Asking Good Questions

I just read an interesting post in HBR: The Art of Asking Questions, by Ron Ashkenas. He is talking about the need as a manager to inquire into your team's thinking without stopping their momentum. He also suggests 3 types of questions to ask:    

• about yourself
• about plans
• about the organization

These issues then beg the question: how do you frame questions in order to build your group's intelligence? They also suggest another possibility: could there be a mechanism for regularly asking the group questions, in order to gather important knowledge about how we are doing? In other words, you don't have to only ask questions at the decision point, or when you have concerns about direction (although Ashkenas' point is find out first rather than direct.)

It is worth building in a method for finding out how the emperor's clothes are doing; it is worth knowing how the project and the organization are being perceived by different stakeholder groups. And how those questions are framed can make the difference between interaction and actionable knowledge on the one hand and tepid opinion and further apathy on the other.

Using collaborative solftware allows your group to respond to such periodic assessments, and to help make sense of the combined answers. It allows these results to be developed on a level playing field, where there is no concern for 'who said what' -- just the ideas playing out against each other.