Why Asking Better Questions is a Top Skill Set for the Future
Last week I spent three days with experts in the field of customer experience from companies whose names you’d definitely recognize. Our conversations were wide ranging—from building culture on virtual teams to selecting the best software stacks.
In one exercise, we tried to predict the future. Each person was responsible for naming at least one thing that would be true about their work in three years time, that is not true today.
If you think at all about the future of work, you won’t be surprised to know the talk involved Artificial Intelligence and data literacy. Here’s what did surprise me: almost every one of the leaders in our session said some form of this sentence:
“In the future, we have to be better at asking questions.”
Music to my ears.
Why is the skill of asking questions more important now than ever before? Why will it be even more important three years from now? Here are three reasons.
#1: Good questions help you work better with AI. Artificial intelligence is changing the way we work. That is not a news flash, but if you haven’t played around with ChatGPT or other systems, you may not realize all they are already capable of.
Asking questions is at the heart of learning to use AI. (It’s also known as “prompt engineering.”) As a speaker last week reminded us, we can communicate with AI as we would with a capable colleague. With our colleagues, we know when to make our questions more specific. We might, for example, ask a direct report to build a 2-hour curriculum using certain key points. Or to write a bit of code that accomplishes a specific task.
Delegating work to AI is no different—you have to set the context, and ask for its help in a way that creates boundaries and expectations for the end result. Then you have to evolve the conversation by asking more specific questions, tailoring your conversation to meet your needs.
Ask a better question, and you’ll get a better result. Learning the skill of framing questions helps you future-proof your work.
#2: Good questions help you discern fact from fiction, and insights from data. Whether or not you’re using AI, your organization is probably doing more gathering of data, and wondering what in the world to do with all that raw information. Extracting insights from data takes asking good questions. It takes getting curious. In asking questions—Why did this number change? Why are people making these choices?—we uncover the underlying story the data wants to tell.
Good questions also help us examine our assumptions before we build a strategy based on faulty logic. They help us assess the headlines from an unknown news source, or a ChatGPT result, to determine if the information you’ve been given is actually true.
Shaping questions that identify assumptions and check for veracity is a skill that is necessary now. It will be even more vital as the demand for data literacy increases.
#3: Good questions help you care for people. At work and at home, asking good questions is part of how we show we care for the people in our lives. You could argue that we’ve always needed this—will we really need to care for people more three years from now than we do today?
Maybe. Yes.
One reason I think so is that since the pandemic, more people have named supportive as a characteristic they admire in leaders than ever before. It seems our care for people is more important now, as leaders, than it was a few years ago.
Questions help us uncover the strengths and needs of our team members; they help us process emotions and honor experience; they help us bring our full humanity to work, and to respect the humanity of others. In an era where more and more of our lives are moving online, intentional care for others is more important than ever before.
Importantly, when paired with active listening, asking really good questions can help to build trust. I trust people who work to understand my point of view through the questions I ask. I trust people who get to know me, and who honor me by asking my perspective. I trust people who show me how they think through the questions they ask and the responses they give. Trust is built through asking and answering questions together.
There are many reasons to grow your question asking skill; preparing for the future of work is just one reason. To help future proof your career, get curious. Ask more questions—of people, of technology, of data.
Photo by Simon Abrams on Unsplash
