Judy wants your point of view.
It's not that she doesn't have strong opinions of her own and a well-internalized point of view. In fact, that strong persona gives her the confidence to put her point of view out for challenge. Her sister-in-law and I were recently admiring how when she has decisions to make, she crowdsources. She puts her hypothesis out to her friends and associates for peer review.
I went through my text chain from her
She texted me a photo of a proposal from a snow removal service. "Does this seem expensive to you?"
"These are the vacation destinations we're considering. What do you know about these places?"
"I'm looking at these outfits for my niece. Which ones do you think she would prefer?
What do you think about my removing the wall between the kitchen and the dining room?
Open-ended questions
This is Judy's daily practice.
Open-ended questions are appeals to our exploratory processing. These kinds of questions generate clusters of information. They encourage idea generation.
When we ask people open-ended questions, we are inviting them to think with us. They draw us into relationship. In order for it to be open-ended, it has to be a question we honestly haven't yet answered for ourselves. We have to be curious. Further, when we respond to an open-ended question, we have to be open to what the listener does with our thinking. We shouldn't be trying to tell them what to do, and we shouldn't be attached to the outcome of their decision. We're revealing to them how we think about the problem. We leave the solution to them.
If Judy makes a decision contrary to my point of view, it doesn't mean she rejected it. My point of view may have allowed her to try out my way of thinking in order to become more strongly assured of a different view.
When we begin with open-ended questions, those with first preference for associative processing find it easy to start riffing on how the question relates to everything else we’re thinking about, ever thought about, and ever expect to think about. And we easily remember every single related incident from our own experience and the experience of every friend and every friend of friends.
At the same time, those with sequential preference start evaluating evidence, creating categories, imagining chains of process, and alternative chains of process, best case scenarios and worst case scenarios.
There’s a bias that open-ended associating in the mind map style is the favored tool for generating fresh ideas. An open-ended question doesn't close off a sequential response.
Sequential step-by-step projections into the future can also liberate creative thinking. This is the work of contingency planning.
When we generate ideas using a mind map, we have people generate ideas from any direction, throw the words on a flip pad or white board, and start drawing the lines of connections among them.
By contrast, when we brainstorm sequentially, we may have a set of desired, or possible, outcomes. We put that outcome on a chart or white board as an ending point, put, now, as the beginning point, and start filling in the actions and processes which appear necessary to achieve the outcome.
As an alternative, we may pull an idea off the mind map, put it as a starting point, and chart how we build out that concept. In this process, we use if-then explorations at decision points to explore new possibilities.
Having clear boundaries and parameters can stimulate creativity. Robert Frost identified this principle when he declared,
“Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.”
Daniel O'Connell said pretty much the same 300 years earlier when he observed,
"It's the one who aims at nothing who is certain to hit it.”
Opening a meeting with an open-ended question: “How do we want to spend our next round of marketing dollars?” seems expansive, but often bogs us down with too many choices. As an alternative, if we open with -- “Do we want to spend our next round of marketing dollars on a regional market or more broadly but to a limited demographic? -- focuses us toward comparison and contrast within a binary system. It’s a quicker start -- but might leave out outlying alternatives.
Responses to option questions are more likely to tie thinking to specific details of relative benefits. They expand evidence-based thinking as one defends a point of view in contrast to specific examples. As evidence-based thinking is the domain of the sequential processor, option questions serve to expand our sequential creativity in multiple dimensions.
The research is solid. When we ask and answer questions, we think more clearly, store in memory more durably and retrieve more reliably.
For example, people who learn another language through asking and answering questions develop fluency sooner, more richly, and more durably than those who study words, phrases, and grammar rules.
Learning to consciously ask and answer questions makes us better leaders.
Questions come in categories, and each category has its own utility. One of my mentors, Robert Lefton, developed the science of this, which he called probing. More on this to come.
Hey Judy!
I know you're reading this.
How can I be a better brother?
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper
REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:
Robert Lefton: https://www.q4solutions.com/teammembers/robert-lefton/