29. Question Everything: Why Curiosity Is Communication’s Secret Weapon
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Hi, Matt here. I invite you to look into Stanford Continuing Studies. For over 20 years, I have taught in the program. Discover a diverse range of courses available both online and in person to anyone, anywhere in the world. Classes cover everything from fundamental business skills to the fascinating world of AI. This fall, join me for Communication Essentials for Work and Life, a new course designed to enhance and hone your communication skills in various situations.

Each week, guest speakers will join me for interactive lectures and Q&A sessions on topics like persuasion, storytelling, nonverbal presence, and reputation management. The course starts September 24th, and registration is now open. Learn more at continuingstudies.stanford.edu. What is one of the most versatile communication tools everyone should have in their toolkits?

The answer is asking questions. I think questions are the Swiss army knife of communication. A well-timed question can accomplish myriad communication tasks, from building trust and understanding to fostering engagement and calming your nerves. Through asking good questions, you can become a more connected and authentic communicator.

My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today, I am super excited to have Debra Schifrin here. Debra is a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she teaches two MBA courses she co-created, Spontaneous Management and Creativity in the Business Ecosystem.

Prior to joining Stanford, Debra spent a decade as a national public radio reporter, producer, and director. Welcome, Debra. I love collaborating with you and I look forward to our chat. Me too. Let's get started. Why questions? What do they do for us? There's a range of goals and purposes we have for asking questions. Of course, a big one is getting information. Matt, what time is it? It's a little bit before noon, actually.

So that's how that works. I needed information, I asked Matt and I got the information I needed. But the second one is building relationships. So you want to use it to build relationships, you ask people questions, you get to know about them, they get to know about you. There's other goals you can use in the workplace. You can ask questions to generate ideas and foster creativity. Then of course, with the darker goals like interrogate or intimidate or avoid responsibility.

I think I'll take one, Matt, if it's okay, and break it down a little bit. Oh, absolutely. I'd love to hear more. So one of the big ones I mentioned was building relationships. So if you're asking questions, you're signaling to the other person that you value them. You're taking time to listen to their answers. You're telling them that their answers matter and they matter.

And the other one that I think is really important is the type of question that comes with coaching or mentoring people. And a lot of people are mentors, a lot of leaders are mentors to younger people coming up in the organization. For me, I use it mostly in my coaching practice. And I'll give you two examples, which I love. Imagine I'm talking to someone and they are deciding whether to take a job offer. They'll be talking and they'll be weighing the pros and cons, right?

And then I'll stop them and I'll say, what do you want? And it's sort of a disruptive question. It breaks the back and forth between the tactical decisions and it just takes things up to another level. A second one is say someone is telling me they're feeling inadequate. When I hear that a couple of times, I will say, how is feeling inadequate serving you and what is it costing you?

And it really makes people stop and think about it. How is it supporting me? And how is it harming me? And it makes people either take action to change it or change their mindset. I see. You know, a key takeaway I had from what you just said is it's,

It's not just the question you ask, but it's the willingness to actually ask the question in the first place and then listen to the answer. That's what can really help disrupt the conversation or show that you really are concerned with the person and want to foster that connection. Is that right? Yes, absolutely. And you have to have some sort of trust built up. So this isn't a question you're not going to meet someone for the first time and say, Matt, what do you want?

But if you have a relationship with someone of some sort, where there's some trust, then you can start using those questions. Clearly, questions can help us achieve many ends that are positive and pro-social. But you did mention that goals were not always as friendly, such as intimidation and avoiding responsibility. Can you talk more about these? Yes, I can. I'll mention interrogating. So this is another way to get information, I suppose, but you're doing it in a very unpleasant way.

You might try to trap someone into making a mistake or doing a gotcha question. And so that's not very pleasant. People can use questions to intimidate. And a lot of times that has to do with power dynamics. So they may want to use a question to increase their power dynamic or take advantage of a power dynamic that already exists. And a third one is avoiding responsibilities.

So this brings me back to my improv training days many years ago when I was learning. And we are told as improvisers not to ask questions on stage. And it may seem counterintuitive.

But the reason is, say you and I are in a scene and we're both creating it together. There's no script. So we're going back and forth and building something. And if I keep asking you questions, you have to do all the work to come up with all the ideas. You don't want to do that. You want to share the burden. And there's an example that I think most people can relate to. So Matt, say we were going to go to a movie and we were trying to figure out where to go to dinner. Let's say there's like five of us. And someone will say, hey, Matt,

Where do you want to go for dinner? And the next person will say, I don't know, where do you want to go for dinner? And that could go to all five people. I think you're describing my entire teenage years. I think that's what we did every Friday and Saturday night. Believe me, it so happens to me now. I'm in San Francisco and there's so many options. But I think the reason that happens, eventually someone will step up and suggest an actual restaurant.

But I think that happens because, one, people might not want to take the responsibility of choosing the restaurant. But I think also people are afraid that if they pick a restaurant and the rest of the group doesn't end up liking the food, that they're somehow responsible for that. So it is an avoiding responsibility technique. Talk to me a little bit about how tone plays out in question asking. Tone is really important. Tone can turn a question negative or positive the same question.

All right, Matt, let's do a role play. Okay, I'm ready. You ready? Okay, so Matt, you're going to be the employee and I'm going to be the manager. See how I did that? Yes, ma'am. All right. So Matt, this is your line and I will respond two ways. You'll say the line, I'll respond. You'll say the line, I'll respond again. So Matt, your line is, I have a plan to automate customer service. All right. I have a plan to automate customer service.

What do you think it will take to implement that plan? Alright, generally supportive. Mm-hmm. Just to say it again.

I have a plan to automate customer service. What do you think it'll take to implement that plan? Oh, wow. That's very different. Just emphasize one word, that, and it changed the entire tone and context of the meaning. So your point, Deborah, is very clear. Tone really does matter in question asking, and I would argue in most communication.

Having this conversation with you has helped me realize that we can get better answers if we ask better questions. So what goes into a good question? I like to use words that are related to values. Words like impact. An example would be, Matt, impact.

how does your decision impact yourself and the organization? Yeah. Something like Matt, what's important or what's at stake? And one that I love is say it's at the end of a project and I'll say to you, Matt, what can we create from here? What can we create from here? And that just assumes that people are creative, right?

And once that's assumed, people rise to the occasion and they free themselves to make suggestions they might not otherwise make.

I really like that. I like positioning the person in the conversation in a very different perspective through the question that you ask. Oh, can I add one more thing? You sure can. When a project is over, people often forget to ask questions that will get a catalog of what went well. What skills did you use to succeed? How did your team accomplish the task? So when it's all said and done, you got the project, make sure you ask what went well.

I love your list of questions. It's about open questions, not closed questions. It's about asking people to reflect and really think about the experience they had, what it felt like, what they learned from it, how they can apply it. Thinking about impactful words. You like how I did that? I used one of your impactful words. And then making sure that you ask questions about when a project is complete. That's fantastic advice for good questions to ask.

Speaking of advice, what advice would you give to business leaders regarding question asking? Whether you're a leader or anywhere in the organization, it takes some bravery to ask questions if you don't know what the answer will be. As adults, it's scary. Kids ask a lot of questions. Yes, they do. What color is the moon? And when's dinner? But adults don't ask as many questions because it's a little scary.

You're handing the control of the conversation to someone else. And you have this fear that it could harm your psyche. In summary, my advice is to leave time for questions and be open to the answers. Ones that you want to hear or answers that you don't want to hear. And then assess how much meeting time you spend asking versus telling people what to do. So inquiry versus statements.

That last point about speaking time and how they're allocated versus inquiry or statements. We've heard that before when Bob Sutton was on the podcast, we spent a little bit about it. And he said from his perspective in his research, he's found that leaders who ask more questions...

are perceived as better leaders, have better data to make decisions, and actually people like them more. So there's a whole lot of value to following the advice of making sure to leave time for questions, be open to the answers, and then pay attention to how much time you're actually asking questions versus just making statements. So thank you for that really important advice.

Now you've done a lot of question asking throughout your life as a reporter, as a coach, and a teacher. What are some best practices for question asking and does the context matter? Yes, the context definitely matters. You have to know who's in the room, what their agendas are, what their needs are. So that's something you have to figure out before you figure out the question or even the type of question you want to ask. In terms of best practices,

I'll frame it this way. I feel like a lot of best practices stem from a mindset of curiosity. So if I were interviewing you, Matt, but it's not just for interviewing, but if I were an NPR reporter, like I was interviewing you and you say something that surprises me or has emotional charge, I want to follow up on that and ask you another question.

Sure, I've come with my list of 10 questions to ask you those questions, but I don't have to stick to that script. I can just go off script and come back. What I do as a journalist is I have my list, but I say in advance, these three questions I absolutely need answers to, but the rest, if I hear something interesting, I go for it.

That's really, really interesting. So if you take time to listen thoroughly and ask questions, you can actually learn a lot more information. When you think about being curious, you're listening for information that's interesting and surprising, but you're also in a state where you're curious about the other person and you're not just asking them questions from your own frame of reference. Matt, if I were interviewing you, I would want to do questions from

that delight or engage you or questions you may not have thought about before. So here's an example. I was at my brother's house and he had a friend over who was a physicist. He worked at UC Berkeley as a postdoc. So I thought, oh, I'm interested in physics, but I don't know much, but I know something. I'll ask him the question that I know.

So I said, are you a theoretical physicist or an applied physicist? He answered the question. It was okay question, but he didn't get very excited about it. So then I thought for a minute and I asked him, what's something surprising that happened for you this year?

And suddenly he lit up. He got so animated. He was talking about these things that he had done in his lab and he was picking up things on the table like a cup or a plate and showing me how mass works by using these, the cup and the plate. And so at the end, I found out that he discovered something pretty cool. It was connecting mathematics to a particle that scientists think is related to dark matter.

So, of course, I can't understand the full scope of what that means, not being a physicist, but it was pretty amazing. And if I hadn't asked that question, that never would have happened. Wow. So, again, it's being curious and really thinking about how to help, how to put the other person in a position where they can share an answer that's really meaningful for them. Yeah, and I would say this is good for leaders as well. When you ask someone a question...

Ask them a question that enables them to speak from their perspective. So ask those open questions, give them a chance to speak from their base of knowledge and not what they think you want them to say based on your frame of knowledge. Excellent way to summarize that. Let me ask you this. Do you have a secret weapon or trick up your sleeve that you use to get to insightful and surprising responses?

I do. I call it the killer last question. Ooh, tell me more. And I'll have to tell you what it is and how you ask it. That's a very important part. There's several steps. I'm talking with someone and we've had a conversation. We've built rapport and it's time to end the conversation or the interview. So I say to them, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think is important? And then here's the next step. And this is really important.

I had to wait, had to wait in silence and be comfortable with the silence. And then nine out of 10 times, the person says, I don't think so. But then you wait again, another, it could be like eight seconds. And then they will say the most interesting thing that they said in the whole interview. And I think this happens because you are turning the control over to them.

You're handing them the mic, you are putting them in the driver's seat. And so it creates a condition where they're more likely to share something. Or at the end of this conversation, we've been talking about a lot of things. It lets them ask a question of themselves and get to an answer. So something they're excited about.

You know, it's interesting that you bring that technique up of waiting because waiting is something I always coach people to do. People don't like that awkward pause. So they'll ask a question and if nobody responds immediately, then they'll just move on. Right. I had never really thought of that pause allowing people to really do some self-reflection and

And really having that be an opportunity for people to dig deeper and provide more information or disclose something that's a little more personal. So I really like that. Let's do an experiment for our listeners. I'm going to ask you a question that you've never heard, right? You don't know what I'm going to say. I have no idea. I'm locked in this cone of silence. And then ask it to you once and then I'll ask it in a different way and see how the results change.

All right, so I'm going to answer it twice. Go for it. Yes, here's the first question. Today's podcast will be really great, right? Absolutely. This should be a great podcast. Let me ask it in a different way. What is important to you about today's podcast? I so much hope that people listen to your passion for asking questions to really bond and build on relationships people have, that I hope when people are done listening that they feel they have something

the tools and the energy to go do what you do. So those are the two questions. So you can see the difference. The first question, the way I asked it, I didn't get any information. And then did you feel a little bit pigeonholed? Like there wasn't really only one answer. There really was only one answer. What am I going to say to that, right?

Totally. But the second question really allowed me to give insight into the work that I did and you did in preparation for this and really let people know that we really want people to take good value from what it is we do. So I totally appreciate the difference. And I can see why you are a good question asker. So thank you for that.

Now, this whole time we've talked today, Debra, has been about questions and answering. Would you indulge me and answer the three questions that I ask of all of our guests at the end of our podcast? Absolutely. If you listen to the answers, I'll tell you anything. I will absolutely listen. Question number one. If you were to capture the best communication advice you ever received as a five to seven word presentation slide title, what would that be?

Be present and build on others ideas. This is the improv wisdom that's come down decades and decades to me today and to the people I'm teaching. Excellent. Thank you. Let me ask you question number two. Who is a communicator that you admire and why?

I'm really interested by Kamala Harris right now. She is very calm. At the same time, she's very passionate. It's a great combination. And she owns the room. A lot of politicians are very stiff, but she's not. She moves, but she moves with purpose. So when she moves, there's a reason and it's very clear. And the last thing about her is that she has mastered the smile for all occasions.

She has the right smile, whether she's debating Mike Pence or introducing Joe Biden. She has the right smile. And smiling can be really tricky for women. Tell me more about smiling and the challenges involved in that. I've seen a lot of women be given the communication advice to smile more. And I think it's really undermining.

Because we know what we want to say and how we want to say it. And if we're given the advice, smile more, essentially we're being told to be nicer, to seem more pleasant, to even be more feminine. And those can be really undermining messages. And I see it all the time. So sometimes as a woman, it's hard to remember that you own your smile, you own your presentation, and that you should do what's best for you.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Let me ask question number three. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? I'm going to go back to, again, be present. And I'll tell you a little bit more about why. It keeps you grounded. It connects you to your audience of one or a thousand people.

And it keeps that inner critic, that judge away from you. We all have that critic that right now say, I'm talking to you.

I am thinking about what I said just a minute ago and judging it. Was that stupid? And then right now I'm talking to you and I might, if I had a judge, I might be judging myself. What I'm saying right now is stupid. And then we'll move on to the next question. I'm not listening because I'm thinking about the stupid thing I said a moment ago. That judge is really powerful. And if we can be present, we can move that judge out of the way. That's number one. Mm-hmm.

Number two, I would say rigorously prepare, but be ready to go off script. You need both of those pieces. You really have to prepare. I know you've said this in the past also, Matt, that there's no substitute for preparation, but you need to be ready to go off script. Lead with energy and commitment to the audience.

If you do that, you will engage your audience. They see that you want to be there, that you're excited to be there, and that you are there for them 100%. And when you do that, it will give you more confidence and confidence will improve your credibility in front of your audience.

I really like your recipe a lot, being present and preparing, but being willing to go with what's needed in the moment, really powerful. And then of course, being audience centric and doing so in an energetic way will help.

You know, Debra, thank you so much. As we wrap up, I find myself asking a question. What are my takeaways from today? And the answer is abundantly clear. Questions can really help our communication. By taking the time to plan our questions and actively listen to the answers, we can build camaraderie and closeness and ultimately improve our communication. Thank you so much for your time and for your insight. It's been my pleasure.

Thank you for listening to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast, a production of Stanford Graduate School of Business. To learn more, go to gsb.stanford.edu. Please download other episodes wherever you find your podcast. Hi, Matt here. Quick question for you. When was the last time you took a step back from your daily life and took the time to invest in yourself and your education?

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