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Photo credit: Núria Madrid
Summary. With organizations of all sorts facing increased urgency and unpredictability, being able to ask smart questions has become key. But unlike lawyers, doctors, and psychologists, business professionals are not formally trained on what kinds of questions to ask when approaching a problem. They must learn as they go. In their research and consulting, the authors have seen that certain kinds of questions have gained resonance across the business world. In a three-year project they asked executives to brainstorm about the decisions they’ve faced and the kinds of inquiry they’ve pursued. In this article they share what they’ve learned and offer a practical framework for the five types of questions to ask during strategic decision-making: investigative, speculative, productive, interpretive, and subjective. By attending to each, leaders and teams can become more likely to cover all the areas that need to be explored, and they’ll surface information and options they might otherwise have missed.
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As a cofounder and the CEO of the U.S. chipmaker Nvidia, Jensen Huang operates in a high-velocity industry requiring agile, innovative thinking. Reflecting on how his leadership style has evolved, he told the New York Times, “I probably give fewer answers and I ask a lot more questions….It’s almost possible now for me to go through a day and do nothing but ask questions.” He continued, “Through probing, I help [my management team]…explore ideas that they didn’t realize needed to be explored.”
The urgency and unpredictability long faced by tech companies have spread to more-mature sectors, elevating inquiry as an essential skill. Advances in AI have caused a seismic shift from a world in which answers were crucial to one in which questions are. The big differentiator is no longer access to information but the ability to craft smart prompts. “As a leader, you don’t have the answers; your workforce [does], your people [do],” Jane Fraser, Citi’s CEO, told Fortune magazine. “That’s completely changed how you have to lead an organization. You have to unleash the creativity….The innovation isn’t happening because there’s a genius at the top of the company that’s coming up with the answers for everything.”
Indeed, leaders have embraced the importance of listening, curiosity, learning, and humility—qualities critical to skillful interrogation. “Question-storming”—brainstorming for questions rather than answers—is now a creativity technique. But unlike lawyers, doctors, and psychologists, business leaders aren’t formally trained on what kinds of questions to ask. They must learn as they go. (See “The Surprising Power of Questions,” HBR, May–June 2018, among others.)
It’s not a matter of asking lots of questions in hopes of eventually hitting on the right ones. Corinne Dauger, a former VP of creative development at Hermès, told us, “In a one-hour meeting, there are only so many questions you can ask….So where do you want to spend the time? When you’re asking one question, you’re not asking another.” If any one line of questioning dominates, it inevitably crowds out others. Leaders must also watch for complacency, diminishing returns, avoidance of sensitive topics, and stubbornness.
In our research and consulting over the past decade, we’ve seen…
