“Nooo..no..no..first, you answer me this!!”

If you were there Reader , you’d have laughed your guts out. During a quarterly council meeting of the society, one of the uncles — you know the type who wears a tight T-shirt, heavy metal wrist-watch and a pair of sports shoes — was repeating himself “Noo…no..no..first, you answer me this!!” x 20 times. On repeat mode. I was wondering where’s the ‘off’ button on this iPod.

But nobody could find the ‘off’ button. And he walked out of the meeting. Furious and angry.

I realized something.

Whether it is this ‘trying-to-be-a-teenager’ uncle or us, we don’t use questions as effectively as we should.

Questions as Tools

If you think about it, what are ‘questions’?

They’re not poems.

They’re not paintings.

They’re not answers.

They’re tools!

We invented questions. To solve our problems. To understand something with more depth.

It was curiosity (aka ‘questions’) that prompted the man to invent the wheel and fire.

Solving the maze

But anyways, here is something that I enjoy in meetings: observing people’s questions.

It is fun. Because different people use questions to get different things. Sometimes, to just get some air time.

In the majority of meetings, people are trying to figure out some information. For example: if it is a sales meeting or project review meeting, people are trying to figure out how good or bad the situation is. If you’re designing a survey, your team is trying to get a set of information using questions. I had also written in the past about a simple filter test to make your surveys meaningful​

All this questioning is similar to solving a maze.

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