Question Suggestion (Part One): Essentials of Good Questions

Questions are like a talented, but wayward, uncle. Questions can do so much conversational good—by improving message comprehension and helping people understand each other—but unfortunately, just like Uncle Jimmy, questions can often cause a great deal of trouble.

Most of us are guilty of asking faulty questions from time to time. And a smaller number of people are so bad at asking questions that it causes them chronic relational problems. The problem is that questions are extremely powerful communication tools—they influence the trajectory of conversations like nothing else. When used incorrectly, questions can do a great deal of relational damage. Because it’s easy for questions to be used incorrectly, we’ll devote the three blog entries to questions.

This is the first entry, focused on the essentials of good questions. The second entry covers bad questions and how to avoid them. The third entry will covers ways to communicate with people who use bad questions pervasively.

Essentials of Good Questions

Questions can do three main things: gather information, increase comprehension (usually immediately), or improve understanding (in the short term or in the long term).

For example, you might ask a question because:

• You don’t understand something. (comprehension)
• You need to get information from the other person. (information)
• You want to learn more about the other person or something they know about. (understanding)

If your questions serve one (or more) of these three functions, they will usually be good questions. Good questions, fundamentally, begin with a good intent. As we discuss in the next two entries, faulty questions can often be traced back to a wayward intent, like using questions to disguise a criticism or using questions to force a particular response. If your questions are designed to increase comprehension, gather information, or improve understanding, your questions will seldom cause relational damage.

Here are three essentials of good questions.

1. Check your intent. Use questions for comprehension, information, or understanding. If your question doesn’t do one of these things, it may be faulty and likely to cause conversational trouble.
2. Questions aren’t trivial. If you don’t want an answer, don’t ask a question. People will answer your questions so avoid rhetorical queries (more on these in the next blog) of any kind. Unanswerable queries frustrate people and can lead to relational damage. Form your query properly because your questions dramatically influence the path of your conversations.
3. Listen up. Once you ask your good question, give the other person your undivided attention and strive to understand her response. Stop thinking about the next question you want to ask and focus on what she is telling you instead. It’s your question after all, so pay attention to the answer.

In our second entry on questions, we cover different types of bad questions (like criticism in disguise, rhetorical questions, and leading questions), and provide tips for handling them in conversation.