外刊阅读20240530｜提问的艺术

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The late scholar and business thinker Sumantra Ghoshal once said that leadership means making happen what otherwise would not. In the realm of inquiry a leader’s job is to flush out information, insights, and alternatives, unearthing critical questions the team has overlooked. You don’t need to come up with the missing questions yourself, but you do need to draw attention to neglected spheres of inquiry so that others can raise them.

All this is harder than it may sound, for two reasons. First, you may be hampered by your expertise. Your professional successes and deep experience may have skewed your approach to problem-solving. It can be hard to escape the gravitational pull of such conditioning unless you take a hard look at your question habits. Second, the flow and diversity of questions can be hard to process in real time, especially amid heated exchanges. Often it’s only after the fact that you realize certain concerns or options were never raised. Our research reveals that strategic questions can be grouped into five domains: investigative, speculative, productive, interpretive, and subjective. Each unlocks a different aspect of the decision-making process. Together they can help you tackle key issues that are all too easy to miss.

When they are facing a problem or an opportunity, effective decision-makers start by clarifying their purpose—asking themselves what they want to achieve and what they need to learn to do so. The process can be fueled by using successive “Why?” questions, as in the “five whys” sequence devised by managers at Toyota. Successively asking “How?” can also help you transcend generic solutions and develop more-sophisticated alternatives. Investigative questions dig ever deeper to generate nonobvious information. The most common mistake is failing to go deep enough.

Whereas investigative questions help you identify and analyze a problem in depth, speculative questions help you consider it more broadly. To reframe the problem or explore more-creative solutions, leaders must ask things like “What if…?” and “What else…?” The global design company IDEO popularized this approach. It systematically uses the prompt “How might we…?”— coined by Min Basadur when he was a young manager at P&G—to overcome limiting assumptions and jump-start creative problem-solving.

Productive questions help you assess the availability of talent, capabilities, time, and other resources. They influence the speed of decision-making, the introduction of initiatives, and the pace of growth. In the 1990s the CEO of AlliedSignal, Larry Bossidy, famously integrated a focus on execution into his company’s culture. He insisted on rigorously questioning and rethinking the various hows of executing on strategy: “How can we get it done?” “How will we synchronize our actions?” “How will we measure progress?” and so on. Such questions can help you identify key metrics and milestones—along with possible bottlenecks —to align your people and projects and keep your plans on track. They will expose risks, including strains on the organization’s capacity.

Interpretive questions—sensemaking questions—enable synthesis . They push you to continually redefine the core issue—to go beneath the surface and ask, “What is this problem really about?” Natural follow-ups to investigative, speculative, and productive questions, interpretive questions draw out the implications of an observation or an idea. After an investigative question, you might ask, “So, what happens if this trend continues?” After a speculative question, “So, what opportunities does that idea open up?” After a productive question, “So, what does that imply for scaling up or sequencing?”