Developing expertise in our work is fulfilling, and when customers and colleagues call on us it feels gratifying. As we spend time in a domain, we come to see all the nuance and detail. But expertise also comes with a hidden cost: we are inclined to share all that detail with others who don’t need or understand it. If we don’t disrupt this dynamic, it hinders us from effectively making use of our expertise. The 4Practices of Precision Answering offer a helpful path toward making our expertise … [Read more...]
Complexity
Stand-up meetings stand out with Precision Q+A
Unstructured meetings waste time and energy. Recent articles, like this one in the Wall Street Journal, document the growing popularity of "stand-up" meetings as a way to avoid the wasteful meetings of old. Just standing up, however, isn't the answer. Better meetings require better structure. Stand-up meetings offer some structural innovations that can help improve our workplace interactions. But meeting formats become even more powerful when they are combined with discussion formats that also … [Read more...]
Three steps to higher impact questions
Does the following scenario sound familiar? You step into a status meeting and ask for an update: "Any new risks to the schedule?" Rashid, your counterpart in purchasing, responds quickly: "Delay in materials! When I called the supplier this morning…." You quickly realize this issue is uppermost in Rashid's thinking, but his response doesn't represent a thoughtful list of all the new risks to the schedule. What's a precision questioner to do? Before you blame Rashid and move on, consider how you … [Read more...]
Slippery Terms: Do you and I mean the same thing?
In the field of informal logic, "slippery terms" are words that mean one thing to one person and something different to another. They produce a consensus that is often an illusion, and therefore likely to fall apart. With long-time colleagues, the depth of shared context or background is usually enough to keep our meanings aligned. But when we work with people we don't know well, and we add differences in expertise, language, and culture, slippery terms create errors, misunderstandings, and … [Read more...]
The Power of Go/NoGo Questions
When meetings go wrong, the grumbling begins. The leader didn't have an agenda. The goals of the meeting weren't clear. One person monopolized the discussion. Key participants were unprepared. There were too many useless tangents. So whose job is it to fix broken meetings? … [Read more...]
The art of the follow-up question
As a student of Precision Questioning and Answering you have probably noticed that inquiry deepens conversations, sometimes in unexpected ways. This month we had lunch with an executive from a semiconductor company, we'll call him Ted. In the middle of our Moroccan chicken salads, Ted asked a direct, and very precise, question: "What class of problems does Precision Q+A help solve?" … [Read more...]