by Thejendra
BS
http://www.thejendra.com
©
2008
Sometime back I was watching a program on a business TV channel where
a bunch of reputed CEOs, CFOs, COOs, etc., were judges for a young business entrepreneur
program. Each young participant was to present a business case study for the winning
entry. However, the program was going nowhere as the judges were not allowing
any participant to complete the presentation or go beyond a couple of sentences,
and would constantly bombard them with questions after questions. And the judges
were even firing questions at each other and answering every question with another
question. Every young participant half their age were being ripped to pieces with
their incessant and often cynical questions. Finally one of the one of the participants
was awarded a ceramic pot of un-definable shape with something inscribed on it,
while the others walked out dazed and gasping for breath. Mercifully the program
ended soon.
Today the world is full of people who love
to ask tough questions. Interviews, talk shows, blogs, corporate seminars, meetings,
vendor discussions, business strategies, IT support, journalism, service level
agreements, etc., are all about bombarding someone with truckloads of smart and
intelligent sounding questions. Today asking questions that others cannot answer
is the favorite hobby for many people. Hence people nowadays take great pride
in asking complicated and smart questions that can make others squirm, shut their
mouth or run away from the scene. Of course, it is not necessary for the asker
to know an answer (or what should be the answer) for his or her own question.
But it does not mean people will be using tough and rude questions with everyone,
but they will definitely not miss an opportunity to fire it on someone they can
afford to be rude with. Also many believe just asking a tough question settles
the matter without the need to get involved to solve the issue. A large percentage
of people ask tough questions just for the heck of it, especially in meetings.
Often many people ask tough questions mainly to satisfy their ego of making others
uncomfortable, cover up their lack of knowledge, or to impress others. Most discussions
and arguments you observe are all about how someone outsmarted someone else by
firing a smart question. Watching someone squirm gives a self congratulatory sadistic
pleasure to many people like, "Hah, you should have seen that bozo's face
when I asked him that tricky question."
Nowadays with
the amount of information overload it is very easy to ask plenty of good, bad,
tough, smart, rude, tricky, vague, stupid, dumb and rubbish questions. And a large
percentage of those questions just don't have answers. However, the habit
of asking questions is basically not a bad habit, but deliberately asking questions
that you or others cannot answer is dumb. You can keep asking such questions to
eternity, but you will not get any correct answers or solutions. Rude and rubbish
questions, even smart sounding ones, often create a lot of problems. Very often
people ask tough questions because they think a tough question will get the necessary
answer. But the fact is people avoid people who ask tough questions. Bombarding
anyone with tough questions is a futile exercise, because you will never get the
right answers. If only makes people avoid you, or give you evasive, defensive
and incorrect answers. Besides a shoot the messenger approach will make people
tell lies and cover up bad news to prevent their head from being chewed off. Secondly
rough and tough questions simply create stress, anxiety and fear to a lot of people.
Such questions make people commit more mistakes because the brain goes numb with
fear. Toughness prevents truth from being said and people will invent excuses.
And the list can go on and on. Maybe rough and tough questions are useful in police
interrogations, but rarely necessary in business life. As Bob Parsons said, "Every
business everywhere is staffed with imperfect human beings and exists by providing
a product or service to other imperfect human beings." So if you are a sensible
person you will understand the limitations of our species. To get correct answers
or solutions from others you need to ask beautiful questions. Now you may ask
a question as to what is a beautiful question, and how do you ask one? But a beautiful
question cannot be exactly defined, nor is it possible to give you a specific
list of beautiful questions that can be used in every situation. However, a beautiful
question can be described in many ways. Here are a few ways to learn how to ask
beautiful questions.
- A beautiful question does not have any toxicity,
cynicism or tricky content into it. It is a question that does not trap people
or put them in an awkward position. A beautiful question can be a straightforward
or direct question, but it is asked in a non-threatening or non-intimidating way.
- A beautiful question does not hurt sentiments, make people defensive
or point fingers at them in an accusatory manner. People make mistakes and will
continue to do many mistakes in their lifetime. It is quite possible for someone
to have completely goofed up on something, lost a major account or did something
really stupid. Except in rare cases there will always be a valid reason for it.
- Beautiful questions create pleasantness and collaboration. It
removes fear and extracts right answers even if the answer is bad news. Successful
managers know how to get the right answers from employees by not being intimidating
in their approach. Their objective is to solve an issue or a problem, and not
get a mischievous pleasure by making people uncomfortable. Beautiful questions
help you achieve that.
- Beautiful questions do not have a "Shoot
the messenger" approach. If you develop the habit of asking beautiful questions
people approach you openly for help and advise, instead of thinking, "Here
comes the ogre to chew our head off."
- People who know how
to ask beautiful questions do not thump on tables, demand an explanation right
away or try find a scapegoat.
To summarize, the challenge
for each one of us is to frequently pause and observe ourselves to see if we are
asking the right questions. And we can conclude with a quote from Dorothy Nevill,
"The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right
place, but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.".
