Questions, questions

“What Questions Should We Be Asking?” asks the Learning Circuits Blog this month. That’s a neat one – I love the way the QotM is shaping up as a self-fuelling engine – we raise our own questions and we answer them ourselves. Collaboration in action, truly.

In my answer to this month’s question, I’m thinking corporate training for the most part, and therefore when I talk of questioning, I am thinking the respondent will most likely be the learner, the sponsor, the instructor, the subject matter expert… the line employee, the training manager, the external consultant, the CLO, the department head, the CEO… And I’m exploring a few related strands of thought here – so this may not be a sequential piece; treat each paragraph as a standalone semi-independent entity. Small pieces, loosely joined, if you will.

To begin with, I don’t think we should be asking questions. No, no, I’m not saying that we don’t need to seek more information from the relevant target segment. My argument is that Q & A is not a natural format of interaction between humans, Socrates notwithstanding.

Why not convert the questioning process into a dialogue, a conversation? To use a zeitgeist of the times, use informal inquiry as a means of gathering information? Why not disarm the person we are speaking with, and thus extract insight rather than just ask for opinion? Why not use a question as a discussion starter, then let the conversation take its own course? There is a possibility meander for sure, but in such meanders lie great stories, great learnings, great insights.

Formal questions elicit formal responses. Formal responses are expressions of vanity rather than reflections of reality; they are quotable quotes, not “actable” pieces of information. They engineer the interviewee into a position where s/he focuses on sounding correct and intelligent, not relevant and insightful. Where there is a correct answer, and it is banal and gratuitous, a truism that takes no one nowhere.

More often than not, question formats tend to get stuck with the lumpers and splitters problem. In the info gathering process, it makes more sense to get a gestalt view of an issue through the questioning rather than use it to split hairs or try to get very precise technical responses. That conclusion is for us to draw at the end of the whole info gathering exercise.

I prefer open-ended questions to multiple choice questions (easier though they be to administer in the online format) or leading questions (tempting as they are, since they force the respondent to take a position even if s/he doesn’t have one). When we subsequently analyze the answers (a word I prefer to responses), we can apply parameters and interpretation to aggregate the responses into different buckets.

Questions are good tools to get respondents to talk about experiences, stories, incidents, anecdotes… these are the only truths in life, and the only ones from which insights emanate. Our job is to analyze all the responses and make meaning out of the aggregate. Expecting the respondent to have analyzed these events in his/her mind and provide us with a processed response is a bit facile, not to mention more than a bit lazy.

Many moons ago, I read an interview of a journalist who said that a good question is one for which the answer is remembered; not the question. I can’t agree with this more. A question is not a tool to exhibit our intelligence or eloquence. The objective of a question is not to trick the respondent or put him/her in a spot. You don’t ask a question just because you have an answer in your mind or you think the respondent is expecting such a question and has a juicy answer in mind.

Finally, I would like to make a quick difference between a questionnaire and questions. I would prefer to use questionnaires purely to collect facts and numbers, and at best an overall sense of the respondent. I don’t expect a questionnaire to provide insight; I’d rather talk to the person face to face on an informal note for that. To seek stories, to aggregate them, to derive insight.

I know I’ve focused more on the kind of questions we should be asking and the nature of the questioning rather than on the questions themselves. That’s because I reckon the specific questions are specific to contexts; I would hate to go into a scenario with totally boiler-plated questions. But at a general level, here are some question types I’d prefer to ask.

• To begin with, a great question from Dave Lee's response. “I’d like to learn more about your business, could I spend a day or two shadowing you or some of your key people?” (Apologies, Dave, I’m not a fan of EE Cummings, so I’ve capitalized as I would normally. :-)
• Let’s talk about a circumstance when you felt your awareness of certain features of your product helped you sell better.
• Tell me about a situation when any of your service staff felt embarrassed because they did not have the awareness to handle a customer query.
• What are some metrics you’d like to improve in your department / organization? (follow-up) What are the factors that affect this metric? (follow up) Can you explain how training can impact these factors? (follow up) Can you give an example of how this will pan out at work?
• Let’s pick up a training program that was particularly successful in your organization. Can you talk me through why it seemed to have worked? (follow up) Can you give me some examples of how the training paid off? (follow up) Can I speak with some of the people who attended the training to understand what worked for them?