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I was listening to a podcast today which featured L. David Marquet who has recently published a book called Leadership is Language in which he talks about how asking better questions can help so much in our day to day communication. He narrated the engaging story about observing the conversation recorded on the black box of a sunken ship. He realized how much more effective the conversations and decision-making on board could have been, had someone asked better questions.
He talks about a few sins of questioning on the podcast and while he was talking, I realized how extremely common these are. I commit these sins often. I’m penning (okay, typing) them down here in the hope that we (me and the two other readers this post attracts) can all learn to recognize them and be better at asking questions. I painted the Product manager as the devil in all of these as I’m one of them. Don’t take it too personally. :)
1. Sin of stacking questions
Product Manager: “Do you think this will be on ready on time? It’s really important for our users to have this feature by next week. Are we all set to ship it? We must make sure everything is ready for the launch."
When we stack questions like that, we aren’t really asking a question – we’re trying to convey our point and lead the listener down our line of thought. We’re putting forth what we want rather than actually, genuinely listen to the response. An easy way to do this better is to ask one question. Don’t add more information than necessary - genuinely ask a question and wait for a response.
2. Sin of leading questions
Engineer: “I think we should delay the product launch. We’re not yet ready for it."
Product Manager: “Well, have you thought about the impact this will have for our roadmap and timelines?"
In this example, the leading question about whether the engineer has thought about roadmap and timelines takes the conversation away from the issue at hand - not being ready for product launch. The PM is pointing out things that the engineer would probably not have thought of and so the expected answer would be “No”. Instead of directly jumping to what matters to them, the PM can approach this with more curiosity, such as asking, Tell me more or What makes you say that?. Otherwise they lose out on the opportunity to get the information the engineer has - what is it that they see/know that the PM cannot see?
3. Sin of the Why questions
Engineer: “I think we should delay the product launch. We’re not yet ready for it."
Product Manager: “Why do you want to do that?"
Why questions can easily come across as accusatory and make people shut down rather than feel welcome to put forth their perspective. Questions like Why would you… or Why do you… or Why can/can’t you… would put someone on the defensive and make them more hesitant to open up. A better way to phrase these would be to skip the use of Why when possible and instead use questions like - Tell me more about that or What do you think are the barriers to doing that?
4. Sin of the Dirty questions
Person A: “I feel frustrated because of this co-worker’s attitude in our meetings lately."
Person B: “Do you have the courage to stand up to them?"
Ooh, this one’s good. What person B said there is such a loaded question. Let’s see -
- It assumes courage is the scarce commodity here.
- It uses the metaphor “stand up”, implying there is a need to stand up/have a face-off with the coworker in question.
- It makes the assumption that the onus of doing something is on A and they own the problem. These are all signs of a dirty question. Basically whenever a question is colored by the asker’s biases and assumptions - it’s a dirty question. There is no better way to phrase these. Please don’t ask questions like that. Projecting biases and disguising it as a question is not cool.
5. Sin of the binary questions
Product Manager: “Is it ready yet?"
Binary questions are fast. Low cognitive load on our brain - it’s a simple yes or no. But there is a danger here. Asking binary questions will most of the time lead us to the axpected right answer. There is a high barrier for someone to disagree/agree when there is an expected right answer. Consider a construction site manager asking Is it safe?. Chances are nobody will speak up unless they feel very strongly that it isn’t. But asking How safe is it? is more likely to elicit responses like There is a slight risk of the plank being slippery because of the rain yesterday but otherwise it should be fine. Open-ended questions will always gain us more information which we would probably miss out on if the question is binary.
A helpful way to think of this is that we should be asking questions that lead to as verbose as answer as possible.
6. Sin of the self-answering questions
Product Manager: “How does this look? Good?" or Driver: “We need to take the next exit, right?"
Self-answering questions create a high bar for someone to disagree with the self-provided answer. They’re very similar to binary questions but possibly even worse because the asker is basically trying to provide their own knowledge about the answer to the question they are asking. This again, does not lead to any information gain.
And, that’s all folks! Hope this post makes you ask better questions. Hopefully one of them is not What did I just read? 🤔