I’m posting a ‘part 2’ for day one for a couple of reasons. Firstly I wanted to share some takeaways from a session I found particularly valuable, more on that below.
Secondly, from a workflow perspective, it was a bit clunky writing as I went throughout the day and posting before all the sessions finished. So for the remainder, I’ll type up the previous day in the AM when I have more time and space.
The session I wanted to share was led by Hal Gregersen, Executive director at the MIT Leadership Center and author of ‘Questions are the Answer’. Hal was joined by Debbie Sterling, founder of GoldieBlox, Simon Mulcahy, Chief Innovation Officer at Salesforce and Jonathan Craig, Senior EVP at Charles Schwab.
The topic was something dear to my heart, asking better questions.
I loved the use of ‘Patagonia’ as an example of how a great question cascaded to great follow-up questions, which led to an organisation which embodies the founder, Yvon Choninard’s vision.
“How can I make a living without losing my soul?” Became the mission statement, “We’re in business to save our home planet.”
A powerful question has the potential to spark a challenge, to cause the sometimes obvious, but non-the-less difficult reflection that starts down a path of equally powerful follow-up questions.
The task then, in the context of organisations, is to help people own the challenge. Again, questions can help. Steering people to ask and answer their own questions aligned to the mission is a powerful mechanism for accomplishing this.
Simon mentioned a great tool they use a Salesforce for this, and it’s one we use a variation of at GrowthOps, the V2MOM, (I’ll let you look up the details if you’re interested).
Explaining your organisation’s mission powerfully and compellingly can of-course help foster alignment and buy-in. The panel shared a simple, but well-worn storytelling structure that is also, unsurprisingly, you guessed it, centred around questions and answers.
Very simply put, using ‘SCQA’ framework you describe the situation and complication, you pose a question and supply an answer.
A final note from me. Asking good question requires practice, and if it’s not part of how you currently operate, it’s unlikely you’ll become a precision question asking machine tomorrow. However, by asking mostly ‘open’ questions, those that start with ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ (although be careful with the last one as it can be a little confrontational) and paying attention to the response, the result and tweaking as needed, you’ll see a shift in the quality of your interactions pretty quickly.