Ask The Right Question

A few days ago, we were grappling with a technical issue that had been unresolved for a few weeks. Several of our developers researched and experimented with various possible solutions. Nothing worked. Several hours were spent searching on Google and sifting through various forums.

And then, one of the developers ran a search on Google in the form of a simple and direct question. And found a solution. The way he framed the question was so obvious and simple that we all wondered as to why that particular question had not been asked by any of us before.

This set me thinking and reminded me of a speech I once attended by noted VC Vinod Khosla where he urged the audience to "ask the right questions"

In the age of Google, all of the answers are there at our finger tips. Billions of pages of information, facts, ideas and figures. And therein lies the problem. It's easy to get lost in details. To get distracted. Or to complicate our ideas.

The few people who are able to get to the right answers quickly have the uncanny knack of asking the right questions.

At Ascendus, in all our years of helping organizations run 360-degree feedback surveys, I have rarely seen this skill being measured and benchmarked. Asking the right question is not about good listening. It's not about just paying attention. It's about pro-actively getting to the root of the matter. And about delving into the details while keeping the big picture in mind. In Six Sigma, you have the notion of "5 Why's" for doing root cause analysis. "Five Whys" is the Japanese philosophy of repeatedly asking why to find not only the direct sources of your problems, but also the root of those sources. Asking the question "Why" at least a few times has helped me gain greater understanding and clarity in a number of situations.

I hope that some bright industrial and organizational psychologists design survey instruments that measure and benchmark this important skill of "asking the right question."