You can’t ask for more than that.
QUESTION GUIDE
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DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS
Before you can fix a problem, you need to know what it is. Get it right, and you’re on your way. Get it wrong and you face the consequences, and they can be costly. These questions help identify a problem with precision, on several levels, separating the symptoms from the disease. Start broad, zero in. Describe, compare, and quantify. Listen for detail and patterns.
Open-Ended Problem Questions:
What’s going on here?
What’s the matter?
The first step is to ask what’s wrong. Using broad, open-ended questions, ask for a description of the problem—what it looks, sounds and feels like. Ask where it manifests itself, when, and in what ways. Ask about what seems to make the problem better or worse. These are present-tense questions designed to get a full and accurate description of the problem from all angles.
History Taking: When did this problem begin? How has it changed? How does it compare? History repeats itself. Learn from it. Look for comparisons, parallels, patterns. Ask about previous experience with the problem—when it was first detected, how it’s changed over time, what’s been done to address it in the past. Ask whether it’s gotten worse and in what ways. Ask what’s been tried in the past and with what effect. Compare then and now. Use the past to inform the present. These questions use history to seek detail to understand what happened, under what conditions, and with what result.
The Mystery: What are we missing? Now that you know the present and the past, drill deeper and ask what don’t we know. What else could be at work here to cause the problem? Is there a dirty little secret, a hidden agenda, a mistake, or an unintended action that has made the situation worse? Did a shortcut become a short circuit? These are beneath-the-surface questions that ask about miscues, mistakes, and missed signals.
Verification Questions: Are you sure? How do you know? Can you take this information to the bank? Once you have a diagnosis, you want to be sure it’s right. Double-check the sources and know where the information comes from. Determine whether the people you’re relying on have an agenda or an ax to grind. What are their qualifications? What’s their track record? Ask for an explanation about their process and what their conclusion is based on. Consider a second opinion. These are the corroborating questions that help you understand the basis of the diagnosis and give you confidence that it is correct. Now you can deal with it.
Ask Again: In the medical field, clinicians and researchers have created a number of techniques to get patients talking and to describe their condition in detail. By connecting symptoms and patterns to knowledge and experience, a medical professional will be able to diagnose the problem or will order up the right tests to take the next step toward a diagnosis. You can adapt this pattern of questioning—describe, compare, quantify, connect—to virtually any situation where you are trying to determine what’s wrong and why. Ask clearly and persistently, and ask more than once.
Listen: In asking diagnostic questions, listen closely to words used to describe the problem and its symptoms. Key in to details about where and when the problem occurs, and actions that connect to it or seem to cause it. Listen for patterns. Listen for detail and for the connection between the problem and actions that seem to make it better or worse.
Try: Have a conversation with a family member who is not feeling well. Start with open-ended questions and then get more specific. Where does it hurt? Can you quantify it, rate it on a scale of one to ten? Does anything you do make it better? Worse? How does the discomfort compare to previous instances when you felt like this? If you can stay focused and keep asking, you will find it easier to extend your attention span and drill down to determine the cause of a problem.
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STRATEGIC QUESTIONS
You’re about to make a major decision that will affect your life, your business, or your community. You’re considering a move, and it requires a big investment of time, resources, and energy. Your future is on the line. Strategic questions zoom out and look at the big picture. They ask about long-term goals, interests, and priorities. They consider alternatives, consequences, and risks. These questions sharpen the focus on the larger objective, the higher calling, and clarify what it will take to get there.
The Big Question:
What are you trying to do? Why?
What difference will it make?
Start at 20,000 feet. The Oxford Dictionary defines strategic as “relating to the identification of long-term or overall aims and interests and the means of achieving them.” Ask whether everyone is even ready to think strategically. Ask about the mission. What’s in play, what’s at stake, and what is the strategic, long-range purpose or objective?
Cost and Consequence: How will you achieve your objective? What will it cost? What are the downsides? Now that you’ve defined the goals, ask about their consequences. How will they affect the business, the bottom line, the organizational profile, personal happiness, or real-world activities? Get specific. What’s the cost? Ask how your plan and its component pieces translate strategic objectives into metrics and outcomes based on the time, resources, and objectives. Ask who you would help if you succeeded.
Trade-offs: What’s the downside? What are the risks? What are you not thinking about? Trade-offs are built into any big decision: You can make more money but will have less free time; you can fix the bottom line but will have to lay off workers; you can liberate a country but will cause damage and death. Trade-off questions openly, sometimes defiantly, ask about risk and downsides. They ask people to calculate when there are no formulas. These are questions that challenge groupthink, conventional wisdom, and your own biases. Think of them as circuit breakers in strategic questioning.
Alternatives: What are your options? Is there another way? Ask about options that can achieve the same outcome. Keeping your strategic objective constant, ask whether there are different tactics that can lower the cost or raise the prospects for success. These questions take the tradeoffs and the risks and ask how they can be minimized by applying different approaches and timelines.
Define Success: How will you know when you get there? What will success look like? How will you measure it? Any good military commander relentlessly asks about the “end state”: what “mission accomplished” really looks like. Ask what success means and what it will take to get there. Be sure answers are clear, commonly understood, and widely shared. These questions are the cornerstone of strategic thinking. They clarify destination and set expectations. They help navigate, set sights, and articulate a vision.
Listen: Invite questions from a wide range of perspectives. Listen closely for unexpected obstacles or unexplored risk. Listen for scenarios that call for additional consideration. Listen for gratuitous compliments or qualified agreement that conceal deeper problems or concerns. Listen for indications that people don’t understand the purpose, the mission, or the goal. That will help you determine whether it’s just the message that needs to be sharpened or whether the strategy itself needs to be rethought.
Try: Engage a group about your big idea. Explain the reasoning behind it. Then ask everyone to challenge you, your logic, and your tactics. Answer questions with more questions. Limit your comments and questions to 30 percent of the meeting, so others are speaking and you are listening 70 percent of the time.