antiques, works of art or even good food.

Is the payoff in the execution toward the goal?

Is the payoff in the process of thinking about the person behind goal?

Or is there some kind of balance we need to strike?

Do we need to learn to practice good questions so that our default mode of thinking generates superior conversation in our team and company?

The better our questions, the better our learning and thinking, and the quality of our actions. Once we have this causal chain sorted out, I believe our businesses will be better able to flourish and evolve.

Do you have any questions?