One of the most powerful things you can do to help someone solve a problem is to ask great questions. My new article “Questions to Explore Problems” (PDF) gives dozens of questions that I’ve found essential in my work as a coach, including questions to explore:

• The problem in general.
• The desired state, the perceived state, and the difference between the two.
• The way the problem is stated.
• The problem’s past, present, and future.
• The way the problem is being solved.
• The way you are exploring the problem.

In a fascinating TED Talk, Laurie Santos shows that monkeys make the same kinds of economic errors as humans do. Another way to say this: Humans make some of the same kinds of economic errors as monkeys do.

Early in the video, Santos asked a question that caught my attention: “How is a species that’s as smart as we are capable of such bad and consistent errors?”

What I find most interesting about Santos’s question is a presupposition: The question tacitly posits “as smart as we are” as the standard of judgment. Why do I say “tacitly,” when she clearly states the standard in her question? Though the standard is explicit, what’s tacit is taking that standard as a given.

To demonstrate, I’ll ask a different question: “For a species that consistently makes such bad errors, how is it that we are as smart as we are?” My question posits a different baseline for evaluating our behavior: Our consistent errors.

In my tweets on this subject, I called Santos’s question a “foreground/background error.” That was a mistake. Rather, Santos makes a foreground/background choice. Her question and mine differ in the choice of background and foreground. Her question places human smartness in the background and consistent errors in the foreground. My question reverses the foreground and background.

We humans often ask such questions, which make an implicit choice of what to place in the foreground and what in the background.

For example, people ask, “Why do we sleep?” The question (tacitly) takes awakeness as background. I think it’s probably more reasonable and fruitful to ask, “Why are we ever wake?” The vast majority of living things are never awake. We and other animals do sometimes wake. How does that happen? I think it’s miraculous.

Another example, which I hear a lot: “Why do we miscommunicate so much?” Flip the foreground and background: “How is it that we are ever able to communicate at all?” Communication is a freaking miracle, and our oft-uttered question takes it for granted.

Matt Heusser tweeted another example from a forum on communication between managers and doers: “Why is there so much friction between managers and doers?” Matt flipped the question: “With so much conflict inherent in our systems, isn’t it a miracle that we ever get anything done?”

We could state our observations relatively neutrally, with equal emphasis: We’re as smart as we are; we consistently make bad errors. But typically we don’t do that. We place one observation in the background, and apply it as a standard against which to judge the other observation.

What fascinates me is that our questions typically place the more “perfect” standard in the background, even though the evidence suggests that humans don’t live up to the standard. What’s more, we typically ask such questions directly in response to noticing that we don’t live up to the standard. We take as given a standard that we know we don’t meet. We humans seem to have a bias toward judging ourselves against standards of perfection.

This is not an idle topic for me. It’s at the heart of my coaching. My clients often lament that they fall short of some standard they have set for themselves. As we explore the standard, we often find that the standard is very difficult to meet, and sometimes beyond human capability. And yet clients make great effort to continue to hold onto their standards, even after agreeing that the standards are unreasonable.

How come we so often choose as background a standard that we clearly do not meet? What would happen if we more often made a different choice, to take our typical experience as the standard, and ask how we are sometimes able to be better than that?

What if how actually we observe ourselves to be were okay, even as we yearn to be “better”?

Of course, my entire post implicitly posits its own standard of perfection: A standard of not judging ourselves against standards that we demonstrably fail to live up to.

Maybe I can soften my own error this way: When we notice that we are holding ourselves and each other to some standard of perfection, we have an opportunity to make the standard explicit, ask whether and how it serves us, and explore other standards that may serve us better.

Problems and Problem Statements

In Are Your Lights On?, Don Gause and Jerry Weinberg offer this useful definition of problem:

A problem is a difference between things as perceived and things as desired.

I like this definition because it highlights three important elements of any problem: things as perceived, things as desired, and a difference between the two.

There’s another important element of any problem: The person who is perceiving and desiring things. In order for the difference between things as perceived and things as desired to be a problem, the perceiver and the desirer must be the same person.

A problem statement is a model of the problem, a simplification designed to aid in solving the problem. Like any model, a problem statement differs from the thing being modeled. A good model highlights features that are most relevant to the modeler’s purpose and hides details that are less relevant. A good problem statement highlights problem elements that help solve the problem, and hides details that distract.

Problem Statement Smells

A problem statement smell is any element of a problem statement that makes the problem harder to solve. Some smells attract your attention toward conditions that are inessential to the problem, or that are beyond your influence. Some smells divert your attention away from an essential element of the problem.

Problem statement smells commonly take three forms: additions, deletions, and distortions. Some problem statements combine several smells.

Additions

Some problem statements introduce claims and ideas that are not present in the problem itself. These additions can confuse problem solvers, lead to wild goose chases, or otherwise distract from the problem.

Conclusions expressed as facts. I need to give my boss the test results for third-party authorization, but Jeff isn’t done testing it yet. How do you know Jeff isn’t done? What did you see or hear that led to that conclusion? Perhaps Jeff is already done, and is writing up his report right now.

Mindreading. Jeff is just trying to protect his own turf. You have no direct access to Jeff’s thoughts and intentions. What did you see or hear that led to that conclusion? What are two other possible meanings of what you saw and heard?

Solution probleming. The problem is that we don’t have a Wiki for test status. This is a solution in search of a problem. What’s the problem? If you had a Wiki, what would that do for you? Often, the “problem behind the problem” is easier to solve.

Missing standard. Jeff tests too slowly. Too slowly for what? What would be fast enough? How do you assess how fast he tests?

Deletions

Many problem statements omit important elements of the problem. These omissions can make it harder to envision what a solution would look like.

Missing desire. The problem is that Jeff is only halfway finished testing third-party authorization. That’s the perceived state. What’s the desired state?

Missing perception. The problem is that I need Jeff to finish testing third-party authorization by Monday. That’s the desired state. What’s the perceived state?

Missing problem stater. The problem is that Jeff is supposed to be done testing third-party authorization, and he isn’t done yet. The person who stated the problem is mentioned nowhere in the problem statement. Who is doing the supposing? Whose problem is this?

Missing actor. Some of the items on the backlog seem to have no owner. Rephrase to add an actor: I cannot identify the owner for some of the backlog items.

Distortions

Many problem statements amplify problem elements, or dampen them, or interpret them in distorted ways. Such distortions, if we take them as truths, limit the kinds of solutions we will consider.

“Can’t.” I can’t ask for a bigger budget. Try: “I choose not to ask for a bigger budget because I want _____.” (Fill in the blank.) What stops you from asking for a bigger budget? What would happen if you asked for a bigger budget?

“Have to.” I have to work this weekend. Try: “I choose to work this weekend because I want _____.” (Fill in the blank.) What would happen if you didn’t work this weekend?

Inanimate agent. The problem is that our backlog just keeps growing. Backlogs can’t just grow of their own accord. Somebody is growing it. Who? How?

Lullaby language. No problem. We should just work weekends until we ship. Words and phrases such as should, no problem, and just tend to minimize the complexity of the problem, directing attention away from important details. Question each use of these “lullaby words” to surface the hidden assumptions. See Jerry Weinberg’s More Secrets of Consulting for further examples of lullaby language.

Combinations

Sometimes a single problem statement will include a combination of additions, deletions, and distortions.

Judgment. The problem is that Jeff has no initiative. One smell: mindreading. What do you see and hear that leads you to this conclusion? Another smell: missing desire. What do you want from Jeff? A third smell: tacit causation. Even if Jeff had tons of initiative, he might apply it elsewhere, and still not do what you need.

Tacit causation. Customers expect me to remember all of their requests, so I add them to the backlog, and the backlog just keeps getting bigger. The little word “so” suggests causation, but the link between cause and effect is neither obvious nor stated. But there is no law of the universe that says “if customers expect you to remember their requests, you must add them to the backlog.” That’s one way to respond to the expectation. What are some other ways?

Other time or place. Jeff didn’t finish testing third-party authorization. That’s in the past, and you can’t alter that. What problem are you experiencing right now? What need is currently unfulfilled?

Your Turn

Experiment: What other problem statement smells can you identify? How might you remedy each?

Experiment: In my description of each problem statement smell, I describe or hint at some of the problems caused by the smell. My problem statements have smells. What smells can you identify?

Once upon a time I was the C++ programming language guru in an organization of 200 software developers. People would come to me with all sorts of esoteric C++ problems, and I’d give them the answer. It often seemed—more often than mere coincidence can account for—that whatever problem someone was having, I’d had the same problem myself, and solved it, only the day before. So I was often able to give the answer off the top of my head, which gave me an aura of being smarter than I really was.

This encouraged people to come to me with even more problems. Eventually they posed problems—not only about programming but also about other sticky issues—that I couldn’t solve off the top of my head. In order to understand the problem better so that I could solve it, I’d ask questions to get more information. Simple questions such as What have you tried so far? and What happened? and What else did you try? I noticed that often as people were answering my questions they would suddenly say, “Ah, I’ve got it!” It turned out that I didn’t need even to understand the problem, much less to solve it.

I began to enjoy helping people with those problems most of all, the problems that I had no idea how to solve. I learned to notice what puzzled me and to ask questions about my puzzles. Not leading questions with embedded advice (“Have you tried regrafting the Johnson rods?”), but questions simply to help me understand more clearly what was happening. And in answering the questions, people became more clear themselves about what was happening. I was surprised and delighted to learn that as people understood their problems better, they were usually able to come up with great advice of their own, advice that was far more useful than anything I might have offered.

Over time I’ve added other questions to my repertoire, questions not only about understanding the problem per se, but about understanding how the person is going about trying to solve the problem. Those “meta-problem” questions, such as the ones I asked Paul, the dream-home builder, seem to have great power to help people create their own advice. And they help people learn to examine their own problem-solving process, to jiggle themselves loose when they’re stuck so they can better solve their own problems.

One day Sriram poked his head into my cube, raised a finger, and said, “Dale, I— No, I got it.” And off he went.

Later I asked him what that was all about. He said, “On my way to your office, I was asking myself, ‘What questions would Dale ask me?’ I answered those questions, and I came up with the answer myself!”

I’d helped Sriram without even being there! That’s the moment I knew I could be a great coach. If only I could find a way to get paid for stuff like that.

Three questions lie at the heart of effectiveness. The better you can answer these three key questions and act on the answers, the more effective you will be:

1. What results do I want?
2. How can I create the results I want?
3. What results am I creating?

In my coaching and consulting practice, I’ve notice that people often focus predominantly on question 2, on “what can I do.” In particular, when people are feeling stuck or ineffective, they’re likely focusing exclusively on what to do. Even more specifically, they’re likely focusing exclusively on how to carry out some previously chosen course of action.

One clue that people are overly attached to a course of action is the way they ask for help. When people ask “How can I …” or “What can I do to …” or “What’s the best way to …” in a way that suggests they have been struggling to answer the question themselves, I begin to suspect that they may be neglecting to ask the other questions: What results do I want? What results am I creating?

There’s something seductive about focusing on what to do. I’m certainly susceptible to the seduction. My story about finding the right word is an example of that. I’d been struggling to find just the right word for “the people you’re asking to change.” I’d somehow chosen finding just the right word as my goal, and didn’t know how to find just the right word. With the help of my writer friends I realized that my stuckness came largely from holding too tightly to that goal. When I changed my focus from “how can I” to “what do I want,” I quickly discovered that my deeper problem wasn’t how to find just the right word for “the people you’re asking to change,” but how to write in a gender-inclusive way. Once I understood my deeper problem, I quickly solved it.

What makes focusing on what to do so enticing? Perhaps it’s because it seems to lead directly to action, directly to resolution. And perhaps it’s because we know that we will achieve our goals only through action. And perhaps it’s because focusing on action usually works.

It’s only when focusing on action doesn’t work that people become stuck. And in those cases, focusing on what to do often leaves people even more stuck. But there’s something about being stuck that encourages people to strive even more intently to figure out what to do. A vicious circle.

And that’s when they ask me for help. So by the time people ask for help, they are often not only stuck, but also intent on figuring out how to carry out the course of action that got them stuck in the first place. I’ve learned, from my own experience and from observing other people, that if people are persisting in a course of action that isn’t working, it’s likely that either they are not staying mindful of what they want or they are not seeing clearly the results they’re creating.

This model of effectiveness is a centerpiece of my approach to coaching and consulting. One of the most helpful things I can do for clients is to ask the questions that they have been neglecting: What do you want? and What is happening?
Time after time, these questions have proven to be both simple and powerful.

What makes these questions so powerful? One key benefit of asking “what do we want” is that simply revisiting our goal often jiggles us into imagining other ways to achieve it, or at least into considering that there may be other ways to achieve it. My “just the right word” episode is an example of that.

A key benefit of asking “what is happening” is that it invites us to seek information, or to recognize that we already have information, that can help us evaluate adjust our course of action.

Here’s an example in which I persisted in a dysfunctional course of action in part because I had neglected this simple question. The story takes place one day in 1992. A group of coworkers and I had for months been gathering in the cafeteria for snacks and conversation every afternoon at around 3 o’clock. For at least two weeks I had been holding court, moaning about our ignorant manager, and his stupid manager, and his bonehead manager, all the way up to the company’s evil CEO and deranged President.

On this particular afternoon, as we finished our break and were headed back to work, my friend Jack said to me, “You really know how to bring a conversation down.”

Yikes! I immediately recognized the truth of what he’d said. And I immediately disliked that it was true. I had been so focused on complaining, on my dysfunctional course of action, that I was oblivious to the effect I was having on my friends. Jack’s comment answered a question that I had neglected to ask: What results am I creating with my complaining? I immediately vowed to stop moaning all over my friends, and I spent some time figuring out what I really wanted, and how better to achieve it.

What results do I want? How can I create the results I want? What results am I creating? I’ve used these questions countless times to improve my own performance, and to help my clients create the results they want.

One of the most important elements of a helping relationship is permission to help. This applies to all kinds of helping relationships: coaching, consulting, teaching, psychological counseling, medical practice. If you don’t give me permission to help you, it’s dangerous for me to imagine that we have a helping relationship at all.

I’ve learned that if I am to help someone, I must first secure the person’s permission to help. That’s easy when someone asks for help. But what about if someone simply describes a frustrating problem? Is that a request for help? I say no. I’ve learned that permission must be explicit, and must be continually renegotiated after it’s given, because:

• Your experiencing pain does not necessarily mean that you see the pain as a problem.
• Your having a problem does not necessarily mean that you want help.
• Your wanting help does not necessarily mean that you want my help.
• Your wanting my help does not necessarily mean that you want my help right now.
• Your wanting my help does not necessarily mean that you want the kind of help I’m offering.
• Your wanting my help right now does not necessarily mean that you will want my help tomorrow, or three minutes from now.

If I want to help, I must repeatedly make sure I have your permission at all of these levels.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High
by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler.

As you can see from the list of books below, over the past year I’ve been a student of conversation and relationships. I’ve been especially interested in how we can make our conversations more rewarding for ourselves, for others, and for our relationships. Crucial Conversations helped me to make a big leap in that direction, and that’s why it is my favorite book of 2003. [Full Review]

Other favorites:

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen.

Difficult Conversations shows that any conversation that matters is really three conversations: one about what happened, another about how we feel about what happened, and a third about how all of that affects the way we think of ourselves. When we try to talk about all of these important things at once, each conversation confuses the other, and we derail the overall conversation.

The second half of the book describes how to conduct a learning conversation, a conversation in which we learn the other person’s story, express our views and feelings fully, and solve problems together. These ideas are very similar to the concepts in Crucial Conversations of dialogue and the “shared pool of meaning,” and also to the approach I describe in my articles “Resistance as a Resource” and “Untangling Communication.”

Difficult Conversations and Crucial Conversations complement each other nicely. The books cover similar content, and express compatible ideas about how to make challenging conversations work.

Don’t Be Nice, Be Real: Balancing Passion for Self with Compassion for Others
by Kelly Bryson.

How to move beyond understanding each other to empathizing with each other. Expands on Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (below). [Full Review]

The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook & Companion: A Guide to Understanding Your Expertise
by Peter Block.

Peter Block and colleagues describe lessons they’ve learned from their experience of practicing the principles of Block’s
Flawless Consulting
.

Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, Revised edition
by Margaret J. Wheatley.

Wheatley applies principles from the “new sciences” of chaos, complexity, and self-organizing systems to leadership and human organizations.

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
by Dava Sobel.

The story of how clock maker John Harrison solved the problem of longitude. The difficulty Harrison experienced in gaining acceptance for his solution, despite the gravity of the problem, makes this a fascinating case study of resistance.

The Illustrated Longitude
, by Dava Sobel and William J. H. Andrews, has the same text as Sobel’s original book, with the addition of 180 marvelous photographs and illustrations, each described in detail.

Loving What Is: Four Questions that Can Change Your Life
by Byron Katie.

Katie describes “The Work,” a set of good questions by which we can identify and inquire into beliefs that cause stress and interfere with our communications, relationships, and happiness. Includes transcripts of many sessions in which Katie facilitates many people to inquire into their beliefs to resolve a wide variety of painful situations.

A CD version of Loving What Is includes live recordings of people doing “The Work.”

Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities
by Jill Freedman and Gene Combs.

Narrative therapy invites people to make visible the stories that create and sustain the problems with which they are struggling, and to create alternative stories that better support meaningful and fulfilling lives.

It was from this book that I began to understand the importance of stories and the influence that stories wield in our interactions and relationships. Also enlightening for me was the chapter about helpful questions.

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, 2nd Edition
by Marshall B. Rosenberg.

How to move from moralistic judgments — judgments that imply wrongness or badness on the part of people who don’t act in harmony with our values — to clearer, more effective ways to express our needs.

Rosenberg’s
Speaking Peace
is an audio version of these ideas.

Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide, Second Edition
by Harrison Owen.

Open Space Technology, a simple and powerful way to organize meetings and conferences, encourages passion, commitment, and personal responsibility, and taps the capacity of a group of passionate, committed, responsible people to self-organize to address complex issues.

See my earlier article about Open Space Technology and Owen’s book.

Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future
by Margaret J. Wheatley.

Wheatley encourages us to hold conversations about what matters most to us. Nothing fancy; just simple conversation. Simple and powerful. [Full Review]

Often when I write about resistance, I struggle to find the right word for the change agent’s action, the action people are resisting when they resist. Would-be change agents offer advice, requests, demands, mandates, proposals, and lots of other… what? What is the category that encompasses all of these offers?

I haven’t yet found that single category. Last night, after several hours of late-night etymological research, I arrived at two categories: proposals and requests. People can resist change agents’ proposals, and they can resist change agents’ requests.

The common element of proposals and requests is that each offers a course of action that the listener may take. The main distinction between the two is the intended beneficiary of the course of action. The intent of a proposal is to benefit the listener. Though the proposer may also intend the proposal to benefit the proposer and others, the defining characteristic of a proposal (a sincere proposal, at least) is that it is offered for the benefit of the listener. The intent of a request is to benefit the requester. Though the requester may also intend the request to benefit the listener and others, the defining characteristic of a request is that it is issued for the benefit of the requester.

I’d love to find a useful, single word that encompasses both requests and proposals. If there is such a word, the key is in what’s common between requests and proposals: each offers a course of action that the listener may take. Is there a good, evocative word for that?

The word offer is a step in the right direction. Dictionary.com defines offer as “to present for acceptance or rejection; proffer.” This definition is more general than I’m looking for — it doesn’t evoke the key idea of a course of action. What’s the word for “offer a course of action?”

I’m starting to think that the right word is proposal, and that a request is a kind of proposal. If that’s right, then the distinction that I drew above isn’t quite right. I may need to drop intended to benefit the listener as an essential characteristic of a proposal. A proposal is a proposal as long as it presents a course of action for acceptance or rejection, regardless of whose interests the proposer intends to serve.

Alas, I’m now mired in The Definition Game. Regardless of what words we use, the nature of our offers is important to our success as change agents. Whose interests are we serving by offering the courses of action we offer? What forms can our offers take? In what sort of relationship would each form be appropriate? What does the form of our offers imply about our view of our relationships with our listeners?

But I still want a word. Is proposal the best word, or is there a better one?

Experiment: In what situations are requests appropriate? In what situations are proposals appropriate?

Experiment: What different kinds of proposals can you think of? What distinguishes each kind of proposal from the others? What would have to be true in a relationship in order for the listener deem each kind of proposal to be appropriate?

Experiment: What different kinds of requests can you think of? What distinguishes each kind of request from the others? What would have to be true in a relationship in order for the listener deem each kind of request to be appropriate?

A mailing list in which I participate is discussing empowerment. As usually happens in discussions of empowerment, several people claimed that it is impossible for one person to empower another, that all you can do is to disempower them, to prevent them from using the power they have.

I believe it is possible for one person to empower another. In my mind, to empower a person means to connect the person with a source of power.

What do I mean by power?
Power is the ability to create value. Yes, I know there are other kinds of power, such as the ability to destroy, whether intentionally or — as in the famous (and untrue) story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow — inadvertently. But when we talk about empowerment, we are almost always talking about the power to do something positive.

Given those definitions, you can empower people by connecting them with sources of ability to create value.

For an example what I mean by empowerment, see this story about how I worked with Susan, the HR Director at a large company, to resolve resistance. I believe that I empowered Susan. I connected her with a source of power, with a source of ability to create value: her ability to listen with empathy. Now, Susan already had that ability, and plenty of it. But, for some reason, she had not been using her considerable ability. She had not yet recognized that listening with empathy could be a source of great power as she interacted with the “resisters.” I simply reminded her of the power that she already had. She knew what to do from there, and she succeeded spectacularly. My questions connected Susan to her own power. My questions empowered her.

Now, suppose that Susan, upon hearing my questions, had said, “Dale, that’s nuts,” and walked away. Would my questions still have been empowering? Is it empowering to offer a source of power, even if the person chooses not to use it? I don’t think so. That sets the bar too low. If Susan had chosen not to use her considerable empathy, or if she had listened with empathy, and yet had seen no valuable results, who’s to say that that “source of power” had any power in it at all? The true mark of empowerment is the value that people create with the sources of power they are offered.

Perhaps the people who claim that it is impossible for one person to empower another define empower differently than I do. According to the usage notes at dictionary.com, empower originally had a very restricted meaning: “to invest with authority, authorize.” That kind of empowerment connects people to sources of power that they previously were prevented from accessing. In other words, it simply reverses earlier disempowerment.

Empowerment seems to be a tricky subject. Conversations about empowerment (including this one?) often fizzle without creating much value for anyone. So most of the time, rather than talk about empowerment, I simply do what I can to connect people with sources of power. I especially enjoy interactions like the one with Susan, interactions in which I am able connect people with the abundant power that is already inside them.

Experiment: During the next week, make a list of every source of power that you use. This list is a source of power for you. In the future, when you become stuck, review the list, looking for sources of power that you may have forgotten were available.

Experiment: Review your sources of power. What kinds of sources are abundantly present in your list? What kinds are rare or missing from your list? How could you acquire those kinds of power?

Experiment: During the next week, notice every time that you connect another person to a source of power. What kinds of power do you typically offer? What kinds would you like to offer more often, if only people knew you had them to offer?

Last week at Consultants’ Camp, several friends reminded me that I have a reputation for asking good questions. One of my friends, James Bach, asked me, “How do you do that? How do you decide what questions to ask?”

Good question!

I didn’t know how to answer James’s question. I’m still thinking about it. And as I think about it, I’m starting to answer a related question: What makes a good question good? Here are some of my thoughts.

I don’t immediately know how to answer the question. When James asked how I decide what questions to ask, my first thought was, “Huh. How do I decide what questions to ask?” I have a hunch that I had a blank look on my face (one of the telltale signs of a good question).

The question asks me to think about things I haven’t thought about before. Though lots of people have told me that I ask good questions, I’ve never explored what makes a good question good. The moment James asked his question, it seemed like such an obviously good idea. How is it that I’ve never thought about that?

It’s okay that I don’t know how to answer the question. It’s easy ask embarrassing questions that point out people’s ignorance. I didn’t feel threatened or embarrassed by James’s question. Why not? Maybe I simply wasn’t embarrassed by my “ignorance” about how I ask my questions. Or maybe there was something about the way James phrased the question that made it non-threatening. Or maybe I’ve learned, in my long friendship with James, that he cares about me. Maybe all of those things. I’m often able to ask very challenging questions in a way that leaves people feeling safe. I’m not sure how I do that, but I think it’s important. I’ll want to explore that further.

I want to answer the question. If I knew what makes my questions so good, I might be able to ask even better ones, or to ask good questions more often. Or maybe I could learn additional ways to get the same good results that I now get only through questions.

The question gives hope. Though I didn’t know how to answer James’s question, I knew immediately that if I think about it, I’ll learn some very useful stuff. The question gave me hope that I didn’t know I needed.

The question shows compassion and respect. James asked his question because he wanted to learn how to do something that I do well. I suspect that every good question shows compassion and respect.

I still don’t know how I decide to ask the good questions I ask, but I’ll bet it starts with me feeling compassion and respect, and wanting to offer hope.

Experiment: For the next week, notice questions that you and others ask. Which questions did you think of as good questions? As great questions? Which questions seemed less than good? What is it about the great questions that makes them great? What makes a poor question poor?