Here’s the Secret to Asking Questions the Right Way

The questions you ask determine the answers you get in business–and in life in general. But to get the right answers, it’s not just whether you ask questions but whether or not you ask the right questions the right way–in other words, whether you employ critical thinking, according to Harvard Business Review contributor John Coleman. 

Information is power and data is the most valuable resource on the planet–as well as the most vulnerable. Every question asked is an opportunity to get high-value data and immense insights. How much information you gain–or fail to–depends on how your question is posed. 

In business and sales, presenting questions the right way can give you the answers you need to close the deal–from that multimillion-dollar property to securing crucial pre-seed funding. In your day to day, it can help you choose the right suppliers or manufacturers, manage your teams and make informed strategic decisions. In the hiring process, it can uncover the information you need to identify the right candidate. 

Companies deploy these strategies all the time to brilliantly acquire key information. In fact, it’s part of how companies like Apple secretly, and ingeniously, test candidates and it’s core to Elon Musk’s hiring strategy, which uses the ‘2-Hands Test’ instead of degrees to discover the more intelligent people in the field. 

We all know it’s best to avoid yes-or-no questions and to ask open-ended ones instead. But not all open-ended questions are framed to give you an in-depth response. 

According to HBR’s Coleman, what you want to do instead, is ask questions that require critical thinking. To do this, you need to create space for active problem solving. This not only eliminates the short, and largely uninformative single-word response, but it forces the respondent to open up, giving you a depth of understanding that you wouldn’t likely get otherwise. 

For example, Coleman says that instead of asking a straightforward yes-or-no question such as “Is this market stable?” frame the same question as, “If the market were unstable, why would that be?” 

Questions are asked for a reason. There’s always an angle and with that something to gain from getting the answer. It might be as simple as an honest curiosity, but it can be a bit more self-serving or even sardonic–something to hold over someone else or a direct personal benefit to be had. While you can’t entirely relinquish your angle, you can greatly reduce how evident it appears to the person who you’re asking. 

This matters because the human mind is wired to seek and identify danger. This process naturally involves looking for signals of risk, something that a question with an angle that doesn’t help you can do. And if it’s not helpful, the mind might assume it might be harmful. 

Take the approach used in science and angle your questions to try to prove your hypothesis wrong, not right. Without an evident angle, your questions are received more innocently, and are more likely to yield an open response. 

Draw information from others by asking questions as if you already know the answer and simply want to hear more details about it. This was one of my late dad’s favorite tricks. He would cleverly say something to the effect of, “I heard about last weekend, how did that happen?” And more often than not, the recipient would then completely divulge a story they likely hadn’t been planning to share. 

Even if nothing happened, people quickly refer to whatever they might be most guilty of and then expound on it. In return, my dad got many stories and deep intel he might not have otherwise. And he definitely got into the psyche of others more than if he had just asked how someone had been. 

People by nature, want to expound-especially when they believe the other person is already privy to something they didn’t necessarily want them to know. It’s how police get additional information when pulling over drivers. 

The classic “Do you know why I pulled you over?” Is effective because no one wants to sound uninformed or unintelligent, so people will quickly fumble for an answer. In return, the driver often gives the officer more intel that they wouldn’t have had, had they not asked the question. Because I would bet very few just say, “yes.”