Improve Your Communication Skills, 2nd Edition

• find fault; 
• make themselves look clever; 
• express a point of view in code; 
• force the other person into a corner; 
• create an argument. 
The only legitimate use of a question is to foster enquiry. 
Questions help you to: 
• find out facts; 
• check your understanding; 
• help the other person to improve their understanding; 
• invite the other person to examine your own thinking; 
• request action. 
The best questions open up the other person’s thinking. A 
question that helps the other person think further, develop an 
idea or make their thoughts more visible to you both, is a high-
quality question. 
A whole repertoire of questions is available to help you 
enquire more fully. Specifically, we can use six types of 
questions: 
• Closed questions
. Can only be answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’. 
• Leading questions
. Put the answer into the other person’s 
mouth. 
• Controlling questions
. Help you to take the lead in the 
conversation. 
• Probing questions
. Build on an earlier question, or dig 
deeper. 
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70 Improve your Communication Skills
• Open questions
. Cannot be answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’. 
• Reflecting questions
. Restate the last remark with no new 
request. 
Remember also the Ladder of Inference from Chapter 3. This 
powerful tool can provide questions that allow you to enquire 
into the speaker’s thinking. You can also use it to invite them to 
enquire into yours. 
The highest quality questions actually liberate the other 
person’s thinking. They remove the assumptions that block 
thinking and replace them with other assumptions that set it 
free. The key is identifying the assumption that might be limiting 
the other person’s thinking. You don’t have to guess aright: 
asking the question may tell you whether you’ve identified it 
correctly; if it doesn’t, it may well open up the speaker’s thinking 
anyway. 
These high quality questions are broadly ‘What if’ questions. 
You can either ask a question in the form ‘What if this 
assumption weren’t true?’ or in the form ‘What if the opposite 
assumption were true?’
Examples of the first kind of question might include: