| Welcome to Issue 171 of 🍏Lunch N Learn with Lindsay🍏. I’m joining you today from Old Delhi in India. You may already know that I LOVE international travel and Malcolm and I are having an absolutely incredible experience enjoying the amazing sights, sounds, tastes and smells in this country. We are most definitely being curious and inquisitive about the history, the culture and the people here and we have been peppering our driver, Luxmi and guide Dav, with SO many questions to satisfy our curiosity! And that leads us very nicely onto our topic for today’s issue – questioning and how we can be adept at gaining and getting the information we want and need to remain curious in our exploration of the world around us. Below is one of my favourite models – The Open Questions Model or, an alternative name “5 bums on a rugby post”!! This used to be my daughter, Lottie’s favourite model when she was little, purely because she could say the word “bum” and fall about laughing as she considered this a very naughty word at the time…(editors note: at age 17 she is now using sometimes “naughtier words” and teaching her old mum a thing or two when it comes to colourful vocabulary on another scale!!). Replace the word “bum” with “bottoms” or “derrieres” if you like but the premis is the same. Imagine a rugby post (the letter H for our HOW questions) and on the rugby post 5 bums, bottoms or derrieres which represent our W questions, namely WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHO and WHY. You will notice WHY has a warning triangle on it. The reason? Because asking a WHY questions could be received in an accusatory way and the resulting response could be a defensive one. Also, as the questioner, you could find yourself in a WHY spiral never really getting to the crux or heart of the information you need (flashback again to a little Lottie who around aged 2 was curious-extraordinaire and asked WHY, WHY, WHY all day long – quite exhausting!). Deleting WHY from you vocabulary and replacing it with “WHAT’S IMPORTANT (ABOUT)…” will give you a higher quality response by inviting and encouraging your respondent to think more deeply, so uncovering and sharing their beliefs/values and getting to the heart and crux of information. It’s the optimum question in any and every situation. This model is fantastic to pull together a portfolio of questions in a given situation. It’s something I use with my EA/PA clients during a training session on organising events and collating all the questions you need to ask to ensure a succesful outcome. Stay tuned next week for this list to add to your resources! Enjoy your week. Remain curious and wish me and Malcolm well on our continued travels across India. |
