Last month former US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson visited the Harvard Kennedy School and following his initial remarks, moderator Professor David Gergen asked HKS Professor Roger Porter who spent many years in the White House under Ford, Reagan, and Bush for his own thoughts. Porter remarked:
One of the fascinating features of the timing of [the financial crisis] is that it occurred late in the second term of a President who was not in a position to run and so you had two candidates seeking to succeed him and one of the issues that [Paulson] had to think about very long and hard is how much do I tell to whom and when...I assume you had to be very careful about what you said to whom because any statements that they might make could in fact make your life much more difficult. So I think it would be fascinating to hear how you thought about who to tell, what, and when?
(Watch the video here, beginning at minute: 50:09)
What is interesting about this is not Paulson's response (which did seem to imply a more active and informed Mr. Obama than Mr. McCain on issues concerning the economy during the campaign), but rather Porter's question. How did Porter think about framing, articulating, and delivering this question?
Despite receiving a world-class education, as I reflect on the skills built during my first two years of graduate school, learning to ask strong and articulate questions is a very clear and noticeable void. Discussions with colleagues reflect the same feelings. As managers, how do we end our compulsive search for answers and shift our mindsets towards developing abilities to ask better questions? Is our educational and cultural system inherently designed as to elicit answers rather than thought-provoking questions?
I think it is, and I do not think that I am alone.
David Garvin of the Harvard Business School recently released a book on Re-thinking the MBA where he disaggregates learning into three areas: knowing, doing, and being.
The first is the area of knowing: What is it that business schools need to teach students that they need to know? Second is the area of doing: What skills are needed to practice management effectively as a professional? The third area is being, and has to do with values, identity, and the purpose that animates thinking by managers.
Our argument in the book is we certainly need to do more with thinking skills by including the expectations of markets and models, but we need to do a lot more re-balancing toward the doing and being skills. It's about re-balancing in order to produce more innovative and principled leaders.
(You can also watch a video of Garvin here):
The "doing" or "being" skills Garvin refers to are exactly the types of areas that can be better reconciled by developing skills within managers to ask better questions.
So how do we do it?
Two interesting articles about developing better questions that I particularly like are Overcome Resistance With the Right Questions, by Kevin Daley and How to Ask Better Questions, by Judith Ross
The authors approach their topics from slightly different directions, but do help us understand three elements of good questions, including:
- Uses words like "why," "how," and "what" to be open ended
- Clarifies and probes assumptions
- Examines viewpoints by helping people think analytically and critically, even reflecting on past experiences
With an initial framework now outlined, our challenge becomes practicing and experimenting within our own organizations. Think about it...
For our next organizational meeting, what would happen if instead of walking into a room and getting a status update on a particular project, we started the meeting by asking the team what they learned over the last week, good and bad, and how the team was planning to incorporate that learning into its current work?
Within an educational setting, what would happen if instead of the infamous "cold-call" asking for an action plan for the protagonist, what if we asked the student to articulate the questions he/she should ask if put in the shoes of the protagonist? Even better, what if the student then had to defend why he/she is even asking these questions, to who they would be addressed, and how they would be framed?
Yes, it's true that the public and media often look for managers who provide quick answers, but I think history will prove that those who create and sustain real long-term value instead start with questions.