After 25 years of avoiding answering the one question I get asked the most, it’s time to break the bad news: The answer to how to ask better questions is that there are no easy answers. This also means that search engines and AI chatbots can’t help you. In fact, there is a real risk that AI makes it harder for you to ask better questions – simply because it offers answers faster than you can decide what is and isn’t important to ask.
The good news is that you don’t need an easy answer – or AI – to ask better questions. All you need is to turn down the volume of the experts telling you how to use questions to boost curiosity, critical thinking, and creativity, and instead turn up the volume of your own experience with asking and not asking questions.
While questions are indeed essential for curiosity, critical thinking, etc., optimizing your questions for these desirable skills makes you lose touch with the dark side of questions. That is, the uncertainty, skepticism, and doubt that you don’t consider desirable skills and therefore try to avoid. To ask better questions, you must embrace the good, the bad, and the ugly of questions. And you must start with the latter.
1. Face Your Fear Of Asking Questions
The ugly side of asking questions is that it reveals your ugly side. Or at least that’s what you think. The truth is that the ignorance, insecurity, and incompetence you reveal by asking is not your ugly side. It’s a prerequisite for you to ask better questions. If you were not ignorant, insecure, and incompetent, you would have no reason to ask, and your questions would make no difference.
“But do I have to reveal these ugly-not ugly sides of myself to other people?”, you may think. “Can’t I just reveal my ignorance, insecurity, and incompetence to AI and then only ask questions that make me look smart and confident when I’m with others?” I’m sorry to be the one who keeps bringing you bad news, but the answer is no.
As I shared in a previous Forbes article, you can’t ask better questions unless you’re willing to jeopardize, 1) your personal and professional role, 2) your relationship with the people around you, and 3) your responsibility to contribute to a common goal. It’s a huge risk that most people – rightly – fear. In fact, if you are not afraid to ask questions, it is very likely that you are doing it wrong. That is, not improving your questioning skills, and not helping yourself and others avoid drowning in AI answers.
Asking a good question means asking a question that matters. To the person you ask, but also to you and the situation you share. If you don’t care whether the answer is yes or no, or whether the entity you’re asking knows the difference between right and wrong, true and false, then you have nothing at stake. You don’t risk being wrong, misunderstood or – worse still – ignored. And you are therefore not under the existential and ethical pressure it takes to ask a question that makes a difference.
2. Practice Asking Big Questions
It may seem a bit too much to throw around big words like existential and ethical in a short article about asking questions. But it’s necessary to understand the bad thing about questions. Besides revealing your ugly-not ugly side, asking questions sends a signal that you are looking for answers. And that’s bad in the sense that it doesn’t help you ask better questions. To ask better questions, you must focus more on the questions you and others ask and less on your answers. Too often we judge a question by the answer it does – or does not – elicit. But as I share in the book, Questions, and the LinkedIn Learning course, “Unlock your question mindset to think clearly and navigate uncertainty”, getting answers is just one of the many reasons we have to ask questions.
Another is to better understand ourselves and each other as human beings. And when it comes to asking better questions in a world drowning in AI answers, this is exactly where you want to focus. Big questions about who we are as humans, why we are here, and what is the right thing for us to do are not supposed to be answered. They are supposed to be explored, discussed, challenged, rephrased, and re-asked.
While we all asked these big questions as kids, most of us are now busy asking smaller, more practical questions – like “How do we get from A to B?”, “What’s the deadline for this report?”, and “When will the bug be fixed?” To ask better questions, you must keep asking the questions that help you solve your day-to-day problems, but you must also practice asking the big questions that help you see your day-to-day problems in a bigger picture. With a bigger purpose. Paradoxically, a world drowning in AI answers seems to offer existential hope that we are all still capable and willing to do just that.
3. Make Room For Others To Do 1 & 2
Finally, the good part: Once you’ve embraced the ugly side of facing your fear of asking questions and have let go of your bad habit of only asking questions to get answers, you are not only starting to ask better questions yourself. You are also making it easier for others to avoid drowning in AI answers.
So no, there are no easy answers to how to ask better questions. But if you replace the curiosity experts and AI chatbots with the good, the bad, and the ugly of your own experience with asking and not asking questions, you won’t need them.