As a guide to explaining the causes of problems at work, we are sometimes given this advice: ask the question “Why?” five times. But “Why?” is a vague question and might not always deepen our thinking. It is akin to advising a confused student to ask “Huh?” or “What do you mean?” five times in order to clarify the meaning of a new concept. It is imprecise and inefficient. Here are five ways of articulating more precise questions to understand what caused something to happen. Sequence of … [Read more...]
Critical Thinking
Ensuring Questions are Clear & Positively Received Over Email
While the number of communication tools available to us continues to expand, email remains a primary form of interaction. Every day we write dozens of messages, and receive even more, generating so much information churn that we can overwhelm our ability to focus on our most important work. Precision Q+A helps us write email that is clear and to the point, easing our collaborations over email. To create clarity and conciseness in email, follow these three steps: Write an opening … [Read more...]
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...]
Taking Precision Q+A personally
Vervago recently worked with a young CEO—we'll call her Ramona—whose technology startup company had failed. We suggested that after the standard technology post mortems and business analyses were over, Ramona could benefit from an additional review, this one completely personal. We asked her to work her way through some of the slide decks that had provided foundations for key decisions, asking herself in relation to each: "What questions did I ask?" "What questions didn't I ask?" "Was my style … [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 art of questionstorming
Most of us are already familiar with brainstorming, a technique for generating new ideas as rapidly as possible, without stopping to judge or discuss them. The theory behind brainstorming is that genuinely creative ideas often look silly or useless at first, so we need tools that help us suspend disbelief and keep us focused on generating fresh ideas, one after another. … [Read more...]