Asking better questions
Hi there,
Happy Wednesday! This week I’ve been working on a project to deliver services to businesses in a new way. It involves parts of the public sector and it’s a complex system, with lots of different users, interested parties and incentives baked in.
To avoid going back to old solutions I’ve been trying to think about the problem a little differently… What assumptions might we be making that are influencing the way we’re thinking? And what basic questions might we ask to look at the problem in a new way?
With that in mind, here’s a few things I found helpful this week in thinking about how to ask better questions.
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While doctors, lawyers and journalists are taught how to ask questions as a core part of their professional training, most of us aren’t trained in the skill of good questioning. Yet questions act as frames - they impact what we see and identify. If you change the frame, you challenge the range of possible answers.
In his Stanford class Michael Barry tells students he needs a bridge. While they could go off and build one, the trick is to ask “why do you need a bridge?” He then tells them “I need a bridge to get to the other side of the river”. At this stage students could look at a whole number of ways to solve the problem as it’s presented, including swimming, canoeing or flying across the river, instead of building a bridge. But what if they went further? What if they asked why he needs to get to the other side of the river? Imagine he says that he works on the other side of the river. Now there’s a whole new field of options. There are likely ways for him to earn a living without ever crossing the river. Good questioning can open up new and previously unseen opportunities.
Barry’s case is a great application of the ‘five whys’. The principle suggests that if we ask ‘why’ of a problem statement, and keep repeating the process, we’ll drill down into the root cause of the problem, rather than just the symptoms.
John Lennon in A Hard Day's Night
What about leading questions? Ahead of the 2015 Scottish independence referendum, the Scottish government proposed the following question for vote: “Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country? Yes / No?” While this question did get to the heart of the issue, the phrase ‘do you agree’ acted as a psychological anchor, encouraging people to agree with the statement and vote ‘yes’ to independence. This leading question was pretty quickly vetoed by the Electoral Commission. In the end, the final question presented to voters was: “Should Scotland be an independent country? Yes / No”.
What if we find ourselves in the same trap of suggesting responses, when we need to be objective? The advice - find the bias, remove phrases that incorporate judgement, and use open questions to avoid shutting down routes of exploration.
If you’d like to read more…
Hal Gregersen - Questions Are the Answer
Fast Company on reframing a problem to unlock innovation
A primer on Design Thinking from IDEO
Something a bit different
My mind was totally blown by this map from Tim Urban - 5 percent of people on earth live in the blue; 5% percent in the red.
Thank you for reading
This newsletter is a new experiment, and I’d love feedback as I learn and explore what works. Please do say hello and drop me a note with any comments: jess@jessnorthend.com
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