Learning Diverse Question Formats to Get Better Insights
One thing I’ve been doing a lot this year is thinking about how to ask better questions. It’s not a skill I’ve deliberately tried to develop much in the past so I spend a lot of time thinking about every single question.
Learning to ask better questions has definitely been worth all the hours of investment, in particular learning a variety of question formats. It is a skill I would definitely encourage all leaders and facilitators to reflect on.
In this article, I’m referring to question formats used in surveys, questionnaires, and workshops. In these contexts, diverse question formats can be more interesting and engaging for participants and lead to deeper reflection compared to direct questions like “What are your 3 top priorities for the next 24 months?”.
When to Use Surveys and Questionnaires?
Thanks to the influence of people I’ve had the chance to work with over the past year like Dan Young and Mike Rozinsky, I’ve been using surveys and questionnaires more often. This has been a key factor in needing and wanting to ask better questions.
I find questionnaires and surveys to be an excellent tool for giving everyone a voice, empowering groups of people to be more self-directing allowing me to be more facilitator and less consultant.
The following are some of the scenarios in which I use surveys and questionnaires
- Sense Making: questionnaires sent out to a group of people working in a particular business area to understand how they are feeling and if there are opportunities for improvement (by designing a workshop for example).
- Pre-workshop: questionnaires sent out to workshop attendees to help plan the final details of an upcoming workshop.
- Workshop: questionnaires during a workshop that attendees complete synchronously, usually timbeboxed to around 5 minutes.
- Post-workshop: questionnaires sent to workshop attendees to get their feedback on a workshop and consider next steps.
- Engaging with a new client: questionnaires for a potential new client to explore the reasons for wanting to work together and gain a better idea if we’re a good fit for each other.
Question Formats
Learning to ask question using various structures can lead to more engaging conversations and creates conditions for more interesting insights to emerge.
An easy question to ask is “What’s the biggest problem you’re working on right now?”. It’s not a bad question, but it’s fairly direct and a structure people will be familiar with, so might elicit a quick response without encouraging deeper reflection.
Now consider a Complete the Sentence Question trying to ask the same thing: “One thing about my work that makes me angry right now is ___________”. People will replay this sentence in their mind as they try to fill in the blank, and it may trigger deeper and different thoughts that lead to different insights.
Here are a variety of question formats that I love thinking about, using, and answering myself:
- Complete the Sentence: As discussed above, this format helps to elicit a different response than direct questions, often tapping into different emotions and deeper reflection.
- Choose an Emotion: This type of questions asks people to look at an emotion/feelings wheel and pick an emotion that best describes how they feel about a certain topic.
- Pick an Image: A great way to encourage novel thinking and deeper reflection is to show people a selection of images and ask them to pick an image which best reflect their feelings about a particular topic. The Ethnographica Deck by Jennifer Mahony is an exceptional resource for this which has delivered great results every time.
- Worst Possible: These types of questions create the space for highly-creative thinking by encouraging people to go in completely the opposite direction than expected. For example: “What is the worst possible business opportunity that the organization could go all in on?”. Worst possible questions serve a number of purposes like highlighting where the organization is actually doing the worst possible thing.
- Just for Fun: This type of question is more about bringing a sense of fun into the process, which can help put people into a more relaxed and creative mindset, eliciting deeper responses to more important questions. For example: “[Just for Fun] If you could hire any celebrity to help us with modernization, who would it be and why?”. Obviously, it’s important to be careful with this type of question in environments where fun is seen as unprofessional (that’s a topic for another day).
- Devils Advocate: These questions are an excuse to challenge people’s belief in a constructive way. For example, if someone believes investing in new products is key, you could ask a question like “So you are 100% convinced that reducing operating costs is the wrong focus and nothing would ever change your mind?”. These questions need to be delivered skilfully, and it needs to be clear the intention is exploration and not a direct challenge or an insult.
A Few Questions for You…
If you’re like I was a year ago, you don’t use questionnaires and varied question formats as much as you should, so I hope this article was useful. If you do use questions a lot and you’re cringing at some of my rookie ideas, please do let me know how I could improve.
To close this article, I’m going to leave you with three questions. Feel free to answer in your head or leave your responses as a comment:
- (Using the emotion wheel) As I read this short article, the two emotions I felt the most were __________ and __________.
- What is the worst possible way this article could have been written?
- (Just for fun) What is the weirdest, but relevant in some way, image I could have used for this article and why?
