Quality outcomes = quality questions
If we feel like we know something, we are less encouraged to ask questions. Thus, more than ever before, and after listening to this inspiring conversation on The Knowledge Project Podcast, I came to believe even more now, in the power of asking good questions.
While I highly recommend listening to this episode, here are a few key ideas from the episode that reshaped my understanding of questioning and how to improve the quality of it. I would like to share (freeze) them here while attaching my current thoughts to them.
1. #
“Questioning is seen as inefficient.” #
There is this stigma that started from school and continued into the business world, where questions are seen as inefficient, a waste of time, uncool, and often asked by the nerds or people who want to look like they care. That is true, though, when the quality of the question is poor.
But what makes a good question?
2. #
“A good question is a question that’s rooted in curiosity.” #
And of course, the more informed you are, the more informed your question will be. That’s why when in a group setting, people will perceive a question to be a good one when it’s rooted in curiosity, and the level of the group knowledge about a particular idea is approximately comparable.
This is also why we don’t consider children’s questions as “stupid.” As they are less informed, but rooted in curiosity.
3. #
“Questioning is a tool that enables us to organize our thinking around what we don’t know.” #
Awareness of what you don’t know is one of the real measures for intelligence. As less intelligent people are generally unaware of what they don’t know. Thus, they don’t care about trying to understand what they don’t know.
That’s almost the starting point of good questioning, 1. awareness of the limits of knowledge 2. caring to know and expand that limit (curiosity). And what the question will enable you is to push forward in the face of the unknown.