The Surprising Power of Questions

The question

What separates people who get real information out of a conversation from people who leave with what they came in with?

The method

A practitioner summary of the authors’ own laboratory and field research on conversation, written for HBR rather than presenting new data. The question typology it leans on was built from Brooks’s research “using human coding and machine learning” [1].

The findings

Their practical core is five moves: “favor follow-up questions, know when to keep questions open-ended, get the sequence right, use the right tone, and pay attention to group dynamics” [1].

The first one carries most of the weight. Their coding found four kinds of question — “introductory questions (‘How are you?’), mirror questions (‘I’m fine. How are you?’), full-switch questions (ones that change the topic entirely), and follow-up questions (ones that solicit more information)” [1] — and the last has, in their phrase, “special power”: “they signal to your conversation partner that you are listening, care, and want to know more. People interacting with a partner who asks lots of follow-up questions tend to feel respected and heard” [1]. It also takes no preparation. In Brooks’s studies, “the people who were told to ask more questions used more follow-up questions than any other type without being instructed to do so” [1].

Tone changes what people will say. “If they are told that they can change their answers at any point, they tend to open up more even though they rarely end up making changes” [1] — a stated escape hatch buys candour it never actually costs you. The mirror image: “an overly formal tone is likely to inhibit people’s willingness to share information” [1].

The limits

This is an HBR summary, not a paper. The underlying studies are cited inside it but not reported in enough detail to judge, and the setting is general conversation and negotiation rather than expert interviewing.

• You are running a Calibration Call and worried about what to ask. Without this article you over-invest in the question list. Brooks and John’s finding is that the second question matters more than the first, and the second question is one you cannot write in advance.
• Someone is giving you careful, guarded answers about what goes wrong in the role. Without this article you push. The escape hatch is the cheaper move: say they can revise anything they tell you, and they say more.
• You are tempted to run the call like a formal interview because you want to be respectful of an expert’s time. Formality is the thing suppressing the specifics you called for.