Ask More: The Power of Questions to Open Doors, Uncover Solutions, and Spark Change pdfdrive com

Cost and Consequence: How will you achieve your objective? What will it
cost? What are the downsides? Now that you’ve defined the goals, ask about
their consequences. How will they affect the business, the bottom line, the
organizational profile, personal happiness, or real-world activities? Get specific.
What’s the cost? Ask how your plan and its component pieces translate strategic
objectives into metrics and outcomes based on the time, resources, and
objectives. Ask who you would help if you succeeded.
Tradeoffs: What’s the downside? What are the risks? What are you not thinking
about? Tradeoffs are built into any big decision: You can make more money but

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will have less free time; you can fix the bottom line but will have to lay off
workers; you can liberate a country but will cause damage and death. Tradeoff
questions openly, sometimes defiantly, ask about risk and downsides. They ask
people to calculate when there are no formulas. These are questions that
challenge groupthink, conventional wisdom, and your own biases. Think of them
as circuit breakers in strategic questioning.
Alternatives: What are your options? Is there another way? Ask about options
that can achieve the same outcome. Keeping your strategic objective constant,
ask whether there are different tactics that can lower the cost or raise the
prospects for success. These questions take the tradeoffs and the risks and ask
how they can be minimized by applying different approaches and timelines.
Define Success: How will you know when you get there? What will success
look like? How will you measure it? Any good military commander relentlessly
asks about the “end state”: what “mission accomplished” really looks like. Ask
what success means and what it will take to get there. Be sure answers are clear,
commonly understood, and widely shared. These questions are the cornerstone
of strategic thinking. They clarify destination and set expectations. They help
navigate, set sights, and articulate a vision.
Listen: Invite questions from a wide range of perspectives. Listen closely for
unexpected obstacles or unexplored risk. Listen for scenarios that call for
additional consideration. Listen for gratuitous compliments or qualified
agreement that conceal deeper problems or concerns. Listen for indications that
people don’t understand the purpose, the mission, or the goal. That will help you
determine whether it’s just the message that needs to be sharpened or whether
the strategy itself needs to be rethought.
Try: Engage a group about your big idea. Explain the reasoning behind it. Then
ask everyone to challenge you, your logic, and your tactics. Answer questions
with more questions. Limit your comments and questions to 30 percent of the
meeting, so others are speaking and you are listening 70 percent of the time.

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EMPATHY QUESTIONS
Empathetic questions go for feeling. They seek deeper, more emotional answers
to explore what makes people tick, think, fear, and feel. They help people reveal
themselves to others—and sometimes to themselves. These questions are best
accessed through “perspective-taking” when the questioner imagines the world
from the other person’s point of view. Empathy contributes to more
compassionate and more effective questioning and more reflective responses.