Someone asks you a question. On the surface, it’s open and reasonable. But you can feel it – they’re not interested in your answer. They’ve already reached their conclusion, and the question is just the vehicle for walking you to it. So, you give the answer they’re steering toward, or you push back and it goes tense. Either way, one thing is certain: you didn’t think anything new. Neither did they. The question changed nothing because it was never really a question. You knew within seconds. We always do. A real question and a question-shaped instruction feel completely different from the receiving end.
I’ve done it too, and I suspect most of us have. The “have you considered…” that means you should have considered. The “what do you think we should do?” when you already know what they should do. We reach for a question because it feels softer than a statement – but the other person feels the steering, just as we do when it’s done to us. Which is strange, given how powerful questions can be. In *The Seven Powers of Questions*, Dorothy Leeds sets out just how much a good question can do. Two of the seven matter most to me here.
The first is that a question stimulates thinking – and not only the other person’s. I’ve found that asking one I genuinely don’t know the answer to makes me think too; their answer moves my understanding, not just theirs. The second is that a question gets people to persuade themselves – and that cuts both ways. The same power that helps a person think their way to something real also lets you herd them where you’d already decided to go. Technique doesn’t decide which way it runs. You do. It took me a while to see that asking good questions isn’t a technique at all. It’s who you bring to the conversation.
I’ve found a question only does its real work when I bring three things to it: genuine interest – actually wanting to know their answer; openness to being surprised – a willingness for the answer to be something I didn’t expect; and a willingness to change – ready to reconsider my own view, even a little. Bring those three, and almost any question works. Bring none, and no phrasing hides it – the other person feels the empty technique for what it is. Underneath this often sits a fear among some leaders: that asking open questions means losing control. I used to think that too. What I’ve come to see is the reverse. Ask a question you’ve already answered, and you get compliance, not truth – which tells you nothing you can use.
The question you genuinely don’t know the answer to is what keeps you close to what’s really going on. Which is why the same question, word for word, can open a conversation up or shut it down. The words aren’t wha
