Learn the minds of others out with a conscious approach to questioning.. Use Assumptions, Open-ended questions, Leading questions. Reflective statements, Tell me more, Brief insertions, Pauses, Closed-ended questions, Fact-finding questions, Commitment questions, Option questions, Leading questions, Summary questions, Learning from others, Using questions to set boundaries during conflict.
We draw lots of valid data from watching each other and assessing our choices. Much of this comes to us the rapid integrative way we call intuition.
Questions and answers are our other link to each other’s brains.
Dr. Robert Lefton of Psychological Associates turned on the lights for me. Bob teaches how to balance our intuitions with clear and direct questions, called probes, that bring unspoken assumptions to the surface where they can be examined and tested for accuracy.
As Bob notes, “probing isn’t designed to make people happy nor serene. It’s designed to do a hard and necessary job.”
Which is: learning about what’s in another’s brain.
Our brains are sitting up there processing data. We think of our brain as a single processing unit, but we know it’s really a complex collection of independent systems that more or less communicate with each other.
And while it’s doing all this complex, and often contradictory, integrative and serial processing, our bodies are quietly signaling more or less accurately, what’s going on inside.
And, as humans, we’re wired to try to make sense of all this complex, often contradictory, integrative and serial signaling coming out of ourselves and coming off the others around us.
Oy.
Assumptions
We’re often told we shouldn’t assume. Of course we assume. We can’t help it.
In fact, the ability to assume is an essential component of what makes us human.
The ability to assume, which is to say, the ability to interpret another’s directions, goals, and intentions, is a signature distinction of human intelligence.
We assume because we’re able to makes sense of all the neurological information that signals out through each others’ bodies as our brains are at work.
Assume away. It’s one of the more amazing things we do as human beings.
And don’t just assume. .
A model is a hypothesis. Hypotheses are made to be tested.
Which bring us back to probing
We are neurological contradictory: we are associative and sequential; we are explicit and symbolic; we’re emotional and rational, mind and body, profane and sacred; and profane; and all others.
We signal and we make explicit.
We assume and we question.
We get our best chance to reflect understanding and correct misunderstandings when we supplement our intuitions with careful and conscious questions.
Bob Lefton is our guide to conscious questioning. He identifies several categories of questions.
Open-ended questions
Open-ended questions are appeals to our associative processing. These kinds of questions generate clusters of information. They encourage brainstorming and brain dumping.
David Allen’s “What’s got your attention?” is a classic example.
“How does this fit with everything else that has your attention and focus?” is an expansive follow up.
What do you already know about this?
Is this similar to anything else you’ve experienced?
Lots of greetings have this quality:
What’ s up?
What’s new?
However, these quickly become bromides and therefore activate standard replies rather than fresh thought. They’re responses and not answers.
Politicians and others with a vested interest in controlling their messages and therefore, who work to avoid offering fresh and unscripted revelations are trained to offer responses instead of answers. An answer engages the question and the questioner.
A response, especially when crafty, sounds like an answer, but it’s designed to deflect the questioner’s purpose rather than enter into it.
At other times, questions are pro forma, and responses are shibboleths.
And even when we actively want to stay out of others’ heads, still, there we are. We can’t help it. We leak out our thoughts to one another all the time through our body language and expression of our personality through our behaviors.
When we are in relationship with one another, we need to get the communication as right as possible. We’re communicating constantly, just not with reliable accuracy.
When we need to get the communication right: on a jury; at a border crossing, we step up our awareness of our verbal and non-verbal systems, and we evaluate both.
When someone enters into our attention and focus, we often have an idea what’s going on with them: a colleague strolls down the hall with a look of triumph. Our child slinks into the car after schools with a guilty look.
An open-ended question puts the other person in charge of the conversation’s direction.
The flip side is a leading question.
The traffic was terrible this morning, wasn’t it?
The Red Sox really choked last night, didn’t they?
These questions assume agreement, and the expectation is a confirmation.
Dr. Lefton describes something between the broadly open-ended question and the leading question. These are what he calls reflective statements.
Reflective statements assert our awareness and understanding of another’s communication without indicating whether or not we agree. The purpose isn’t to mask our own view. On the contrary, we reflect to keep the clutter of our own view out of our understanding of what the other is saying.
Sometimes these are specifically begun with “Here’s what I hear you saying, . . .” or “What I’m getting from you is . . .”
Other times, your frame of reference is understood, and
You’re not happy about this.
That must have made your day.
You seem frustrated.
You seem to have mixed feelings.
Reflective statements serve a number of purposes. They show you’re listening and taking things in. They keep the conversation open and give encouragement to the speaker to expand and elaborate.
Most important, reflective statements allow your subject to check the accuracy of your mirroring. They bring to the surface what you think you heard and understood out into the open for mutual scrutiny.
When we engage others, we’re going to open up all the masses of contradiction Walt Whitman told us about.
We contradict ourselves because our brains are in motion: we are constantly changing our minds. My brain is changing as we speak (or in this instance as I write.) It is processing, adding, and forgetting at every moment.
And we contradict ourselves because often we don’t like our own thoughts.
We can find we don’t like our own thoughts when those thoughts heave out across our blood/brain barrier, get exposed to air and the light of scrutiny, appear different. We hear ourselves speaking; we read what we write and say, “No. That’s not right.”
And we contradict ourselves because we discover thoughts in conflict with our self images. We get nasty surprises when we uncover imaginings, prejudices, hostilities at odds with our own values and expectations.
And we contradict ourselves because we have no idea what’s hanging out in our brains.
And we contradict ourselves because we have different processing systems producing contradictory results. There’s fight or flight. There’s hold ‘em or fold ‘em; approach/avoidance; passive/aggression; schadenfreude.
Our brain is a committee. Sometimes it’s a jury, other times it’s a Quaker meeting, sometime it’s a contentious town hall forum, once in a while: it’s a barroom brawl.
When we engage in a conscious process of drawing out another, we are really taking a poll of our partner’s neuroprocessors. And we‘re going to get a number of views and perspectives. Further, as the committee hears itself out, it may drive to consensus or it may drive to deadlock.
This polling of the neuroprocessors happens differently depending on which neuroprocessors are dominant within us. We listen more to parts of our brains than others. We weight the votes of our own processors differentially depending on our neuropreferences. In short, it’s not a fair system.
Questions often drive us to get responses from our brain’s quieter voices. Questions promote a conversation from one processor to another.
What’s most important is to become comfortable with these contradictions within ourselves and others.
Much of our interpersonal conflict takes place right here.
When we try to draw out another, we’re going to encounter contradiction.
Therefore, we need to allow for contradiction. We need to allow for the synthesis and antithesis taking place within our own brains and the brains of others.
It’s tricky because sometimes the people we interact with will lie, stonewall, do anything but tell the truth. More often, those contradictions reflect our own working our way to a truth.
In either case, when we explore in a nonjudgmental way, we have excellent odds of discerning the differences.
As my grandmother used to say, “Time and chance reveal all.” Offer others time and a chance to talk. (No disrespect to Grandma, but Solomon is quoted as saying it first. Although, now that I think of it, he probably heard it from his grandmother.)
This process of questions and answers helps us not only to learn about others,
Often our most illuminating questions are the ones we ask others of ourselves.
Why am I so tired?
Why did Brian’s email upset me so much?
What could I have done differently?
How could I have been such a fool?
The people around us often observe us more closely than we do ourselves. If we ask for information about ourselves and treat the responder with respect and appreciation, we’ll learn a lot.
Don’t forget to be aware of Dr. Lefton’s observation. This kind of work isn’t designed to make people happy nor serene. It’s designed to do a hard and necessary job.
Tell me more
If most of our job is to let time and chance do its work. Bob offers us more strategies for encouraging others to talk.
These are questions about information the other person has already shared. You’re drilling down in a neutral way for more information. Your partner may become defensive, but the strategy is designed to be neutral.
Its primary use is when you don’t have enough information yet. You may not have a definite position or point of view and hope more information will lead you one.
Help me out, Ed. What about the shirt?
Tell me more about sales dropping off last month.
Or you may be developing a point of view, but want to expose it to more information.
Tell me more about your struggle with getting places on time.
What are you learning about that?
Brief insertions
Most of the time, the best strategy for gathering another’s point of view is to keep our own mouths shut. In American culture especially, we fill silences.
At the same time, too much silence can suggest we’re not engaged. Small signals of attention can encourage the other to keep going.
We do this with words:
I see
Keep going
I get it.
Did he really?
No joke?
Wow.
Hmmmm
And we do it symbolically:
Raised eyebrows
Nodding
Facing another with open body positions
Some of us are more responsive to verbal cues; others to symbolic cues. Over time you can take the measure of your partner.
Pauses
Pauses allow us to catch up with our thoughts and our thoughts to catch up with us. Often our thinking and our expressions of our thinking walk at different paces. When we pause, we give them a chance to synchronize and to return to consistency.
Pauses also allow our active processors to rest and our dormant processors to activate. They give us to chance to think under different lights.
Pauses give implicit permission to others to start or stop. However, when someone pauses, we should resist the opportunity to weigh in with our views. Often the pause precedes a peroration. The speaker is summoning a conclusion. If we jump into the pause, we can lose the best part of the communication.
Closed-ended questions
There are times we don’t know what we’re looking for when we engage one another. We want the other’s thoughts. We want them to brainstorm, associate, cluster, explore, dump out the contents of their brains out into view so we can sift and see if there’s anything there useful or interesting. This kind of thinking is what gets generated from open-ended questions.
However, at other times, we’re looking for something specific.
Dr. Lefton teaches us how to conduct a specific exploration of another’s views.
Often these are questions raised by the systems of our brain we use to understand rules, processes and time as depth and distance.
Does this directive come from corporate?
What evidence do you have for this conclusion?
How long do you expect it will take you to finish?
What’s our next action?
Dr. Lefton puts this style of exploration into three categories.
Fact-finding questions
Most closed-ended questions are simple findings of fact.
Where were you at 9pm on Thursday the 23rd?
Did get the delivery this morning?
Can you meet in an hour?
Who told you to do this?
Commitment questions
Other questions ask you to sign up, take responsibility, agree to purchase.
Commitment questions are very important. It’s easy to mistake enthusiasm or lack of enthusiasm for level of commitment.
To the question: “Do you want to go to Disneyland.”
An associative response might be:
Oh I love Disneyland. I had my senior prom there.
Which sounds like yes, until the commitment question:
Shall I book tickets?
No. It won’t seem the same. I want keep my memories.
Or
Want to go to Disneyland.
A sequential response might be:
What are we going to drink? I don’t want to spend $10 for a bottle of water.”
Which sounds like resistance, until:
Does this mean you don’t want to go?
Not at all. I’ll book tickets. I just need to find where I can get a flat of water bottles so we don’t have to use the hotel mini bar every time we get thirsty.
Option questions
Option questions are often directives embedded in a limited choice.
“Do you want to meet Tuesday or Wednesday to go over your report?” means we are going to meet to go over my report.
“We’re not even close to finished. Should we order sandwiches or pizza?” means I am going to be working late on this project.
Nearly all of us respond better when offered choices, even if limited. Parents, who get resistance when we say, “Let’s put on your sweater, dear,” often get ready compliance when we say, “Do you want to wear your red sweater or your blue sweater.”
There are several times when it’s important to pose questions as options. The most important is when we don’t want an open-ended response; we don’t want brainstorming; we want our partners to keep their thinking inside the box: thank you very much.
Option questions keep us focused. Option questions are useful when we are driving toward a goal. Option questions are important when time matters. Option questions are important when you have an agenda, and need to limit discussion.
Option questions are often useful after brainstorming to hone our thinking. Option questions shift us from associative processing to sequential processing, or, in other words, from model-based thinking to rule-based thinking.
Should we use our next round of marketing dollars in the Ohio market or the Florida market?
Instead of, “Which of the initiatives on the board has the most potential?” Option questions winnow choices: Which do you like better, option A or option F? Option F? Okay, now which do you like better, option F or Option C?” Tightly focused rounds of option questions help in sorting though a richness of possibilities.
Sometimes, when everything’s out of the box, it’s helpful to put some things into boxes.
Leading questions
The answer is built into the question.
One my favorite mission statements is that of the John D, and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; “Building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.”
As the Foundation is a frequent sponsor of my public radio station, when I hear, as I do often, “Building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.” I’ll turn to my wife, “I want to build a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.” Susan usually responds patiently, “You do, dear.”
As a pitch, “Do you want to build a more just, verdant, and peaceful world?” is a lead into one answer. In their best use, leading questions are designed to create affiliations and to establish common values.
Do you want to create a safer neighborhood for our children?
Do you want an enduring peace?
Other times, leading questions are designed to lower another’s resistance.
Don’t you deserve the best?
Do you want to be happier?
Do you want to make more money?
And they can be use to warn or intimidate:
You don’t want to lose your job, do you?
These questions are most effective when all parties are within the same frame of reference. When we’re organized to integrate the other person’s view into our own, that is, when we are already inclined to be affiliative, this questions draw us together in our shared conclusion.
At the same time, these questions require us to be sure in our assumptions. While they’re meant to lead to one obvious and shared answer, they’re structured as open ended. Sometimes, your subject opens them up.
Don’t you deserve the best?
Hamlet: “Use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping?”
This kind of response make it hard to sell cologne.
Summary questions
Summary questions require us to think harder. They are similar to reflective questions in that you are still trying to keep the focus on what your partner has said.
However, reflective questions are just simple restatements of what we’ve heard. Summary statements are our attempts to sift through the communication in order to arrive at the speaker’s intended message. The communication may have been rambling and garbled or intricate and expressive or complex or confusing,
Our job is to sort through the message to the core meaning as we understand it.
A reflective response mirrors what we heard our partner say.
A summary response mirrors what we think they mean.
With reflective questions, we’re trying to give our partner an instant replay of what we heard.
With a summary question, we’re thinking with our partner. We might be processing what they said out to a logical conclusion, distilling it to a main idea, or elaborating it with an anecdote of our own.
For example, from this statement of the Prince of Denmark:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them.
My summary response might be:
Hamlet, are you asking if it could be an honorable decision to take own your life considering the circumstances you’re in?
This kind of questioning is an art. Too formulaic an approach fails to activate fresh thinking. A too interrogative approach puts others on the defensive.
I’m also trying to keep my opinion and views out. I’m still trying to find out what’s on the mind of my partner. I have to keep in mind, my understanding may be completely wrong.
Hamlet may respond, “How can you think I’m suicidal? I was reading The Death of Socrates and trying to understand if suicide is ever a proper way to end one’s life.”
I may then respond, “Thank you. I’m sorry I misunderstood so completely. Tell me more about these existential questions you’re considering.”
Hamlet might say, “Don’t put words in my mouth. That’s not what I meant.”
To which I respond, “Yes, I’m sorry. Those are my words. I’m putting what I’m hearing into my own words to check my understanding of what you said. I see I’m not getting it. Would you mind saying it again?”
Again, it is important when I summarize another’s view as it is when I reflect another’s statements to allow my partner to change his mind or to recant without judgment or penalty. When our own words echo back to us, we may find we disagree with ourselves. This isn’t flip-flopping, it’s called thinking.
Learning from others
Before we start gathering information from another, it’s important to be as clear as possible to ourselves why we want another’s view. When we solicit another’s view, there’s an implied agreement that we’re open to influence. We need to have own agendas clear so we can keep our views separate from the views of others.
And in order to learn from another, it’s often useful to keep our views to ourselves – the most important is to keep open the possibility of have our own minds changed.
The art of exploring another’s view is sharply different from argument, persuasion, and interrogation. In argument, persuasion, and interrogation we are attempting to bring someone around to our view. We may very well use all the questioning strategies outlined above, but we are only opening up the other’s point of view for the purpose of correcting it or to use it as evidence against them.
Since the tactic is almost identical, it takes a high degree of sophistication to use properly. Most often, we think we’re exploring when, in fact, we hope to persuade. We send mixed signals to our partner.
And, even when we are pure of motive and only seeking another’s views, this experience of someone honestly and without agenda seeking our view is so rare, most of us remain on the defensive nonetheless.
Using questions to set boundaries during conflict
Many individuals, and I’ve noticed it may be a cultural practice in some social groups, routinely challenge others with a question, rather than a demand.
Instead of saying, “Don’t do that,” some say, “Why are you doing that?”
The question may be sharp, but it’s still posed as a question, for example, “Why are you being so annoying?” or “Are you trying to get on my nerves?”
It’s an interesting difference. A boss could say, “I don’t like that idea,” or “That’s a non-starter,” as a direct statement; or put it as a question, as in “Why would you want to do that?”
Even when expressed in annoyance or frustration, it leaves open the possibility of a response or a defense.