The Power of Questions

What happens when you ask a question?

I love asking people questions.

For one thing, it usually gets them talking, so I don’t have to say as much.  Plus, if it’s a good question, I get really interested in the answer.  What’s more, whatever comes out is important information related to the work we’re doing together.

Problem is, how do I know I’ve asked the right questions?  The questions that will give us all the clearest insight into what is going on and will yield the clues into what we should do next.

That’s the hard part.

There’s that whole thing that happens as an observer or intervenor.  That what I am observing is affected by my observation.  The questions I choose to ask have an impact on the answers I get.  More bluntly, I only get answers to the questions I ask; nothing on the ones I don’t.

That seems obvious, but it’s not trivial.

The only way I know to combat this dilemma is to be consistently transparent in what I’m doing and why.  To disclose the intent behind the questions and the method to my madness.  Then, and only then, can my partners in crime (my clients) verify that we’re on a productive track and that we should keep going.

Or, that there is another story to be told, and new questions to be asked.

The Questionable Value of Benchmarking

Look inside, engage your team’s expertise, test your ideas, and you’ll find that what others are doing is much less important than what you originally thought.

Working with a client the other day, the request came to do some benchmarking: looking outside the organization for best practices, points against which her team could be measured and assessed.

I asked her to stop and think for a minute about what she hoped to accomplish with such an exercise.

She explained that she was looking for some new ideas to break her team out of its complacency.  

I told her she could stop right there, because no one ever found anything new by benchmarking.  It’s impossible.  By definition it’s not new if someone else is already doing it.

“New for us,” she protested.

“Maybe you could find something like that,” I agreed.  But no one ever became the best at anything by copying someone else.  

“I’m also interested in seeing how we stack up against the market, whether we are even on market with our practices,” she offered.

“OK,” I said.  “That will get you a study that points to what some consultant wants to sell you as best-in-class, or worse, a bunch of ideas that don’t fit in your organization.”  (I was beginning to feel like I was raining on her parade with all this cynicism and negativity.)

“You’re really not being very helpful right now, you know, Michael.”

(Ouch.  That confirmed my cynicism.)

From there, I suggested that no one knows the business better than her own people.  Engage them.  Have a conversation with them about what they know and see.  If you need to bring someone in to help you have that conversation, fine, but let your people carry the load on content.

If they’re stuck, expose them to new and different things (including people).  Not through benchmarking, but through a visit to a museum or a walk in the woods.  If that’s too far out there, just go to a different place for your meeting.  Talk about what people notice.  Challenge the group to use that to find real opportunities.

Tap your own expertise and inner wisdom first.  Then, run small experiments with clients (or potential clients) to get some help in refining what you think.  Expose your ideas to light and air.

Remember something we’ve talked about in the space before: reality is something you create yourself through your words and deeds.  Use that to construct and define your own market, not what someone else says your market is.

These kinds of strategies will build commitment in your people and lead to results.

Resolving to Make Changes

So here we are in 2012.  Have you made your New Year’s resolutions yet?  How many?  Are they new ones, or recommitments to last year’s?

This desire to improve, to make ourselves better, is so ingrained that many of us repeat this process of personal and professional assessment every year.  And, despite this drive, we all have stories of our failure at accomplishing what we set out to achieve.  What gets in our way then?

We don’t go far enough.

If you are serious about reaching your goal -- less weight, more exercise, healthier eating, more delegation, more speaking up in meetings -- you have to go deeper with yourself .  Once you’ve set your resolution, ask yourself these questions:

1. What will I do (or not do) to keep me from more fully realizing my commitment?  How will I sabotage my efforts?

You know what this is.  And, you can’t take the easy way out and put all the blame elsewhere for your busted resolution.  This is about taking responsibility.

1. Now think about your answer to question 1.  Imagine you actually did overcome what you said would get in your way.  How do you feel about that?  Can you identify a fear, or at least some discomfort, that is associated with doing something other than what you said in your response above? 

That uneasy feeling is at the heart something else you probably hold very dear.  Something else that is important to you and that actually prevents you from making the change you set out in your resolution.

What you’ve just done is to create a much more detailed picture of the reasons why you are likely to have difficulty sticking to your resolution.  It’s not because you have no willpower or are undisciplined.  There is an integrated system of reasonable, but rival, promises you have made to yourself.

So now what?

For one thing, notice what you have: a map of the dynamic tension that keeps you from what you say you want.  Good news: You’re not alone in this.  We all have these tensions and internal contradictions that don’t seem like contradictions because we don’t usually pay attention to them like this.

For another, if you are serious about making progress against your resolution, you now have to upset this balance you’ve just described.  To do this, see if you can identify what is it that you accept about yourself, without question.  

This will be the idea or feeling that is beneath all your work in question 2 above.  What is it that you believe about yourself that makes it possible for you to hang onto the commitment that counteracts your resolution?

Now you’re getting somewhere.  This is the level where you can begin to make lasting change.  Look for safe, small experiments you can run to begin shifting your perspective.  Don’t try to do everything at once.  Little changes in the way you conceive of yourself and your world can have outsize impact.

This is messy and really hard.  Creating change always is.

Adapted from How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey.

Big Assumptions

When you find yourself saying something should be a certain way, you’re in a big assumption.  When you believe you have a lock on the way it has be done, you’re in a big assumption.

When there, you can be certain you’re in for a challenge from someone.

Big assumptions, also known as mental models, are the stories and images we carry around with us all the time.  They are what make it possible to navigate the world.  They act as guideposts, allowing us to make sense of what is going on around us.

They come from all the important influences that go into making us who we are, and are a result of the way the brain operates.  As a self-organizing, patterning system, the brain looks for information that fits into and reinforces patterns it already knows, and discards data that doesn’t quite fit. 

Consequently, these stories and images are inherently flawed.  They blind us to other ways of seeing.  Other ways that are equally legitimate but that come from different experiences, different backgrounds, different ways of thinking and making sense.

Why is this important?  Because many times when we are caught in challenging and unsatisfying conversations it’s because we’re locked in a battle over mental models trying to assert we are “more right” than the other person.  So much of our poisoned discourse today is a direct result of big assumptions too tightly held. 

Occasionally, we do have the more legitimate perspective, but usually there is no one right answer, no single, simple truth.  If there was, we wouldn’t be in this predicament.

This is a big reason we have a conversation in the first place: to explore each others’ big assumptions; to be curious and to learn something about ourselves.

Really?  Isn’t conversation mostly about convincing the other person that she’s wrong?

(Embedded in that question is its own mental model about what conversation is supposed to do.)

This idea asks us to shift from a teaching and telling mode to a learning stance.  Learning can be scary; it can make us seem vulnerable.  What if I’m not as right as I believe I am?  What if by opening myself up to other ways of thinking and seeing I decide I want to change my mind?  Where am I then?

Well, you might have learned about the limits of your thinking, and in so doing further clarified your own perspective.  You may find that the source of the disagreement is a set of unshared assumptions about what is important.  You may be missing some vital information.  All this may be true for the other person as well.  

The lesson in all this is to hold our big assumptions (or mental models) gently.  We can’t get rid of them, nor do we necessarily need to change them.  Recognizing that they exist and developing the ability to be curious about them can open up a way of growing out of the repetitive cycle of destructive conflict that bogs down so much of our organizational lives.

Porter's Evolved Thinking on Strategy

I came across a really interesting excerpt from an interview with long time strategy hotshot, Michael Porter.  He’s asked for his experience on why organizations get it wrong so much of the time when it comes to strategy.

What strikes me most is the huge amount of wisdom, much of it running counter to common practice, that Porter is able to share in these few sentences.  Ideas like:

• Competitive advantage results from paying attention to both the supply (value chain) and demand (value proposition) sides of the house.
• Success comes when you figure out what makes you different from everyone else, not when you try to be like them.
• Significant barriers can be found both within and outside the organization.  Internally these are things like skewed incentive systems and faulty decision-making processes.  Externally, these are the consultants and “experts” who want to push individual companies to look like their view of what is best-in-class.
• Short term-ism is death for strategy and creating value.

And, in the category of stuff he’s been saying since the very beginning, Porter emphatically reminds us that 

1. Many executives don’t even recognize they don’t have a strategy, and
2. Strategy is as much about what you don’t do