Disagree better by asking great questions
Which of these good question-asking habits have you mastered, and where is there room to fine-tune?
It’s tempting to tell people what they should do. It feels efficient, and it makes us feel helpful and wise. When we replace telling with asking, we can do something more powerful and, ultimately, more satisfying: Help people illuminate what’s important and generate effective solutions to problems.
Marty Cooper, a young engineer at Motorola, was given a new assignment: lead the team that would build the next generation of car radiotelephones. It was the early 1970s, and car phones seemed poised to become the next significant advancement in telephone technology.
But Cooper didn’t just roll up his sleeves and get to work on the next iteration of telephones attached to cars. Instead, he stepped back and wondered: Why is it that when I want to call a person, I have to call a place?
What people think of as the moment of discovery is really discovery of the question.
Jonas Salk
Cooper’s question changed not just telephony but the world. After a century of telephones attached to wires, the two became untethered. In April 1973, Cooper stood on New York City’s Sixth Avenue and placed the first cell phone call in history [source].
The power of good questions for creating shifts
Good questions have great power during a disagreement:
They help us get information. Sometimes, it’s information we weren’t aware we were missing.
They help us understand.
They help us think differently about a vexing problem, which is essential when the usual solutions are ineffective.
They challenge our assumptions, helping illuminate viable options that had been hidden.
They help us break out of that hopeless place mediators tend to label “impasse.”
The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
The importance of attitude for asking great questions
Effective questions are as much about attitude as they are about word choice. Even awkwardly phrased questions can work when asked with curiosity and interest instead of judgment or doubt.
Imagine that you disagree with a colleague about a decision they made. You’re suspicious of their motives. Ask the following question out loud as you read this, in the way you might ask it if you’re expressing disdain, skepticism, or distrust: Why did you decide to do it that way?
Now imagine someone whose motivations you don’t doubt and whose judgment you almost always find on the mark. Imagine they’ve made a decision you disagree with, and you’re curious about their thinking. Ask the following question out loud, in the way you might ask if you’re expressing curiosity or a desire to learn: Why did you decide to do it that way?
Same question, different attitude. Your attitude influences which words you emphasize, your tone, and your facial expression and body language. The listener hears the difference too, and their response will be affected by the intention they perceive in your question.
How to ask good questions for conflict resolution
Use these guidelines to fine-tune your question skills by picking a few ways you want to improve and focusing first on those:
Ask what you really want to know. When I teach workshops on asking good questions, I am repeatedly struck by how often people skirt around the question they really want to ask of their roleplay partner. I’ll pause the roleplay and ask, What do you really want to know? And they’ll tell me very clearly. It is often not the question they had asked, and equally often, it is the question worth asking. I find myself wondering… is language I find honest and valuable in moments like this.
Ask one question at a time. This seems obvious, but watch television news interviewers, and you will notice how frequently they’ll ask two or three questions at once, leaving the listener to decide which question to answer. You’ll see this in meetings once you start to watch for it. Pause, think, and ask one question. Then the next.
Listen to the answer! It is important not to listen with your answer running; you don’t want to miss the answer because you’re inside your head, thinking about what you’ll ask next or worrying about what they’re thinking of you. Get out of your head. Don’t waste a good question by missing the reply.
Don’t fill silence. When you’ve asked a good question, the other person may need time to process it and consider their reply. This is a good thing! Good questions deserve good answers, so stay out of their way and let them think.
Avoid multiple-choice and run-on questions. I’ve noticed that run-on questions tend to surface when the asker is nervous, so practice asking clear questions and then stopping yourself. Multiple choice questions assume you know all the options — and you probably don’t. Don’t limit the response possibilities.
Avoid leading questions. Be honest with yourself about this. Don’t try to disguise your idea or advice by hanging a question mark at the end.
Try not to over-rely on a question queue. It’s not wrong to jot down a list of things you want to ask. If you over-rely on your list, your questions can sound more like an interrogation than an exploration, and you may fail to see opportunities to ask good questions that are not on your list. Try to relax into the experience of working beyond a prepared list.
Flip the question. It’s a surprisingly useful trick to take the usual question and flip it into its opposite. It seems to trick our minds into seeing something in a fresh way. Find examples of flipped questions here.
Timing matters. Even a brilliant question asked at the wrong time or place will yield underwhelming results. Sometimes, you must ask your question again when they’re ready to hear it.
Sniff out the question you haven’t thought to ask. You don’t have to be omniscient. Sometimes, they’re waiting for you to ask something you haven’t considered. What haven’t I asked that you want to tell me? can be useful.
Over to you
Journal / conversation / comment prompts:
What question do you wish you could ask someone important to you at work or home? How can you word the question in a way that asks what you want to know and makes them interested in answering it?
What keeps you from listening to someone’s answers when you ask questions during a difficult conversation?
What question might someone important to you enjoy being asked?
What question would you enjoy being asked by someone important to you?