Questions, Not Answers

Blair interviews David on his recent article about the idea that expertise does involve supplying answers, eventually, but mainly expertise is about asking the right questions, first, and then offering a few answers after the truth surfaces.

Links

“Expertise Is Mainly About Asking Great Questions” by David C. Baker on Punctuation.com

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, our topic today is a recent blog post of yours expertise is mainly about asking great questions. Just speaking for myself personally, but are you like me on this topic where you've gone from many years of seeing myself as the person with the answers and realizing, oh, I need to be the person with the questions?

David Baker: Yes. Everybody keeps telling me, "David, your answers kind of suck. Take a step back and work on your questions." Maybe that's what's happening. [laughs] I was taking a walk earlier today. I thought, well, how did I get to this topic? What is it that prompted me just to think about this a little bit more? It honestly comes from something that's pretty unique to our industry in the sense that the industry is started by people who are good at doing the work. They also are pretty good at entrepreneurship. They're pretty good at running firms.

Those two things sort of come together. If they don't get separated, then they have to hire other people. Those other people don't sometimes measure up to what they think their ability is as the owner. They have other people between the firm and the client. Those people need to represent the firm well. Then if you go even further and the firm gets professionalized, then, oh, let's have professional account managers. Okay. How smart do those account managers need to be? Do they need to be just as smart as our dev people or our strategists? If they do, then why do we have separate ones? Why don't we just have the people who are really good at the skill side be the account managers, too?

How can we have great account managers who don't have the answers? That's what really drove me to this. It finally hit me. It's like, no, no, no, no. Account people don't need to have all the answers. They need to have all the questions. Then you can work that problem backwards and realize "experts" whatever that means, they don't need to have all the answers, at least not right away. They need to have a lot more questions and then maybe the answers towards the end. We go straight into the answers when we should be having more questions. You talk about this in a sales context as well.

Blair: Do you think there's something about this industry where we talk more than we should listen? I know we do, and I know that's pervasive across the creative professions, but do you think it's more pervasive here than it is in other areas of expertise? I'll give you an example. On the weekend, I was listening to some old episodes of 20% - The Marketing Procurement Podcast, that other podcast I did for a year. I was listening to an interview with Caroline Johnson from the Business Model Company. She'd worked in agency and she'd worked in one of the big consulting firms.

She made an offhand comment that consultants are very good at asking questions and agency people are always showing up with the answers. They're trying to prove themselves. Would you agree with that? What do you think the cause of that is?

David: I absolutely agree with it, and I am dead sure I'm right, but I might not be. It's because of our inferiority complex. We come in, we don't have a seat at the table. We're already feeling like we're going to have to really do extra to prove ourselves, and so we just start foaming at the mouth, giving them all kinds of reasons to hire us because we're so smart instead of just luxuriating in what we really know and sitting back and relaxing and just asking really smart questions. I think her observation is correct, and I think it's because we are just insecure.

Blair: Do you think it's probably one of the reasons why the pitch is so pervasive in the creative professions? Because it's about us. We get to talk about ourselves.

David: Yes, and it's also not just the pitch itself, but if you back up a step, it's why we even agree to do it. It's like, okay, we're already a few steps behind here. There's already a few things against us. This party who has more power than we do wants us to pitch. It's like, I guess we have to. Some of that is just how we come to this field, this inferiority complex, but some of it is our own damn fault too because we view every opportunity as so precious that cannot be wasted that we just grasp it so carefully and don't let go until it's clearly dead because we just don't have enough of those opportunities. We don't have a tight positioning, or maybe we do, and we don't have a good marketing plan. I know I sound like I'm ranting a little bit, but some of it we deserve, some of it we don't.

Blair: As an advisor serving this space, I'm prone to this too. I've made the comment many times that I did off the top that I've had to go from seeing myself as the person with the answers to seeing myself as the person with the questions.  Years ago, I was a member of the Canadian Association of Management Consultants for one year and they sent me the introductory material, and there's a little booklet. The booklet makes this claim I'd never heard before. That says there's really two forms of expertise. There's subject matter expertise and there's process expertise. I scoffed. I thought, yes, I know people who are facilitators. I really looked down my nose at somebody who had process expertise, who knew how to facilitate a conversation, because I really believed that being a consultant was all about having the answers, about being smarter in the subject area, certainly more removed than your clients. Man, it takes some humility and some maturity. Maturity is a hard one, but humility is maybe something I've struggled with over the years.

David: [laughs] You left something unanswered just for a year. Did they kick you out or were the dues too much? Why were you just in there for one year?

Blair: If I'm fully honest, it helped me with my visa application, with my US visa.

[laughter]

David: I've never really thought about whether there's subject matter expertise or process expertise, but I do think you eventually have to come up with the answers. No, let me restate that. You don't have to come up with the answers. The client needs the answers. They don't have to come from you. They might come from them. They might come from other people on your team. They might come from additional research that you might do, or they might come from you, right? Eventually, there has to be some answers from somewhere, but that's at the very end of the process.

Here's another example. I was teaching motorcycle racing and high-performance riding for a while with a supervised school. They didn't care how good a rider you were. You couldn't be turned loose to work with their students on the track until you mastered their way of teaching. They were so insistent that as the instructor, it didn't matter how much better a rider you were, you could never tell somebody what to do. They would follow you around the track. You would try to illustrate something. Then they would go in front of you, and then you would watch how well they picked it up, and so on.

In the end, when you were debriefing over in the paddock, you could not tell them anything. The only thing you could do is ask them questions. You would say, "Did you notice anything in turn three at the apex? What did you notice there?" Oh, okay. What would make you not go so wide at that point?" They would give you two or three things. You'd say, "Okay, why do you think--" and it was like you could never tell them the answer. I was so frustrated with that when they were teaching me how to teach.

Later, I realized, oh my goodness, this really drags someone along so that they feel they are involved in the process. They come up with the answers on their own because of the questions you've given them rather than giving them the answer. I just thought it was brilliant.

Blair: That's hard-earned. A lot of studies show that learning sticks far better than somebody just giving you the answer. I'm all for it. You make the point here in this article, "Expertise is mainly about learning and teaching through questions." I really like this idea. Let's drill down on it. When I launched Win Without Pitching in 2002, I actually had this idea that I had a couple of years of learning ahead of me. Then I would know everything I needed to know, and I would just be a teacher. Then fairly soon into it, you realize, oh, that's not how it works. It's how it works is really about this point in your article. Do you want to unpack that a little bit?

David: Yes. I think we have this weird idea that experts have all the answers. That sounds pretty good on the surface. Just academically, that sounds pretty good. Oh, they have all the answers. It's like, wait a second. If they have all the answers, then are they really just applying the same things to every situation? Isn't every situation really different? How do you reconcile those two things, somebody that is going to bring all the answers to a specific scenario but is going to do it uniquely so that you aren't just sort of selling a book or a manual or something that doesn't change from time to time, and presto, people leave with all the answers and their situation is so much better?

It's like that doesn't make sense either. I think the way to just picture this in your head is that experts have all kinds of tools, and over time, slowly, they save up money and they buy another tool, and this is really cool. You don't start out with lots of tools. You start out with just a few. Each of these tools are questions, different kinds of questions. When an expert is called on to solve a particular situation, they don't usually have to bring a new tool that they don't have already. They're using different tools in different combinations in a different order each time they come to solve a problem, and it's driven by curiosity. It's like, okay, I've seen all these things before.

Every client brings their own  unique form of dysfunction. You wouldn't necessarily come out and say that. It's my job to figure out what's unique about this situation so that I can solve the problem correctly. The solving the problem correctly part, it's very compressed, it's towards the end. Everything up to that point is just asking the right questions in the right order. Every once in a while you find that, oh goodness, that's new, I haven't seen that before. That prompts you to go out and learn a lot more about it and then be open to adjusting your model, adjusting assumptions you've brought to a particular thing. It's just a different way of thinking and it's driven by curiosity and not having all the answers. It's having a high level of confidence that you're bringing some assumptions to the table and we will solve this, but it's too early to take a stab at it. Let's just figure out some things first.

Blair: I really like the metaphor of questions being the tools in your toolbox. We use that too. We have different frameworks for each conversation in the sale. We talk about the frameworks being the toolbox itself with multiple shelves. Then the questions are the tools. A skilled mechanic in this metaphor or advisor would ask some questions and then reach for the right tool. There are tools beyond questions. There are frameworks and there are other processes you would bring to bear, but it starts with these largely diagnostic questions. I've seen the flip side of that where we've helped our clients build a suite of diagnostic tools.

Then what usually happens first is they fall in love with their tools and they hurriedly use all the tools in all their engagements. It's like going to the doctor who's got a new fMRI machine and you don't need an fMRI, but he gives you one anyway because he's got this new tool that he's in love with and he thinks it's the bee's knee. I have seen the flip side of that. I do love the metaphor, questions are tools in the toolbox. You make the point that great questions equal better outcomes. Do you want to speak to that or is that the writing discussion?

David: I'll just illustrate it by reading a few questions and you could see how you could turn each of these around into a statement, but instead you're inviting somebody to pause to look a little bit deeper at what they're facing and to see if we can get at some root issues. You might say something like, why is this upcoming conversation difficult for you? What are the possible reactions you might face and how do those fit into the bigger picture? Somebody might come to you in a consulting or a marketing relationship and say, how do I handle this? What's the best way to do this? Instead of answering the question, you ask more questions like, why is this difficult? What are you afraid of?

The transcript of the call you just had with that big client captures what was said. I wasn't there, but I wonder if there's something we can infer from what she didn't say when she answered that question you asked. Is there something else going on there? It's this really interesting dance in holding two things at the same time. One is a tentative conclusion in your mind that you probably haven't shared with a client yet, but this driving curiosity to make sure it's correct. You keep asking questions, and in asking those questions, you are sort of giving them clues to where the answer is going to be and what it's going to look like.

I feel like this is just one really, really interesting idea, the idea of questions. I don't know how to talk about it too much, but it just makes so much sense when you start reorienting your advice-giving in client relationships this way.

Blair: There's some really good books and maybe I'm jumping ahead a bit on asking questions. One is called The Answer is a Question. I forget his last name is Dominic somebody, I have it upstairs. Another is called the Coaching Question and I'm also thinking of Robert Cialdini's book, 75 Cage Rattling Questions.

David: Oh, wow, yes, that sounds interesting.

Blair: I need lots of books on questions because of my old calcified habit of having the answers. You've mentioned curiosity and you make the point in this post that questions keep curiosity alive. You mean keeps the curiosity in you, the expert advisor, is that what you mean?

David: Yes. I also mean that I want to be epistemologically humble in the sense that-- this is a restatement of basically holding those two things in tension all the time. I want to have a tentative conclusion. There's only five or six things I want to utter that I'll never change my view on. The rest of them, it's like, nah, I'm open, just talk to me. What am I missing here? It's sort of a constant curiosity, but you can't have 100% curiosity because then nobody gets anything from working with you as a firm. There has to be some basic principles.

Blair: Yes. You're trapped in a riddle somewhere. It's this recursive thing where, okay,  how many questions before we get to the answer?

David: Yes. At some point, it looks like you're just stalling for time. There is some element of stalling for time. If you ask more questions rather than just blurting out the answer, you're going to give the client some clear signals. One is, hey, I'm listening to you. Because this question that I'm going to ask next, it follows on your answer, so I'm listening to you. That's one thing it does. The other thing it does is it just gives you more time to formulate, oh, I wonder what needs to be said here. At the end, don't make something up. If you're not sure, then say, listen, I need to think about this more. I want to go back over everything we've talked about, everything you've sent, what we know about your firm.

Let me give this some more thought. I have an initial idea, but there are enough questions about this, so I'm just not ready to talk about it yet. I just think there's really no downside. I guess the downside is in never having answers. This frustrated me one time. This is maybe why I've worked through three therapists.

Blair: I was thinking, are you going to bring up therapy as an example? Because I have very little experience with it. You're an old pro.

David: [laughs] Yes. It's like, stop with the questions already. At least give me some answer.

Blair: Do you feel crazy?

David: Yes. [laughs ]Oh, it's got crazy. Anyways, there is some balance here. What I'm hoping to sway people at is, okay, you could stand to give people answers a little bit later. You could stand to be more curious. I'm talking about this in a business setting, but my God, some of you would be so much better at being friends if you would just quit talking so much and just listen a little bit. That would be a great thing too. I'm talking in a business context here.

Blair: Yes. I think the more expert we are in our domains or feel we are, probably the more prone we are to asserting too much and not questioning enough. I'm really struck by your statement that you think there are really only five things that you'd feel confident enough to assert in almost any situation, whether the number is 5 or 15 or whatever it is. That's a really interesting idea. What is it that you know to be universally true that would not change from situation to situation? You could say point blank, carte blanche to the client, this is a problem, or something to that extent. The rest of which their ideas more loosely held their hypotheses in the moment where you would be better served posing questions around that.

David: Yes. Right. Especially when you approach something from a research mind and you try to be a scientist in a business setting. That's my goal. I don't have any training or much training there. My goal is, okay, this hypothesis is always subject to-- We're not afraid of data. We're not afraid of information. Let's look for the truth here, wherever it takes us. Neither one of us need to be afraid of that. I was thinking about this the other day. There's some people that I've never had any interaction with. What I would give to have a dinner with this person?

It's like somebody that I've really admired, a writer or something. If finally this happens, I'm telling everybody how excited I am about this, and we sit down, and they express a genuine interest in me and they ask me some questions to see if what I say fits their model of the world. I will never forget that meeting versus somebody who just sort of spills all the same stuff. I already know they know because I've read all their stuff. It's just such a difference in terms of how the world works and how the world when you approach it with questions rather than answers.

Blair: Yes. I'm thinking of some conversations as you speak about that. You sit down next to somebody at dinner on an airplane and they're transmitting information to you about how much they know. The conversation you have with somebody who's like-- let's say that they're smarter than you, they're more accomplished than you, but they're deeply interested in something that you have and you know, and they just start with the questions and they pull and they pull and they pull. My brother-in-law is a bit like this. He is a sponge. He meets somebody new. It's like, "This person has something. I want to know what they know." He just keeps pulling and pulling and asking and asking and learning and learning. It is an impressive trait. I think people like that make naturally good advisors because it's in their nature to learn what they teach.

David: Your brother-in-law is the kind of person who would look across a group of people, and he would assume that almost every one of those people could be an interesting conversationalist. "If they will allow me to ask them some questions, genuine questions, I can pull." I try to do that if I have an Uber ride or something and I'm not like lost in myself and I really want to have a conversation with a human, which is rare, but--

Blair: 1 in 10.

David: 1 in 10, and just like, okay, we've got 20 minutes here. Let me figure out  how interesting this person is. The only way you can discover how interesting a person is, is by asking them questions. Question number three needs to indicate that you were listening to their answer after you asked question number two. It's like, oh, this expanded my body of knowledge. I learned something. That's what I mean by expanding my body of knowledge. I also learned so much about this person, so that if this person asked me a question, let's say at the end of the ride, they said, "Hey, let me ask you a question." I'm going to be able to give them a much better answer because I've spent the first 20 minutes learning about them. I just love this whole thing. It probably has nothing to do with what people are listening to 2 Bobs for, but I just wanted to talk about it. [laughs]

Blair: Yes. I like the subject too. I'm reminded since we're a little bit off-topic. My dad was telling me a couple of weeks ago that when he meets somebody new, he comments on their name and he says, "Do you like your name? Hi, David. Nice to meet you. Do you like your name?" They're taken aback by the question. They say yes or no. Then his follow-up question, and I might be getting the order wrong, is, "Who are you named after?" I've since found myself asking that second question to a few people. When I hear a unique name, I ask who you're named after. Then the conversations that flow from that are fascinating and they often go in very different places.

It just goes to show that curiosity is one of the major tools or set of tools that just like a macro tool. Curiosity and the specific tool is all these different sets of questions just makes you so much better at what you do. I don't think it's in your post here, but do you have any advice to the audience on where they're taught, or it's modeled for them that no, no, no, no, we're the person at the front of the room. We're the one with the deck pointing to the slide. We're on display. All the wisdom is emanating from us. How do you overcome that? I guess I'm asking to help myself. How do you get past that? Because I've been working on this and not very well, but I've been working on this for years. How do you get past that?

David: Yes. The post which you can find on the site has I think eight or nine recommendations. I love every one of these recommendations are so good, like the coaching habit. One of my favorites is the 36 questions that lead to love. That is a very specific prescribed way for-- before you date somebody is like if you get through these 36 questions, if you decide to build a permanent relationship, you have done it on the right foundation. If you aren't meant to do it, these questions will surface that ahead of time. It's really interesting to read these things.

To me, the answer to the question is simply the people that you're around regularly that make you feel heard. How do they do it? How do they do it? Then take that and translate it into sales. This is one of the things that I'm drawn to your model about sales is you talk about it as a conversation. What is the conversation? It's a lot of questions. It's a few tentative opinions. I think the same thing ought to be true when you're delivering expertise to which after you get through the sales process. I think just assume that business is really a representation of personal life. Listen to the people who make you feel seen and heard and take that over into your business world. I think it just automatically improves. It just does.

Blair: That's a great wrap-up. I think maybe a good way to try it out in the next business conversation you're having with a client or a prospect, see if you can get through the whole conversation without making an assertion. If you end up driving the person crazy and losing the deal, don't blame me, this was David's idea.

[laughter]

Blair: Thanks for this, David.

David: Thanks, Blair.