As a leader, your ability to quickly assess and understand a situation is pretty fundamental. As leadership often involves multi-tasking, it is also easy to be distracted by minutiae, or interesting information that may not turn out to be directly related to the topic at hand. Knowing what questions to ask is a great way to get the facts on the table.

In Hans Rosling’s book, Factfulness, he focuses on facts. The title is a dead giveaway! He tells the story of a time he supported a call to action, based on pressure from local government, a narrow fact base, and a growing fear in the decision makers around him. The decision turned out to be the wrong one. A number of women and children died as a result and it continues to haunt him to this day.

When managing a crisis there is, of course, a natural bias to action. This is great if something is on fire. But if you have the capacity to stop and ask some good questions to ensure that you get a clearer picture first, you are unlikely to regret it. 

In an organisation I once worked for, a customer complaint came through which everyone was super interested in. It had all of the right ingredients of drama, interest, and shock value. Every man, woman, and dog decided that they needed to be involved. The situation quickly escalated and gained momentum, yet no one really stopped to question what was really going on. Many meetings were called, and summons made to urgently address what clearly was a systemic issue. How could it not be when it was so throat-grabbing and downright interesting? It is worth noting that this issue:

a)      had never happened before in memory of the institution 

b)      happened due to a well-documented and normally effective process not being followed.

c)       was due to human error rather than anything systemic

A spot of training, an apology, and some good communication later, and the customer was happy. The actual cost of restitution was less than $200. We assessed the cost of management time was closer to $750,000.

Had the right questions been asked along the way in pursuit of of the issue, there is no doubt in my mind that a lot of time, money, and effort would have understanding been saved

So, what are some techniques you can use to improve the quality of your questions? 

1.      I am sure we all know this one. Don’t ask closed questions unless you want a one-word answer. Now it’s worth noting that sometimes a one-word answer is appropriate! For example,  if the question was, “Is there a spider on my head?” Typically though, you will want more granularity than that.

2.      Follow your initial question with further clarifying questions. Here are just a few examples:

a.      Tell me more about that?

b.      Have we seen other examples of this anywhere else? 

c.       How would you recommend we go about this? 

d.      What are our alternatives?

e.      Who does this well?

f.        If we don’t do this, what are the likely trade-offs or consequences?

g.       If we wait six months to do this, what are the likely trade-offs or consequences?

h.      How have we gone about validating our assumptions?

3.      When you are dealing with multiple team members or stakeholders with different personalities and thought processes, you want to make sure you can glean as much information as you can in a short period of time. If someone is quite black and white, or tends to think in a linear manner, they may interpret your question in quite a different way than you intended. For example.  You might ask whether something will be hard to fix, and the response might be that it will be easy.  Now you could joyously infer from this that it will not be expensive. I learned this one the hard way when I received an eye-watering invoice. Easy and cheap are often not the same thing and it’s always worth clarifying! 

4.      Watch for people who are listening to answer rather than listening to understand. This often leads to an incomplete or inaccurate understanding as they launch into a pre-prepared answer.

5.      Always play back your understanding of the conversation before it is finished. “So, what you are saying is….?” By doing this you will often find that the other party may clarify, add to, or change their initial statement. This will hopefully result in a better understanding of the situation.

6.      When someone is speaking in superlatives, seek to clarify. I will pick up my pen when someone tells me something is huge or disastrous and then ask them to quantify exactly how big or how bad the situation is. I have found, almost without exception, that the bearer of the news will ask for more time to go away and ‘just check’ the facts. The same goes for statements including the words ‘always’ or ‘never’, to which I would typically respond “Are we sure, and "How do we know that to be a fact?”

Like anything, good questioning techniques take practice. But it really is worth the effort and you will see the outcomes in the quality of your conversations and your personal impact.

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