Yes, but … Yes, and… No, but … No, and …

Why, oh why, do people perpetuate this myth?

Through the mysteries of LinkedIn postings, I was able to read an interesting article on Cross-Silo Leadership originally published in HBR about a year ago. In general, I thought it was a sound article focusing on a common leadership issue. Not earth-shattering, but sound.

However, I was very disappointed to see the authors, all professorial academics from leading institutions, further propagating the myth surrounding open/closed questions. For clarification, the myth says open questions open up a dialogue (a good thing) whilst closed questions close down a dialogue (a bad thing).

This simply is not true. Try listening to conversations more closely and observe how people respond to closed questions. In the vast majority of cases where individuals are asked and respond to a closed question with a yes or no answer, they follow on almost immediately with an ‘and …’ or a ‘but …’ i.e. they go on explain their answer. This is not closing the conversation; it is adding to it in two ways. Firstly, the binary response tells you where the individual stands on the issue and, secondly, it provides an explanation for that stance.

Neil Rackham, of verbal behaviour analysis fame, identified this when he could not correlate the use/non-use of closed questions with successful sales outcomes.

And if the explanation does not follow on from the binary response, it is easy and natural to wheel in one of Kipling’s ‘six honest serving men’. (https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_serving.htm)