Freative Friday Episode 90 Video Podcast - The Art of Questioning

Welcome to Free at Friday. Marc Danolo here, art school MBA and CEO of Sales Globe. And is that day of the week we get to try our hand at logic driven creative problem solving. And this week I want to continue our conversation about a fast moving topic which is AI for sales. And the goal of our conversations, which I'm calling AI or U is not to review all the new developments in AI, but but is to help you to think through the human and AI relationship and how you can increase your asset value and build your future and your organization's future in a world where AI exists and it's going to play a significant role. So as I've said before, we want to help you invest in that one personal asset you have that can't be AI'd, which is your human ability to creatively solve problems today. So today I want to talk about a super critical skill for problem solving and to build as part of a human asset. And I'm going to begin with a question which is what is one of the most important ways that you can get insight for your problem solving? Is it analytics? It's before that. Is it maybe research? No, it's before that it's questioning. So we talked about the art of listening last time. Now we're going to talk about the art of questioning. Questioning. Because if we're not asking good questions, we're not going to be getting good information to even listen to. So I want to share with you my story, vision, method to help you build your personal asset of questioning. Because without effective questions, we don't solve the right problems, we can end up going in the wrong direction, we don't get the information we need or it doesn't even matter for listening because we're not getting good information and we don't have the insight we need to start doing our research or to explore further or to generate idea options. And with AI, if we ask the wrong questions, what do we get right? We get a mix of information or even junk and we can get the wrong answers and AI will convincingly tell us it's the right answer and it'll give us all the backup to support it. But it's still the wrong answer because maybe we asked a bad question. So if you remember back when I talked about the human AI model, this is where effective human driven questioning comes in that we can then solve for either with AI or we can solve for using our own old school human creative abilities. Because like I've said before, most of the things we're solving for, if we're talking about products or services or solutions are initially driven by a human need. So who's best to understand human needs? Probably humans. So we could ask the best questions that need to be answered. So getting to questioning, picture this in your mind. You're in a room at a social event and you're talking with someone and you're just struggling with what to talk about. You're struggling with what questions to ask, or you don't want to be trite with what you're asking. And being a reformed introvert myself, I had this problem for years. I used to hate social events, especially business social events, because I felt like I was forced to make conversation when I didn't really know what to make conversation about. And I would have rather sat in my hotel room and worked on a spreadsheet than stand around at that 6pm cocktail reception forcing myself to have conversations. So, for we introverts or reformed introverts, why is that? Well, one of the reasons is you don't know why you're talking to that person, or you don't know what you want to learn, or you don't know anything about that person, even though they might be fascinating, or we don't know what we might even learn from them, or we don't have a way around thinking about how to learn from that person. And a similar thing can happen in meetings. In our work, we go through the motions of listening to people or what they're saying and what the presenter is saying, and we observe what we happen to see and we ask some perfunctory questions. And when we look back at the meeting, if we even look back on the meeting, we don't come out with quality insight and we might not even think about it. We just stay in the shallow end of the questioning and insight pool. Sometimes before an interview or a visit, if I'm with a client and we're working together, I'll ask them the question, what do we want to come out with from this interview? What do we want to come out with from this, this plant visit or this store visit? And it's surprising the number of times they don't have a clear answer, they haven't thought through it, and they'll just end up coming out with whatever appears or whatever they happen to notice. Why is that? Well, one reason is they're not good at asking questions. And a few reasons that we're not good at asking questions is because we're not clear about what we're solving for. Like what the big challenge question is that we need to learn about and what this conversation has to do with solving this challenge question. Or we don't know what we're looking for, we're just kind of grazing around and we'll notice whatever we happen to notice. Or we don't have a good reliable way to think about questions and think about how to structure our questions. So I'm going to focus on a method that you can use to become a better asker of questions, whether you're solving the problem in an old school human way or whether you're using AI to solve that problem. And in the process, you're going to become more confident and you're going to become more relaxed, which is going to allow you to free up your thinking and free up your brain to be able to do the creative problem solving while you're asking those questions. So I'm going to share with you what I call the story vision model, and I'm going to give you three steps to build your superpower of questioning. Number one, tee up your problem statement or your challenge question before you start. And this is just for you, which is before you start thinking about what you're even going to ask questions about, you have to know what you're solving for. So if you need to get up to speed on defining your challenge question, you go to my book quotas and we have a whole chapter on that. Or you can go back to some of the prior Freedom Friday podcasts and we go into how to redefine your challenge question. So the point is, you want to know what you're solving for before you start asking questions. Number two, explore the story of the person or the situation and how they got to where they are, how the situation got to where it is. And start with the strategic and then work to the tactical. So you want to understand the strategic or the big reason they got to where they are. And then you want to explain or understand how things worked at a detailed level that got there. So this involves a relatively simple set of questions in a straightforward framework. I want to understand why the thing started and why it evolved. I want to understand what happened and what changed along the way. I want to understand where it happened, I want to understand when it happened, and I want to understand who was involved. And you can use these in any order, but I like to start with the why. So let's just apply this to a business situation. Say you're talking to a customer about providing a technology solution. Maybe it's an enterprise hardware or software solution and you've identified the challenge and the challenge question sounds something like this. How do we help the customer create a seamless system across their company that the organization will accept and adopt and use, rather than their one off homegrown solutions that vary across the organization? Okay, that's a pretty big challenge question. So that's a big one to solve for. So you learned some things about the company already. You've learned about some acquisitions the company did and you think that might give you some insight and impact what you're solving for. So you could ask them, well, tell me about the acquisition you did last year, or tell me about some of the acquisitions you've done over time and what's worked and what hasn't worked. I always love that cliche, what's worked and what hasn't worked. That's kind of like teeing it up and putting it right back in the customer's lap and asking them to solve for it. So these are things you want to avoid. These kind of questions will give you answers, but are they going to give you the answers that you need? Possibly, maybe not. It's kind of random. So let's try the story vision model. I want to share with you how this would work. So these questions can come in any order. Like I said, I like to start with the why, which is why did the company pursue these acquisitions or a particular acquisition? What was the reason behind it? How was it done? Were they integrated together with the acquiring company or were they bolt ons? Did they operate separately? Who was involved? Were you involved? Was the CFO involved? Was the management team involved? Who on the management team? What happened? What impact did that have on the technology we're talking about now with you. What was the financial result? When did it all happen? Wow, 10 acquisitions in three years. And where were the acquisitions? And then maybe you go back to the who and the why as you're learning more, and then you get into some of the tactics behind what happened during that whole situation. So you can see you're working across a framework for the story and you're getting a well rounded understanding of what you need. And you've taken the pressure off of coming up with the questions as you go and you're following a complete process and so you can stay with the framework or you can head off in different directions and come back to the framework as necessary based on the information you're getting. And number three, explore the vision of the person or the situation and what it would look like in the future. This is the question of what does success look like? And again, you can work from the strategic to the tactical. I like to put a time frame to it as well. So when you talk about the vision, what things need to look like, is that going to be over the next year or the next three years or the next few months and, and then you get to the tactics to explain how that's going to happen. So I like to keep the same basic structure, so why should it be that way? What needs to happen, when's it going to happen and who's going to be involved and how's it going to happen and where is it going to happen? So same basic framework. And you can use the story and the vision questions interchangeably. So if somebody's telling you the story about a situation, they may also at the same time talk about what the vision looks like for the future. So you don't have to force the story first and the vision second. The idea is that you want a framework that's easy to use and easy to navigate to free up your thinking behind how you can do your creative questioning, your creative thinking as you're going. So think about the story vision framework, kind of like the choreography as you dance through your questioning to make sure you're being complete and, and you're being smooth and you're doing it gracefully. So this is going to give you the information you need to do your problem solving as the next step. Whether you feed that to AI or you do it human old school and use your own creative problem solving skills. So use the story vision method to build your art of questioning as your personal asset and give it a try today. Try it out for the first time and do it in your free to Friday and every day.