The Quality of Your Questions Defines the Quality of Your Outcomes
It's not how much you know, but how much you discover, learn, and apply those learnings to achieve your goals.
In a previous post, I mentioned how continuing to ask questions once you’re beyond the onboarding stage in your new role is a great way to continue to excel. In this post, I dive deeper into what quality questions are, how to use them to your advantage, and how they deliver a big impact.
Have you ever been in meetings where someone is distracted or doesn't ask any questions? Or, even if days and weeks go by, they assume things or ask repetitive questions? Can you trust this person to drive successful outcomes for you and your team? If you are shaking your head, you know that this type of behavior is visible and is detrimental to the team.
The flip side of that is someone who shows they understand their environment and their users. As a result, their plans, products, and overall solutions are more likely to succeed.
What are Quality Questions?
Quality questions are about going deeper, connecting the dots, deducing things, and asking for feedback.
There are a few ways you can go about understanding your environment (including your users, their needs, your constraints, your goals, etc). Two of them are either (1) taking things at face value and burning through to-do lists, or (2) going deeper - peeling the onion if you will.
Toyota coined the famous “five whys” methodology, where you keep asking questions until you find the root cause. That’s a great start. But beyond going deeper in a single direction, what can you tell about your environment? That’s when Systems Thinking kicks in. According to the University of Phoenix,
Systems thinking is a way to approach issues by looking at them as systems. Rather than considering only how to solve an immediate problem, you consider how all of the pieces connect to make the whole.
In other words, asking different types of questions allows you to recognize patterns, levers, and systemic problems. Not only will showing your thought process to your stakeholders assure them that you’re becoming a subject matter expert, but more importantly, you are indeed becoming a subject matter expert.
The Effect of Your Questions
So other than achieving mastery in your field or area, quality questions include the following positive effects:
Earn Trust. Your stakeholders count on you to drive positive outcomes. They reach out to you for your opinion, and you organically influence others because they trust your judgment. Long-term, career opportunities open up because of your known expertise.
Resiliency. Mistakes will happen, and that is a desired outcome. The scientific method relies on proving and disproving hypotheses so that you can learn, and apply those learnings to innovate, and continue to push the boundaries. Not only do you come back from mistakes, but you celebrate them, and use them to improve your solutions.
Growth. You deliver better and bigger results, like compound interest over time.
A few more thoughts…
The process of asking questions has many facets: (1) self-reflection, (2) asking for feedback, (3) connecting the dots, (4) absorbing information from formal or informal education, (5) reading, etc. Every waking moment is an opportunity to ask quality questions, out loud or to yourself. More on that in The Curiosity Venture’s next instance.