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Become a “questionologist”
Asking questions is absolutely a discipline that we all need to master. I’m a big fan of the work of Warren Burger who’s written a great book called The Book of Beautiful Questions. And Warren, who calls himself a questionologist, is convinced that we actually should be teaching how to ask questions in school, and I agree with him because not every question is created equally.
There are divergent questions, questions such as “why,” and “what if,” and “I wonder.” And there are also convergent questions that help us to get super tactical, such as “what,” “where,” and “when.” And in some of our organizations, those tend to be the sorts of questions only that we focus on. Then there are more hybrid questions such as “how.” “How” questions can be both diversion and convergent. But we want to be able to really integrate all categories of questions. Asking questions is a way of thinking, and it trains our minds and our mental state to show up very differently at work.
Lean into ambiguity
We live in incredibly ambiguous times, and in our educational systems and a lot of our corporate environments, we want to lean into certainty. We want to lean into what is the answer. The challenge where we’re only myopically focused on what is the right answer is that we lose sight of other multiple possible future scenarios and other opportunities that are right in front of us.
Ambiguity is actually not something for us to be terrified of. It’s something for us to lean into. It’s not going anywhere, and it helps us to fall in love with the process instead of only trying to figure out the answer.
One way to think about plowing our way through ambiguous terrain is to think very simply about the following three questions to lead us. So we could start with that very divergent question of “why” and then go even bigger to ask “what if.” And then we can dial down into the much more convergent tactical question of “how.” We’ve got to start big and expansively because we’re always going to need to edit down because of constraints on time, on budget, on personnel. So why not start really big and then begin to whittle it down based on the constraints with which we’re working?
Open up new fields of opportunity
Collaboration is hard. We tend to think, “I could do this so much faster by myself or with just our team.” We already know the way we think. We already have our own jargon. But one of the gifts of collaborating is that we are invited to ask questions, and we also are required to answer clarifying questions. And this process begins to open up new fields of opportunity. We begin to self-reflect and question the ways we’ve always done things.
In my practice, what I’ve learned are some of the greatest creativity inhibitors, especially as it relates to curiosity, are remarks such as, “Well, we’ve always done it this way,” or, “We tried that 17 years ago and it didn’t work.” Well, what’s to say it wouldn’t work now? The context has shifted. The actors in your organization have evolved and shifted and changed and moved. We have to be open to asking these new questions because questions are inputs into a system.
What I’ve learned in my experience is that a lot of the time we have people who seem obstructionist to a process is that they need to feel seen and they need to feel heard. So let’s incorporate their perspective. Let’s ask them for those examples that they’re referring to historically, and then explore collaboratively ways that we can build on that and shift those ways of working.
Generate juicy questions
There are a couple of ways that as leaders we can use inquiry in a very practical way and to guide and model for our teams. The first way is to practice something called questionstorming, which is a little different from brainstorming.
So in questionstorming, instead of asking people to generate a lot of different ideas, we’re actually asking our teams to generate multiple possible questions. And I like to do this in a very structured way. So the first point of structure is for there to be time limits. So it could be 30 seconds, it could be as long as 90 seconds.
The second point of structure is to use space as a constraint. So for example, asking people to jot down one question per Post-it so that they’re really keeping their questions distilled and tight. The other constraint is that you might only ask divergent, big, blue-sky questions about the topic at hand.
And then you have another phase where you’re only asking people to generate very convergent tactical questions. And what you’ll discover is that there’s a plethora of questions that can be generated in a really short amount of time.
The next step is to identify, as a group, as a team, what are the patterns and themes that we’re seeing amongst the questions that we’ve all generated. And then let’s try to land on the juiciest, most provocative question that we want to go after.