The Surprising Power of Questions

Alison Wood  Brooks; Leslie K. John

Article | Harvard Business Review | May–June 2018

The Surprising Power of Questions

by Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie K. John

Abstract

Much of an executive’s workday is spent asking others for information—requesting status updates from a team leader, for example, or questioning a counterpart in a tense negotiation. Yet unlike professionals such as litigators, journalists, and doctors, who are taught how to ask questions as an essential part of their training, few executives think of questioning as a skill that can be honed—or consider how their own answers to questions could make conversations more productive.
That’s a missed opportunity. Questioning is a powerful tool for unlocking value in companies: It spurs learning and the exchange of ideas, it fuels innovation and better performance, and it builds trust among team members. And it can mitigate business risk by uncovering unforeseen pitfalls and hazards.
Several techniques can enhance the power and efficacy of queries: Favor follow-up questions, know when to keep questions open ended, get the sequence right, use the right tone, and pay attention to group dynamics.

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Communication Strategy; Information; Knowledge Sharing; Performance Effectiveness;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Brooks, Alison Wood, and Leslie K. John. "The Surprising Power of Questions." Harvard Business Review 96, no. 3 (May–June 2018): 60–67.

In August 2017, Commonwealth Bank of Australia was looking for ways to differentiate itself from competing banks, and was also trying to improve the financial wellbeing of its customers. One domain where this was particularly relevant was in its bank-issued credit card business, where customers routinely selected cards that although profitable for the bank could be a poor fit for customers’ needs – leading to low satisfaction scores, cancellations, and occasionally, financial distress. To that end, the company’s Behavioral Economics team had developed a provocative experiment dubbed “The Good and the Bad.” Rather than just presenting the strengths of its various credit card offerings, they proposed also promoting each credit card’s less-obvious drawbacks. Being transparent with customers might help them make better choices, but would those choices come at the expense of bank performance? Should a company choose to be in the sales prevention business?

Companies want access to more and more of your personal data—from where you are to what’s in your DNA. Can they unlock its value while respecting consumers’ privacy?

Study objective—We define a minimally important difference for the Likert-type scores frequently used in scientific peer review (similar to existing minimally important differences for scores in clinical medicine). To our knowledge, the magnitude of score change required to change editorial decisions has not been studied.

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The Surprising Power of Questions

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