How To Ask Beautiful Questions
Author: Thejendra BS

Sometime back I was watching a program on a business TV channel
where a bunch of reputed CEOs, CFOs, COOs, etc., were judges for
a young business entrepreneur program. Each young participant
was to present a business case study for the winning entry.
However, the program was going nowhere as the judges were not
allowing any participant to complete the presentation or go
beyond a couple of sentences, and would constantly bombard them
with questions after questions. And the judges were even firing
questions at each other and answering every question with
another question. Every young participant half their age were
being ripped to pieces with their incessant and often cynical
questions. Finally one of the one of the participants was
awarded a ceramic pot of un-definable shape with something
inscribed on it, while the others walked out dazed and gasping
for breath. Mercifully the program ended soon.

Today the world is full of people who love to ask tough
questions. Interviews, talk shows, blogs, corporate seminars,
meetings, vendor discussions, business strategies, IT support,
journalism, service level agreements, etc., are all about
bombarding someone with truckloads of smart and intelligent
sounding questions. Today asking questions that others cannot
answer is the favorite hobby for many people. Hence people
nowadays take great pride in asking complicated and smart
questions that can make others squirm, shut their mouth or run
away from the scene. Of course, it is not necessary for the
asker to know an answer (or what should be the answer) for his
or her own question. But it does not mean people will be using
tough and rude questions with everyone, but they will definitely
not miss an opportunity to fire it on someone they can afford to
be rude with. Also many believe just asking a tough question
settles the matter without the need to get involved to solve the
issue. A large percentage of people ask tough questions just for
the heck of it, especially in meetings. Often many people ask
tough questions mainly to satisfy their ego of making others
uncomfortable, cover up their lack of knowledge, or to impress
others. Most discussions and arguments you observe are all about
how someone outsmarted someone else by firing a smart question.
Watching someone squirm gives a self congratulatory sadistic
pleasure to many people like, "Hah, you should have seen that
bozo's face when I asked him that tricky question."

Nowadays with the amount of information overload it is very
easy to ask plenty of good, bad, tough, smart, rude, tricky,
vague, stupid, dumb and rubbish questions. And a large
percentage of those questions just don't have answers. However,
the habit of asking questions is basically not a bad habit, but
deliberately asking questions that you or others cannot answer
is dumb. You can keep asking such questions to eternity, but you
will not get any correct answers or solutions. Rude and rubbish
questions, even smart sounding ones, often create a lot of
problems. Very often people ask tough questions because they
think a tough question will get the necessary answer. But the
fact is people avoid people who ask tough questions. Bombarding
anyone with tough questions is a futile exercise, because you
will never get the right answers. If only makes people avoid
you, or give you evasive, defensive and incorrect answers.
Besides a shoot the messenger approach will make people tell
lies and cover up bad news to prevent their head from being
chewed off. Secondly rough and tough questions simply create
stress, anxiety and fear to a lot of people. Such questions make
people commit more mistakes because the brain goes numb with
fear. Toughness prevents truth from being said and people will
invent excuses. And the list can go on and on. Maybe rough and
tough questions are useful in police interrogations, but rarely
necessary in business life. As Bob Parsons said, "Every business
everywhere is staffed with imperfect human beings and exists by
providing a product or service to other imperfect human beings."
So if you are a sensible person you will understand the
limitations of our species. To get correct answers or solutions
from others you need to ask beautiful questions. Now you may ask
a question as to what is a beautiful question, and how do you
ask one? But a beautiful question cannot be exactly defined, nor
is it possible to give you a specific list of beautiful
questions that can be used in every situation. However, a
beautiful question can be described in many ways. Here are a few
ways to learn how to ask beautiful questions.

1. A beautiful question does not have any toxicity, cynicism or
tricky content into it. It is a question that does not trap
people or put them in an awkward position. A beautiful question
can be a straightforward or direct question, but it is asked in
a non-threatening or non-intimidating way.

2. A beautiful question does not hurt sentiments, make people
defensive or point fingers at them in an accusatory manner.
People make mistakes and will continue to do many mistakes in
their lifetime. It is quite possible for someone to have
completely goofed up on something, lost a major account or did
something really stupid. Except in rare cases there will always
be a valid reason for it.

3. Beautiful questions create pleasantness and collaboration.
It removes fear and extracts right answers even if the answer is
bad news. Successful managers know how to get the right answers
from employees by not being intimidating in their approach.
Their objective is to solve an issue or a problem, and not get a
mischievous pleasure by making people uncomfortable. Beautiful
questions help you achieve that.

4. Beautiful questions do not have a "Shoot the messenger"
approach. If you develop the habit of asking beautiful questions
people approach you openly for help and advise, instead of
thinking, "Here comes the ogre to chew our head off."

5. People who know how to ask beautiful questions do not thump
on tables, demand an explanation right away or try find a
scapegoat.

To summarize, the challenge for each one of us is to frequently
pause and observe ourselves to see if we are asking the right
questions. And we can conclude with a quote from Dorothy Nevill,
"The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing
in the right place, but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the
tempting moment."


About The Author: Thejendra BS is an IT manager & author from
India. He pens articles on self-improvement, technical, humor,
etc, and has published books like Disaster Recovery & Business
Continuity, IT Service Management, LIFE-365 and Corporate
Wardrobe. Visit http://www.thejendra.com to buy his popular
books and articles.