Consider the possibility that everything we know today
about our world emerged from somebody who first became curious
about something and then framed a question around it.
“What would the universe look like if I were riding on
the end of a light beam at the speed of light?” Einstein
wondered when he was a teenager. This thought experiment resulted
many years later in the emergence of the theory of relativity;
the world discovering that light can - and does - bend.
As most of us probably have discovered intuitively, the right
questions can lead to new discoveries or innovative solutions to
old problems.
“I went for the jugular question,” Arno Penzias, a
Nobel-prize winning physicist, replied when asked what accounted
for his success, revealing that how we perceive and acquire knowledge
depends upon the quality of the questions we ask.
“People who ask quality questions are empowered,” Susan
Young, president of Susan Young Media relations Inc., and Get In
Front Communications, stated in a recent article in the San Antonio
Business Journal.
Young credits the success of most high achieving sales professionals,
lawyers, psychologists, teachers and news reporters to their ability
to ask powerful questions. In her view, people who ask questions
are “psychologically in control of the conversation.”
“Open listening is the best question. And silence,” says
Barbara Anderson, a Canadian journalist based in Halifax, NS. “Never
be afraid to fumble, or to go in an unanticipated direction.
Engagement is the key word. It is give and take. When interviewees
ask me what I am going to ask I say I don't know, and that is
generally the truth. I tell them we are just having a conversation.”
The way we structure our questions makes a critical difference
in whether or not our minds will be opened or narrowed to possibility.
Open-ended questions that begin with interrogatives such as who,
what, where, when, and why are questions that ask people to become
much more specific about what they mean. A deeper level of conversation
is often the result, giving cause for people to become more reflective,
or open to a wider range of possibilities, in their dialogue with
each other.
Acquiring knowledge needs having an open mind, and one indicator
of a powerful question is its ability to evoke more questions.
Close-ended questions that simply require a yes or a no, or an
either/ or response, will often bring a conversation to
a close,
shutting down all potential dialogue that could have occurred if
it had only been asked differently. People usually walk away from
such a conversation feeling frustrated or upset that they have
failed to communicate effectively. Yet often, it is because they
have not been asked – or are not asking themselves – the
kinds of questions that can unlock information.
A Simple Change
Sometimes something as simple as changing a preposition in a sentence
can have a dramatic effect on the way we think about a question.
Consider this story about Hewlett Packard, as recounted in “The
Art of The Question” by writers Eric E. Vogt, Juanita Brown,
and David Isaacs.
The director of HP labs wondered one day why the organization
was not considered the best industrial research laboratory in the
world. As he thought about it, he realized that he did not know
actually know what it meant to be the best industrial research
laboratory in the world. This question marked the first step in
a journey find the answer.
The question “What does being the best industrial research
lab in the world mean?” was posed to all HP Lab employees
around the world, and the director of the project, Barbara Waugh,
initiated a number of company-wide conversations around the question.
Things were going well until the day an HP Lab engineer came into
Waugh’s office and said, “That question is okay, but
what would really energize me and get me up in the morning would
be asking, ‘How can we be the best industrial research lab
for the world?”
Changing the preposition from be to for made a radical shift in
the assumption behind the question, and the effects were remarkable,
even catalytic. Employees at HP Labs and throughout the whole company
responded to this new question with renewed enthusiasm, for it
raised all sorts of other questions: “What does HP for the
world mean to me? What does it mean in my life, in my own work?”
The question traveled far beyond the company, and HP’s E-Inclusion
effort, a project designed to provide critical medical information
to communities in the third world, grew out of the dialogue generated
from this simple change of preposition.
A powerful question will never fail us. If each of us looked at
our own experiences, we’d likely discover that our own successes
were prefaced by the right question being asked at the right time.
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