Are You Provoking The Right Questions?

We often gauge the quality of our conversations by the responses we get in those conversations.  I have learned to gauge the quality of the conversation, the quality of engagement by the questions the people are asking.  If there are no/few questions, there is very little engagement.  If the majority of the questions are closed ended, the engagement isn’t much better.

It’s the deep probing, deeper questions that tell me how engaged the people I’m talking to are  (and how engaged I am.)  How do we provoke this level of engagement?  How do we engage people in ways that encourage deeper questions?  Do the questions we ask provoke great questions from others?

It’s fascinating to analyze conversations–less through conversational analytics tools, though those are sometimes helpful, but through actually observing the conversations.

The least effective conversations are dominated by statements:

Seller: “We have the best solutions for this……”

Customer: “We don’t really have that problem….”

Seller: “But customers like you find this solution really helpful…”

Customer: “But we don’t care about that issue….”

Seller: “If you buy before year-end, I can give you a discount…”

Customer: “We prefer not spending any of the money…… Merry Christmas!”

We see the same thing in “coaching conversations.”

Manager: “Your pipeline sucks, you need to fill it!”

Seller: “I’m doing the best I can, I’m not getting enough leads!”

Manager: “Well it isn’t working, you need to do more.”

Seller: “I’ll try….”

It’s clear how ineffective these types of conversations are. While I have created extreme examples, actually too many of our conversations tend to resemble this. We focus on our agenda and goals, presenting the data and information and we wait for a response. It’s kind of like a ping pong game: Back and forth, back and forth, ….. until someone decides to smash the ball, ending the game (or at least winning the point.). Conversations shut down, there is no engagement.

Sometimes we adjust those conversations, asking questions. But the questions are close ended, not provoking meaningful responses.

Seller: “We have the best solutions for this…. Do you have issues with that?”

Customer: “No we don’t….”

Seller: “But others like you have these issues and have gotten a lot of value…. Can you see how you might value this?”

Customer: “No….”

Seller: “Would it be helpful if we could give you a discount?”

Customer: “We prefer not to spend the money…… Merry Christmas!”

And we know the “coaching version” of this conversation, it usually starts with, “Why does your pipeline suck?” You can play the rest of those conversations out yourself.

Most of our training focuses on asking questions and getting answers. If we ask the right questions, we hope to get the answers we want. As a result, we tend to ask questions with an agenda. But are we asking the right questions? While we are getting answers and data, are we getting engagement? We have the greatest impact and create the greatest value when our questions provoke deeper engagement.

Engagement changes, when each person starts asking questions of each other.

Seller: “We have the best solutions for this… Do you have issues with that?”

Customer: “I’m not sure, how would we determine this….?”

Seller: “We are seeing customers look at these things….. Have you done something similar?”

Customer: “What data can you share about what those customers are seeing?”

And the “coaching” version of the conversation might provoke the seller to ask, “What should I be doing?”

You can see the quality of the engagement and conversation changing. The moment each party starts asking questions, the conversation gets richer. When people start asking questions, they are more curious, more engaged.

And as we ask more questions of each other, we learn more, we get more deeply engaged, we develop our relationships, we develop deeper understanding, and we build trust.

Now we get to the crux of this post. How do we engage each other in ways that provoke questioning and deeper questions? How do we ask questions that provoke other questions and not just responses?

As an example, yesterday, I was watching a group of really talented managers doing a role play about a coaching conversation with a salesperson. It was remarkably realistic, each of the managers had “lived” the scenario dozens of times. The manager was doing his best to ask thoughtful questions. The “seller” was answering the questions. You could see the frustration building, the manager was struggling with how to get the “seller” more deeply involved in the conversation.

We paused the conversation. I asked the question, “What questions do you want the seller to be asking you?” Richard paused a moment, responding, “I’m not really sure, I hadn’t thought about it that way?” The group did some brainstorming, thinking about the questions we might want the seller to ask to get more deeply engaged.

Once we started understanding those questions, we explored, “What questions do we ask to provoke questions and deeper discussions?”

While we don’t have complete ideas on this, some of the ideas we developed include:

• Modeling curiosity: The more curiosity we displayed in our questioning, the more the people we engaged started mirroring that behavior, becoming more curious themselves.
• Actively encouraging questions: While it seems so simple, encouraging people to ask questions is very powerful.
• Asking, “What questions should we be asking ourselves or considering?” These tend to provoke deeper thinking, more curiosity.
• Posing more reflective questions: So often our questions focus on getting data or a reaction. They don’t provoke deeper reflection. Things like, “What leads you to that conclusion? What assumptions are we making? What things should we be questioning?”
• Moving from questions that evoke data oriented responses to those focused more on meaning, feelings, impacts: This is related to the reflective questions, “What would this mean to us? What should we be most concerned about?” We want to get people thinking around the issues that drive FOMU/FOFU.
• Eliminating “judgemental” responses: Nothing shuts down questioning and exploration more quickly than judgemental responses. How many questions will follow, “That’s a really stupid issue…”
• Inviting people to question our own positions or statement: “What do you think of this point of view? What might I think differently about? What am I missing?”
• The Socratic Method encourage dialog through asking more questions.
• Creating a brainstorming session: With groups, we can encourage greater engagement and participation, through active brainstorming seeking to generate lots of questions.
• Leveraging “Yes, and…..” conversations. One of the foundational concepts of improv is progressing the conversation. “Yes, and …” approaches keep grow the conversation, rather than shutting it down.

We want to engage others—customers, our people, our colleagues, others in high impact conversations. One of the best ways to do this is to construct our questions and our part of the conversation in ways that provoke questions and deeper engagement from others.