This episode emphasizes the paramount importance of asking better questions as a foundational skill for consultants striving to become strategic partners within their organizations. We delve into the significance of transitioning from an answer-centric mindset to one that prioritizes inquiry, thereby fostering deeper understanding and enhancing professional relationships. Throughout our discussion, we elucidate various types of questions—contextual, depth-oriented, and future-focused—that can significantly elevate the quality of consultations and decision-making processes. Furthermore, we identify common pitfalls associated with questioning, including the risk of leading inquiries and the potential for interrogative styles that stifle genuine dialogue. By the conclusion of the episode, we offer practical exercises designed to cultivate effective questioning habits, ultimately leading to more impactful consulting practices.

Foreign.

Welcome to the Consulting for Humans podcast.

You're with Ian and with Mike.

And in each episode of the show, we explore a new topic that gets to the heart of what makes consultants happy and successful.

Right, Mike?

We do, Ian, on the Consulting for Humans podcast.

It's our mission to add just a little more humanity to the lives of consultants.

We'd also love to bring some of the skills and perspectives of consultants to human lives, too.

Well put, Mike.

So if you're a consultant who's trying to be more of a human, or even like this week, a human who's trying to be more of a consultant, then stick around because we think you're just our kind of person.

Mike, where are we in our little flow here of podcast episodes dedicated to internal advisors?

Yeah, internal advisors Becoming strategic partners.

We've been trying to address the many professionals who are already doing consultative work without realizing it.

And last week we talked a little bit about how to recognize if you're doing it, how to cultivate more of it, how to add more value to your company and key stakeholders, customers, team, and yourself by doing that.

And we introduced this strategic partner pyramid and some of the skills that went along with it.

And today, Ian, we're going to dive a little bit deeper on perhaps the most foundational skill about that pyramid.

Right, Mike?

Today we're going to be talking about asking better questions, maybe asking more questions, but for sure asking better questions.

We think it's a foundational skill for anybody who's trying to do consultative service, analytical consulting type work, and it's vital for strategic partnership at all of the levels of the pyramid that we've talked about a little while ago.

I will be getting back into the three levels of the pyramid again this week.

First of all, though, we're going to cover the paradigm shift from thinking about the answer first to thinking more deeply about the question first.

We're going to talk about three ways that you can make a question a strategic question.

And we're going to talk about some questioning techniques that will help you mark your progress up that strategic partner pyramid that we talked about.

Yeah.

In doing this, we're going to dive a little bit into asking questions that'll help you grow your professional relationships.

We'll talk about some common pitfalls you're likely to encounter with any kind of questioning, and we'll offer three simple exercises to help build your confidence in asking questions.

That sounds great, Mike.

We better dive into it.

So listen, this whatever current job you're doing, whichever kind of firm you're in, Whatever kind of business you're in, whether you're a solo or a big company, or a internal or an external consultant, take a moment to think about your most valuable relationships.

Thinking about the people whose advice and perspective you appreciate the most.

The chances are that those close relationships, that those trust based relationships involve people who ask you thought for questions, questions that help you think more clearly, think about challenges or opportunities, help you frame up and understand the decisions that you have to make.

So these aren't people who provide answers, or at least not just providing answers.

These really appreciated advisors are the ones who are asking us questions, who are helping us to discover better questions that we can dig into.

And like, I think there's a big paradigm shift if you start out your career, especially in a business where science or technology is involved, there's a very good chance that you feel under pressure to possess answers to questions or to discover answers to questions.

And this shift from answer giving to question asking is probably the most fundamental transformation that we see in people as they become a strategic partner inside their firm.

Most professionals will have started their careers with that foundation, like I said, are giving the right answers.

Strategic partners use asking the right questions to build influence.

Asking questions isn't only about helping to qualify your world better.

It's about helping other people and helping your advice and your thinking to have impact.

So it's not about holding back your expertise.

It's not about being a pain in the ass and making them wait.

It's about using questioning to make your expertise have more value and more impact.

So Mike, the questions are going to be a big tool for us as we climb up the pyramid.

At the foundation level, you answer questions, but we're going to get into ways that you can answer questions even better.

At the mid level, you use questioning to understand problems and qualify them better.

At the top level, you bring fresh questions, you bring questions that provoke new thinking.

And the challenge assumptions and the quality of, of the choice and execution of your questions has a lot to do with the quality of your strategic contribution.

Right?

Absolutely.

Ian?

Yeah, I think you're.

I'm looking back on my own career.

I'm thinking about colleagues that I've worked with.

And I think so many professionals operate from this answer first mentality because that's how they've been rewarded all the way through their education, through their early career.

You know, we always got good grades for having the right answers.

We got hired for demonstrating expertise.

We, we got promoted for solving problems, especially for having the answers that worked here.

And this creates this ingrained pattern of jumping to solutions.

Sometimes before fully understanding the context, strategic partners pause and try to operate from this question first mentality.

Take a breath, let me ask a little bit more.

They understand that the right question often matters more than the right answer.

They know that asking thoughtful questions builds relationships.

It demonstrates cares for other success, and it usually leads to better solutions than immediately providing answers.

I benefited tremendously.

My second CEO that I worked under very early in my career, pretty folksy guy, but he imparted a lot of wisdom in that folksy.

He said, mike, one of the things you need to understand around here is if I tell you to go paint the fence, I want you to go paint that fence.

Now, if you don't know what color I want to paint the fence, you probably better ask me before you paint it.

And it was his way.

He kind of went through this whole fence painting example of saying, I'm going to tell you to do stuff and I don't want you to just charge out of here.

I want you to help me figure it out before we get it done and that if we don't, it's going to be on you.

He was also that kind of guy.

So I got to understand that asking good questions was really important too.

But even then I found it challenging because I had to jump over this idea of I'm smart, I got it, I can do it.

Let me just provide the solution here.

So we want today to be about what all strategic partners do well, which is first, understanding the problem more deeply through thorough questioning and then providing insights, answers, solutions, their contributions that address the real underlying issues.

Right.

So, Mike, we've talked a bit now about how we think questions really change the way our advice has impact on the way that we're perceived.

Let's get into figuring out some of the how.

Let's get into figuring out what kind of questions.

And in my mind, you and I have talked about this before.

We've talked about the three different kinds of questions, right?

We have context questions, we have depth questions, and we have future questions.

And why don't you get us started with token is through context questions.

What's the role of a context question?

Give us an example of how one might work and how we use it.

Thanks, Ian, will do.

I mean, you know, there's so many ways to categorize questions, you know, open and closed and high gain and, you know, other things.

But this is, as you said, Ian, we take a little bit different look here, context questions, making sure you understand the broader situation before diving into Specifics, you know, for example, instead of just having the request and responding to it, asking what's driving this request, or help me to understand what success would look like from your perspective, or tell me what constraints are you working within here?

So we're trying to get at the kinds of questions and context questions that are going to prevent us from solving the wrong problem, from missing an opportunity for.

From overlooking perhaps a more valuable option, or from providing solutions that don't fit the real situation, that the person asking the question is involved in something we might not know about unless we ask.

Yeah.

So the complex questions are helping us focus on the right problem or the right version of the problem.

I'm a big fan of depth questions as well, Mike, because I think depth questions, this middle category here, are going to be the questions that help us to tease out cause and effect.

We're all about cause and effect.

We're going to use the word diagnostic, I think, a lot in today's episode.

But depth questions are about understanding the underlying issue.

Not just taking symptoms as they present at the surface, but digging below the symptoms, asking questions like, what have you tried so far?

What.

What patterns are you seeing or noticing?

Like, let's start to tease out some cause and effect.

Or even depth questions are sometimes about challenging our own assumptions about what's causing the situation.

So I could ask, what assumptions are we making?

What assumptions are we all making about this situation?

Where might be our received wisdom?

Where might be our sources of bias?

And this, I think, is all about the skeptical mindset of being a consultant.

Moving from the foundation level to the mid level means making sure that we've dug a little deeper to find the real problem and then start to do some diagnosis.

So with context questions and depth questions, we've done quite a good job in understanding the problem and also digging deeper behind it.

What's left, Mike, if we think about future questions.

Yeah, in future questions, is we're really talking about implications, possibilities.

Sometimes we're so focused on the question that we haven't paused to look forward a little bit.

So what.

What might change if we solve this here?

Or what opportunities might we be missing?

Or, okay, we talked about success.

What might success look like six months from now or a year from now?

Or, you know, even a question like, so help me to understand, how does this align with the overall strategy?

Another thing where we're, you know, we're so around this urgent problem right now, but have we taken that bigger picture?

Sometimes the future helps us to do that.

And these questions not only are important anytime we're working.

But they are questions that help us work across the different levels of the pyramid and reach that top level by provoking new thinking about possibilities, about strategic directions, about alignment with strategy.

Excellent.

So we've got three different ways of making our questions more strategic.

We've mentioned the pyramid when we introduce the pyramid.

I think the pyramid is super useful for helping us think about where we are and where we like to get to, of why that might be a better thing for us as an internal advisor.

So I'd like to dig into the kind of questions that will help me just push things a little at that foundational level.

Even if I'm expecting that my role is mainly to gather data to answer a question.

How can I clarify the question?

And Mike, I was thinking about this and I think that understanding, purpose, understanding, like not only context, but how is the data going to be used is a really elementary thing that I can remember forgetting to ask this question, doing analytical work early in my career and making massive mistakes off the back of not simply asking, what decision are you trying to make?

Therefore, what does this analysis inform?

What kind of format or presentation is useful for your needs?

What are you hoping to discover?

You could even ask, what do you think the answer is right now?

Because getting somebody else's hypothesis can be a great way for you to qualify and understand why they want the data and how it could be useful for them.

I think one of the traps for us here when you are a very analytical person when you're dealing with lots of quantitative information, is to believe that precision is the main thing.

Like, and if I can tell you the market size to five decimal places, then I've done my job.

But actually that's not necessarily what we need.

So asking clarifying questions for me serve two purposes.

First, they help us to deliver, like you said before, Mike, what's needed rather than what we guess is needed.

And secondly, they demonstrate that we're thinking about the success of the person who's requesting the help.

And this is already going to change us to be beyond the foundation level.

Because we're not just there to service a request.

We're trying to position that sounds as being their advisor, somebody that will earn trust so they'll remember the experience of being asked the clarifying question, even if later on they forget just how useful the clarifying questions were.

From an analytic point of view, even really simple clarifying questions can help us to add value.

When somebody asks for some kind of standard report or analysis, simply asking what specific concerns are you hoping that this piece of work will address Megan?

We're framing is, I believe you have a concern.

Telling you what your concern is.

Framing it that way might at least reveal that they need, now that they've thought about it for a moment, different information or different analysis from what they regularly get or even what they've asked for.

And my simple way to memorize all of this, Mike, is to think about why.

I think I'm forever asking why.

This idea of start with why is a pervasive one for consultants.

We've talked about Simon Sinek's famous book, Start with why on the show in the past.

I can think of plenty of examples where understanding why completely changed the work.

I was working for a client that was trying to set up a big observational study in the world of gathering clinical data for a pharmaceutical product.

And the vendor that was offering to do this work for them believed that what they want was the same kind of study that everybody else wants.

And it was only at the last minute that they asked, hold on a second.

Why is it that you want this study that you're commissioning from us?

And I said, oh, we don't need it for registration.

We don't need it for a regulator.

It's a marketing thing.

We want to build connections with the people who are investigating this stuff.

And it's really just a marketing thing.

And that changed a lot.

There were some things that didn't change, but it changed a lot of really vital stuff about how we set about doing the work and the kind of standards that applied and the way that methodology worked out.

So asking why first can have a really big impact.

Yeah.

It's funny, I was listening the other day again to effortless by Greg McEwen, the guy who had written Essentialism, and he laid out an example.

He was talking about how we overcomplicate things so many times.

And this example that he was talking about, I thought, this is exactly what we're talking about this week about asking why, as a college professor, she works with all of the work with this college as it is expanding, and it's a lot of pressure and budget and everything, and got a request to make sure that this one course was placed online.

And she was thinking, oh, my gosh, hosting this thing, doing the intros, doing the outros, you know, all the things that would be involved in this thing.

And then she finally, in the midst of it, thought to say, well, wait, why?

Why this course?

You know, kind of, how did that get picked?

They said, oh, there's a student that's been injured, they can't attend class right now.

And so we want to make that available to that student.

She said, well, hold it a minute.

Could they just ask a friend or another class member to video it on their phone?

And the person making the request said, oh, yeah, that's a great idea.

Let's do that.

I could.

I thought, yeah, isn't it the truth?

How many times have I go off, you know, Absolutely.

As.

As we used to say, darkening the sky with planes, you know, everybody revving up to do everything without realizing.

Like your example there, Ian, of no, no, no.

The why means this is what we need.

Not all of that.

Not an all singing, all dancing production here.

Right.

And asking why helps to increase the perceived value of work as well.

Not, not only if you're in our sort of situation where you're selling services and you want to demonstrate value for money, but also if you want to demonstrate impact.

If the person who's asking for you is looking after a brand or a function or a bigger, a big initiative, then asking why helps you demonstrate to them that you help to support their goals as well as helping us to be positive and qualify projects so that we all see the impact.

Mike, I think asking why also sometimes helps me to say no.

Like, if I don't think that the work looks relevant to me, if I don't think that this looks like a good use of someone's time, of, you know, of my kind of size and shape, it's going to be more professional for me to say no by saying, I'm not seeing yet really how this impacts the business.

That's a better phrasing for me of saying, no, I'm not going to do this than simply say, gee, I'm sorry, I'm too busy right now.

Or, you know, send me an email request.

I like to be able to say, I'm not really sure that this is going to generate a high quality answer because I want to own the quality and relevance of the answer as well as owning my own schedule and workload.

Well, it's interesting because I remember a time when I was working with a group and actually a big part of this company that was all about doing everything and doing everything perfectly and having all these initiatives.

And it was almost like we were being measured by the number of initiatives, at least at some level.

And what cut through that was one day when somebody said, as we're about to go into another one of these things, you know, I'm not sure I see our customer in there anywhere.

And boy, that just let the air out of the room.

And we were thinking, oh my gosh, you know, all of these wheels that we're about to be spinning here, what does this ultimately do for our customer?

So a great one of getting another example of why they're here.

Right.

I remember talking to a colleague about a friend of their lady called Maria, who is a manager, a mid level finance manager.

She tended to have to respond very sort of transactionally to budget requests.

And she just simply had to analyze the numbers and then kick upstairs a recommendation to approve or deny.

And when she started shifting her questions from have you filled in the numbers correctly?

To questions like what outcome are you hoping to achieve with the investment that you're advocating here?

Or what would success look like from the perspective of your department?

That actually helped reveal the department heads has often requested budget increases to address problems that money alone couldn't solve.

And by asking the question and getting her head inside of what the underlying objectives were, Maria got the chance to be a problem solver in her own right and to get a conversation going about what the real underlying problem is.

And therefore, albeit starting in a small way in a finance function, turning around budget requests, becoming a strategic partner in the planning process rather than being a narrowly constrained budget gatekeeper.

And that changed a lot about her role and her success in the company.

Nice, nice.

Yeah, it's great when you kind of go beyond would you like fries for that with that?

Or some purely transactional kind of interaction here.

But I think I've talked a lot about calling these why questions.

A much slightly more fancy name for them could be outcome questions.

And asking an outcome question is asking people to think ahead.

So how will you know when this problem is solved?

Which is a smart way of saying I don't have an indefinite amount of data to dig out for you.

Let's you and me have a conversation about what would look like enough.

And you can ask about indicators.

What kind of leading indicators might we notice in this data if it's helping you to solve your problem?

And why is that?

I think if you're asking why, if you're asking outcome questions, then I think you're already actually well on the way to level two.

So we've given quite a lot of extra juice here, I think, to the questioning dialogue at the fundamental level.

Mike, I think it's super helpful.

It's interesting when you talk about that, about outcome questions and stuff.

I'm remembering another story also.

Oh yeah, effortless here.

So this is, this has been great because it's been on my mind here.

He was talking back to this idea of outcomes and helping that shape.

Sometimes it makes it easier, sometimes it makes it more successful.

So you talked about what happens when you aren't doing a good job of asking and answering questions like this, when there isn't a clear outcome or an outcome that, you know, perhaps keeps changing on a whim.

That's kind of, if we don't do this, this is where we go.

Sweden's King Gustav II had decided, given the relative proficiency of different navies around the globe, he wanted to build and then show off to a bunch of other countries, the most powerful warship ever built.

However, as the work was going, he was constantly changing the design, you know, adding more cannons, changing the kinds of cannons.

How does the deck look?

What are the cabins going to be displayed on the deck?

Even down to the final demanding a bunch of really ornate sculptures to be positioned in various places around this ship.

Unfortunately, the demands, the outcomes were changing all the time.

They weren't necessarily related to any wise or to constantly shifting wise.

Like, we're going to have a big reveal, and I want all these statues for the big reveal.

I'm not going to change the deadline.

And what happened as a result of all that is that they brought the ship out kind of, you know, it was much delayed, but it was, you know, the date had finally been set for the unveiling.

It met the unveiling date, but it had never been tested on open water.

So on the unveiling, with a bunch of foreign officials and diplomats and fireworks, this ship, an incredible ship, sunk less than one mile into its maiden voyage.

It actually opened its cannon doors to give a salute to all the foreign dignitaries and to King Gustav ii.

And when they did, the seas whipped up a little bit and the.

The ship went straight to the bottom.

Oh, my gosh.

So, wow.

So talking about scope creep coming before a fall.

Right.

Never mind price coming before a fall.

Oh, my God.

We've all had customers like that.

We've all had stakeholders who say, can I just have it a little bit more ornate?

So, Mike, we've dealt with the foundation tier, if you like, of straightforwardly answering the question, but doing a better job by understanding the question.

What is it looking like when we go up to the mid level?

We get to the kind of better framing of the original question.

Yeah.

So we're going a little bit beyond, Ian, what we've been asking already and asking things like, what would need to change for this to no longer be an issue.

What is the problem or the opportunity underneath this request and making sure that we're thinking strategically, that we're helping our client think more strategically with a small S perhaps, rather than a large S about what they're asking here.

So, Ian, what starts to happen here?

Well, if we think about what could happen as a result, we start to get to think about what does a recommendation look like, what does a conclusion look like coming out of this work, to put it in a short form, like we start to think about cause and effect.

And I think thinking about cause and effect, thinking about what kind of diagnosis is going to come along here, is a really important part of helping to reframe the question.

Because answering a fact and knowing a bit about its purpose is kind of useful.

But being able to say, I can combine your fact with another fact and maybe another fact and help to identify if we change this, we will get that result, or if we do this, we will get success, but not unless we also do X and Y.

To be able to have these combinations of cause and effect, Mike, I think is a really powerful way to think at level two.

And level two is about being excellent at shaping and solving problems.

I think a diagnosis, although it sounds fancy, is what we've all got to get into.

It's way more valuable than simply discovering facts to be able to tell people the real root cause of your problem is here, or the major upside from this opportunity is here.

And to be able to put it in those terms is way more valuable than telling them the answer to five significant figures.

It allows you to answer the question so what?

And if you've ever been feeling like you're stuck at the lowest level of just answering the question, and you've made analyses and you've made PowerPoint slides, and seniors have said, well, this is great, but so what?

I think doing a better job at level two is all about helping us to answer the so what?

So, for example, let's take a sort of everyday instance here.

If someone asks for data on, let's say, employee satisfaction, mid level questioners might only not.

Might not only ask about purpose and where the intention lies, but might ask, what are you concerned about?

Are you concerned about retention or productivity?

Which of those is a bigger concern for you?

Is there a specific team that you want to look at team dynamics for?

So we're starting to ask a question that supposes that there could be a specific problem that we're looking to diagnose here.

Understanding root causes and root concerns really helps us to provide more valuable insights.

Now, Mike, we have to be smart about this.

We can't go straight away say, okay, if you want to ask about retention, I'll just close my analysis down and only find answers that prove a point about retention.

But we've got to be smart.

We've got to be intelligent about it.

But having a hunch ahead of time about what the answer could look like in cause and effect terms is going to be really, really helpful.

So some examples, I would refer you to all of the why and purpose and context questions that we asked before.

But I would ask questions like this.

What promises have we made to ourselves and our investors that will be affected by this piece of work?

I might ask a stakeholder impact question like which one person or which group of people in our organization stands to gain or to lose the most if we do either a good or a bad job at this?

So I'm kind of asking people to frame how's it going to look like from the point of view of people whose, whose opinion is important to us?

You mentioned the customer earlier on, Mike, so I've got a question here that includes the customer.

Which one customer or group of customers stands to gain or lose the most if we do a particularly good or conversely, a particularly bad job?

And then one of my favorites, Mike, for getting into cause and effect is to ask a negative.

I would ask what happens if we leave everything alone and do nothing about the situation?

Like, what are the consequences of just letting it lie and not acting?

And sometimes that's another good way of surfacing people to say, well, either I actually have a specific intervention in mind and that frames my hypothesis, or sometimes asking that question will reveal that we don't have a clue about what will happen if we don't do this.

The world will keep turning.

In which case that might be another good reason for me to say I'm going to focus my attention on something else besides this analysis.

So, Mike, we've got some why questions stacked up now with some diagnostic questions, some questions about cause and effect that's getting us to the mid level of the pyramid.

What happens when we get to the dizzy heights of the top level of the pyramid?

Yeah, exactly.

Let's move up to that top level.

Let's remember we're now at, as you said last week, the pointy end of the pyramid up there at the top.

And we want to start talking about challenging assumptions and expanding possibilities.

So at the top level, we're looking for questions that provoke new thinking that challenge conventional approaches.

You know, even questions like, what if we approach this completely differently?

Or what assumptions that we're making, should we test first?

And I think that we are making, you know, we're starting to break it down that you're making that the person who brought this to you is making, that I'm making that we've made in the past here, even flipping it on its head and saying, what opportunities might we be overlooking?

A lot of times we're solving problems.

Sometimes there's options or opportunities that we can ferret out here that would be really helpful.

And these strategic questions then move beyond just problem solving to opportunity identification.

They demonstrate that we're thinking about and helping others think about possibilities and alternatives that might not have been considered.

And this is where you become an even more valuable strategic partner by influencing direction rather than just responding to it.

I think we can have an influence all the way along, but this is really influencing at a high level.

For me, one of the important differences between the mid level and the high level here is that we're bringing ourselves in to have the right to challenge assumptions.

Not necessarily to say, aha, you missed something, I know better, but to ask a question that says, I think we all can do better at learning from what else is going on in the environment.

So we're bringing that perspective that there are probably other things going on that will be germane to what we're trying to understand here.

So, Mike, I think this ends up with us then asking questions that are bigger picture and longer term and put us in the perspective of looking at it from the outside.

Yeah, you used a great example earlier.

In this case, say a team is struggling with project delays.

Top level questions here at the top of the pyramid might explore whether the real issue is something like resource allocation, is it process design, is it strategic priorities or incentives?

And these questions can shift the conversation from fixing problems to optimizing performance here.

I have some other examples here of questions for this highest level.

First of all, looking for what has changed.

I might ask what's changed in the environment of competitors or customers or business partners since last time we looked at this.

I might go further and say, let's look for what's changed in the whole world in the last two or three years from the political or economic or scientific or technological perspective, what's changed in the last two or three years?

That could be germane here.

You could ask the same question again and just frame it immediately, like what's happened in the last two or three months that makes this Urgent.

And my.

And then I think another question I might use to get people thinking about the longer term and thinking about it from a detached perspective is to say, how might this decision look different three years from now?

Let's all imagine a future three years from now.

How is it going to be different?

What else is going to have changed in the world of, like we said, our competitors or our markets or our customers.

Yeah, I love that.

I love that, Ian, that, that three years look down the road.

I think, you know, sometimes even with personal things, when it seems like so much, you know, I used to have a colleague who would say, so what do you think you're going to think about this in 10 minutes, in 10 days, in 10 weeks, 10 months, 10 years?

And.

But that idea that especially as you said, with a world that's so volatile, so uncertain, kind of ambiguous, We've talked about this before, being able to say, yeah, things are thrashing, but three years from now, where might this be?

I love that.

Well, we've talked a lot about these questions at different levels of the pyramid.

We also wanted to talk a little bit about questions from.

For relationship building or the role that questions like the ones we've talked about play in relationship building.

So I think asking a question simply to reinforce a relationship and to deepen a relationship is a really powerful tactic.

There are all kinds of stakeholders that we work with, people who we need in order to get our work done.

People have got information and resources and permission to give people who are impacted by the work that we do.

And being able to ask smart questions is one of our powerful tools for building relationships with those stakeholders because it demonstrates genuine interest in them and their situation.

The key is asking questions that are formulated in what I would call an unselfish way.

So ask questions that show that you're interested in their perspective.

Not just that, sound like you want them to help you out.

And I think, remember that the three components of relationship questions here are going to be questions about perspective, questions about experience, and again, questions about outcome.

So, Mike, if I want to ask a stakeholder a question, really mainly in order to build a relationship, and I'm going to use a perspective question frame, how might that work out?

Yeah, I think that we're really trying to understand, again, how others see the situation, see the challenge, perhaps see the opportunities here.

So what's your biggest concern about this approach or how do you think this will affect your team?

Questions that show respect for others, expertise and experience that also, as you say, Ian, give us valuable context information, but are phrased in a way that it's about them, not about us.

Very good, Ian.

How about experience and outcome questions, our other two?

Well, I want to show that I'm interested in the professional history and the perspective of other people.

Sometimes because that's going to be downright helpful sometimes just because I want to show them that I'm open minded and I'm interested in their, in their world.

I want to tap into their knowledge and their insights.

I might ask questions like what have you seen work well in other situations?

Or I might ask what would you do differently if you could start over?

And I might ask them to reflect on their past.

I might say, given you and your team's experience, what do you think that we could be missing here?

Which is one of my favorites.

Like asking them to open up the scope of my analysis is a really smart move.

And these are not kind of sitting on your high horse.

I'm an expert questions.

These are I want to get down into the kind of muck with you and figure this out and we'll work with this problem together.

We're positioning other people as experts rather than ourselves whilst at the same time gathering some valuable information.

Finally, Mike, do you want to talk about outcome questions in the context of a relationship here?

Sure.

We mentioned earlier that in addition to helping us understand what success looks like from others perspectives, we're also personalizing this situation to the individual that we're dealing with.

It's not just what's best for the whole business.

For example, we can ask the kinds of outcome questions we were asking earlier, but make it about this person, their team, their department.

So for example, what might make this initiative a win for your department?

Or what would success look like from your perspective?

Or how might this benefit you or your team if we could solve this problem?

Again, these questions, perspective, experience and especially outcome from their perspective, ensure that we're aligned on objectives and success measures and they ensure that we're covering off on a greater group of stakeholders or clients.

What's in it for me?

You know, if you've gone from the so what before to what's in it for me, that's where we're making sure we're getting at value and people understand the value and understand that we're looking at this Broadly, not just I'm smart and I've got the answer or I don't have your interest in mine.

I'm just kind of, you know, being an answer giver, an order taker.

Back to you here.

So Mike, we've got loads of great advice already for different ways of asking questions to help to characterize the work that we're going to do, to help to look for its impact and look for cause and effect and to help to deepen the relationships.

There's going to be a lot of question asking going on here.

I guess there must be some limitations, maybe even some pitfalls to us getting into question asking mode ourselves.

How do you think the pitfalls might look from your perspective?

Boy, I remember Ian building up interview guides in my youth and realizing sometimes that it almost I could see the person on the other side of this interview guide as kind of sitting there with a bright light in their face, almost tied to a chair.

What we might call the interrogation trap.

So sometimes we're not just asking questions in a flow of conversation and information gathering, we're just firing off question, question, question in rapid succession without providing any value in return.

So we're envisioning this questioning process as being a conversation where both parties or all parties are getting value from this interaction.

So we don't want the interaction to be an interrogation, rather a value added conversation.

So we're going to balance questions, insights, observations and other information that both again is valuable to the parties, but also demonstrates that we're processing what we're learning.

So we are taking this in.

We're not just checking off an interview guide list.

So we want to be collaborating, not just one sided information gathering.

And we do want to share some relevant insights as we learn more about their situation or explain how the answer is going to help us provide better support.

Again with not jumping to here's the solution or let me tell you where you're wrong as I'm going through this part of the process.

Well, you're opening up an interesting idea, Mike, which is that questioning is great and questioning is better than having answers, but you can still be naive and mistaken in the way that you build up your questions.

Having too many questions is a problem for us.

I think having questions that don't reflect enough thought is a second trap.

So I'm going to call this the obvious question mistake.

Talking to an old friend of mine and we were talking about this phrase, there's no such thing as a stupid question.

And we talked about it, I kicked it around a little bit.

And we concluded that actually there probably is no such thing as a stupid question, but there is such a thing as an inquisitive idiot.

So if you're asking a question that makes you look unprepared, that looks like you haven't done your homework, then you're missing out on a questioning opportunity.

Here.

We've said all the way along here, asking smart questions is a way to demonstrate empathy and expertise.

Asking obvious questions is a trap.

It makes us just look like we don't care.

If you ask somebody for information that's already documented, stuff that you already ought to have access to, that is already widely known, then you're undermining credibility and you're wasting time.

So the great thing about questions, I think is it prompts us to do a little bit of preparation.

And that preparation needs to include knowing the basics about the other person's situation, focusing your inquiries on insights and perspectives and context that only they can provide, and showing respect for their time that also positions your questions as valuable rather than lazy or naive.

So we're not going to ask dumb questions after all.

Right?

What's our third and final pitfall here if we're going to be thinking about asking questions?

Well, Ian, once again, because we're trying to work as a strategic partner here and not as that expert that is pushing everything in your direction.

The leading question problem is a key one here.

You know, we want to avoid asking questions that push people towards what perhaps either we think is the right answer or what sounds like, by the way that we're asking it seems like we're pushing to answer.

You know, don't you think we should or wouldn't it be better if can be very transparent attempts to say, yeah, here's the answer to this question.

Or you know, I don't really, I'm not really looking for your opinion or I'm trying to say you're wrong, but be diplomatic about it.

So, you know, we want questions that are open ended that allow for responses that we might not expect because we're trying to gain others perspectives and insight and context.

And we're going to continue to demonstrate curiosity about those perspectives rather than attempt to confirm our preconceptions.

There's probably a time for doing that, but in the opening round of questioning that's not it.

Now we've addressed the pitfalls, can we perhaps give our listeners some exercises to boost their questioning confidence?

I think we absolutely can, Mike.

So Mike, as we get towards the end of the episode, I think it's time for us to give folks something concrete that they can do.

I've got a great idea for an exercise for better questioning.

I'm going to call it the Question Before Answer challenge.

And this challenge is just about forming the habit, challenging yourself to be really rigorous about asking questions.

And give yourself a week, especially a week where you know that you're going to encounter lots of requests for doing routine analytical work.

And I'd like you to make a commitment for that week to ask at least one question before you provide any answer or any recommendation.

This doesn't mean that you're going to withhold helpful information.

They are going to get it in the end.

But it means that you gather context before applying your expertise, even if you have no clue about what context you're going to discover.

Simple context questions go back in the episode.

You can re listen to the ones that we talked about there.

Simple examples right now would be what's the most important outcome you're hoping for?

Or even just what prompted the request.

Notice how, by the way, those are open ended questions.

Like Mike was saying a moment ago, they change the conversation and they could well lead to more targeted or valuable responses coming out of the work that we're going to do.

So take a week of always asking a question before you dig for an answer.

Track your observations, notice how people respond to your approach.

Most people will appreciate the extra attention and we'll provide some context that makes your eventual response more valuable and relevant.

There are going to be one or two impatient people who are going to say never mind the why, just get on with it.

But we can deal with them another time.

So Mike, exercise one is one week of no answer without a prior question.

What's our second exercise?

Yeah, Ian, the second exercise is developing a three question drill.

So practice answering three questions in secrets before offering solutions.

So start with a context question, follow with a depth question, and conclude with a future question.

For example, context, what's driving this concern?

Depth.

What have you tried so far?

Future, what would success look like for you?

So the idea here is you could substitute some questions.

We talked about different contexts in Depth and Future.

But the idea is let's understand the situation, including, you know, what's been attempted.

Let's clarify the desired outcome before I provide answers and recommendations.

So this sequence helped you understand the situation, identify what's been attempted, and clarify the desired outcome before you provide answers or recommendations.

Again, a little bit of context, a little bit of depth and something about the future.

Just getting to the point where this sequence really becomes a natural for You?

Yeah, great.

I love the fact that it enforces the habit and the expectation that out of my mouth are going to come more questions than answers and I'm not going to just ask one question, I'm going to ask repeated questions.

I think that's really great.

Final exercise Mike, final practical takeaway from the episode this week, the assumption challenge.

Practice and once a day I'd like you to put yourself temporarily at the top of the pyramid.

Identify an assumption that you're making about a situation and ask a question to test it.

I sometimes call this the everyone knows test.

Like everyone knows that is true.

Well okay, what's the everyone knows statement?

That could be holding you back or could be limiting your analysis.

If you assume that someone wants a quick solution, ask if they prefer a comprehensive analysis or vice versa.

If you assume that they already understand the implications, then don't take that for granted.

Ask what concerns they've got about implementation in the future.

And this strips away our tendency to rely on assumptions and to keep them implicit.

It gets us into an inquiry based mode of thinking.

It demonstrates thoroughness in when used in the right way.

It demonstrates strategic thinking of a kind that says I'm going to demand to take an outside perspective.

We're going to have to make sure we build on all the skills that we've talked about today.

In this episode though Mike, because I think this assumption challenger question still needs to come in an open ended way.

We need to not make it sound like we think we know better and we're just kind of coaching them towards it.

We need to make it online.

We really want to find out what's going on in the world.

If the other person says well I'm assuming the customers still value X or Y, we should not jump in and go ah, ah, ah, you're wrong.

Customers these days actually value Z or Z instead we should keep that question, like I said, open ended.

How do we know?

What else should we be observing?

What would we see if that was true?

How long is it since we last measured that?

And I think if you can start out by surfacing and testing hunches in that way, I think you're going to do a really great job as a questioning kind of advisor.

Boy, I love that.

Ian.

Well all of this is about, as we said in the opening, going from answer giving to question asking this fundamental approach to becoming a strategic partner.

We've covered off on how questions also help build relationships, reveal opportunities, position us and you as somebody who thinks strategically about others success.

So I think mastering this skill means you'll find yourself working better and better at all levels of the pyramid while creating more value for yourself, for your team, and for everyone around you.

Absolutely.

So, Mike, I think this is a really, really great session.

We talked about getting good at asking questions and getting smooth and practiced at executing them, I think is a really big way to transform the advice that we give and how we're seen by all of the people who are asking us for help.

We hope that it's been useful to you, the listeners.

Thank you very much for listening to us.

Please join us next time when we're going to dive deeper into becoming a strategic partner and we're going to cover part four of our series.

We're going to talk about understanding before being understood, getting better a problem diagnosis, getting better at root cause, not only in the questions that we ask, but in the way that we think and the way that we persuade as well.

So we hope that you're looking forward to that.

I know we are.

We're looking forward to having your company next time on the Consulting for Humans book.

The Consulting for Humans podcast is brought to you by P31 Consulting.