How to ask questions that grow your business
Kids are annoying.
The Question Phase of young kids (not a real term to my knowledge, but it should be) is peak annoyance, but also, hilarious and brilliant.
It’s the reverse of the much later puberty phase, that joy-filled period where kids are non-communicative, grumpy and inward-looking. Instead, around pre-school age, kids are question-producing machines. They’re an automatic tennis ball server, but rather than balls, they’re firing high-velocity questions at you at a rate of about 73 questions a day. Right in your face. Some research reports the figure as nearer 390 questions a day. Blimey, they’d barely have time to lick the dog’s tail or scream at the injustice of having their toast cut into triangles even though yesterday they LOVED triangle toast).
Essentially, if their eyes are open, they are pretty much asking questions about anything and everything around them. For parents, it can quickly get a little… taxing.
Various pieces of research say that these questions move from being fact-finding because they know so little about the world around them (‘what is this thing I am eating?’) to becoming more about being in search of an explanation (‘why is there a hole in my bagel?’).
There is power in these latter types questions, a real creative power, but as those kids move through the education system, questions are not encouraged. As TedX founder Richard Wurman wisely noted:
“In school we’re rewarded for having the answer, not for asking a good question.”
So we lose the art of good questions. Which does not help us a business owners, because good questions can change - and grow – your business.
This is a plea to all business owners to make some time to ask more questions about their business, to help them see things differently and get better ideas.
To help you start, here are five guidelines to better question skills.
❔ Get brave. Asking questions takes courage. Not stick-your-head-in-a-lion’s-mouth courage, but asking good questions is not for the faint-hearted. Particularly if you are asking questions out loud with other people. So get comfortable with not knowing, it will open your thinking to ideas.
❔ Don’t expect the right answer. The power of a great question is not to give you the answer, but to shift your thinking into a more divergent, options-based mode. Using open questions encourages your brain to be expansive, so you explore many thoughts and ideas.
❔ Get out of your shoes. Good questions help you find new ways of looking at your problem. They shift your perspective somewhere new, and this is one of the most effective ways to spark new thinking. If you keep looking at your problem through your own eyeballs, you’ll only see the same ideas.
❔ Be curious, not critical. Asking questions can take your thinking to strange places. Some of these places may feel wrong. It might feel like you’ve gone down a cul de sac, but if you approach every avenue with open curiosity, you may just discover that behind that hedge is a small passageway that leads to somewhere incredible. Metaphorically speaking, of course. You can do all this from the comfort of your own chair armed with just a pencil and a cup of tea and not run any risk of ending up with foliage in your hair.
❔ There is not ONE right question. There is no single question that will unlock untold creative riches or the gateway to business growth. Sorry. But becoming a chain questioner, where you ask a long sequence of questions about your challenge, will be the key to getting to new ideas for your business. Even questions that feel wrong can be right, so if a question seems to yield nothing, don’t get stuck, move onto another question and come back to it later. MIT’s Hal Gregersen talks about a Question Burst process, where you spend 15 or 20 minutes just asking questions.
Questions create shifts in perspective, not answers. Creative thinking will be sparked, curiosity will be piqued and ideas will happen. So channel your inner five year old and before you know it you’ll be pondering just why bagel holes exist.
💡 If you want a better perspective on a business challenge, why not enter to win the FREE monthly spot in the Hothouse, a virtual creative thinking session with me. We’ll spend 20 minutes with the Allotment’s creative thinking toolkit, asking questions and getting fresh ideas for you. Enter here and be automatically in the draw every month!
💡💡 And if after reading How to ask questions that grow your business you are left with the question: what sort of questions should I be asking, then you need to shimmy on over to the Tool Shed, the Allotment’s free online membership. A new tool has just been hung in there giving you one hundred questions to spark ideas. You’ll find it in the Creative Thinking section. What more could you ask for?