— How was your day, dear?
— Good.
— Did you have a good time with your friends at daycare, sweetie?
— Yes.
— Did your French exam go well?
— Fine.
Needless to say, some questions make for pretty poor conversation. This applies to conversations with children, spouses, friends, and colleagues.
What does a LEAN manager need to do to stimulate innovation? Ask open-ended questions. Why is that so important? How do you ask an open-ended question? Let’s find out!
The advantages of asking open-ended questions
In addition to fostering enriching conversations that go beyond one-word answers, open-ended questions have many advantages:
- Encouraging collaboration
- Involving employees in decision-making
- Unleashing creativity
- Promoting autonomy and accountability
- Increasing engagement
Above all, open-ended questions stimulate innovation. They can help bring out ideas, new products or services, or solutions you might never have thought of otherwise.
How do you ask an open-ended question?
Before beginning a conversation, start by clarifying your intention. What are you looking for? Do you want to understand a situation, improve a relationship or a process, be convincing, offer food for thought, or find a solution?
Clarifying your intention(s) (you may have more than one) will help you formulate effective and engaging open-ended questions.
Here are the characteristics of a good open-ended question:
1: It elicits a complete response, not just a word or two.
Did you talk to the customer today?
What came out of your meeting with the customer today?
2: It doesn’t contain the answer. It’s important to fight the impulse to provide the answer within the question so that intelligent responses and contributions have room to emerge. .
Do you agree that collaboration is the best way to increase productivity?
How do you think teamwork affects productivity?
3: It’s objective and non-judgmental
Are you sure?
Why is this software better than the one we use?
4: It’s specific
What do you think of the new vice-president?
What could the new vice-president do to create closer ties with employees working in the field?
A few ideas to inspire you
At Campus Lean, we’re not too keen on cookie-cutter recipes. That being said, here are a few suggestions to inspire you and give you some momentum to practice:
- How do you think we should go about solving the problem?
- We’re on a tight schedule. What’s your game plan for following it?
- Your project sounds very well put together. What challenges do you foresee during the process?
- If an issue comes up, how do you plan to tackle it?
- You seem overloaded. How can I help you?
- What do you remember about our conversation?
- What bothers you about this approach?
Hint: many open-ended questions start with phrases like why, how, in what way, describe, tell me, explain, what do you think…
Knowing how to ask good, open-ended questions is great, but actually doing it isn’t always easy. The key to success is practice. You may not achieve the outcome you’re looking for on your first or second attempt, but don’t get discouraged. Give yourself some time. You can try to rephrase your question or ask a follow-up question to prompt your counterpart to consider further or elaborate on their argument.
Yes, asking the right open-ended questions is an art… one you can master with practice. Good luck!
by Bernard Gagnon
Master Black Belt LEAN Six Sigma,
Professional Scrum Master PSM I
