A question is not a request for information. It is an instruction to somebody's brain about what to think about, and it will be obeyed. Ask a narrow question and you get a narrow answer, however clever the person in front of you. Ask a forward-facing one and the same person, about the same event, produces completely different material.
The second half of the name matters as much as the first. Having asked, you yield: you say nothing and let the silence do its job. The answer belongs to whoever says it out loud, which is why telling somebody the answer almost never changes what they do on Monday.
What the model says
The frame is set by the question, not by the situation. Take a job that went wrong. Ask "why did that go wrong?" and you get causes, history and a certain amount of defence, because the question points backwards and at people. Ask "what would need to be true for this to work next time?" and you get conditions and options, because that question points forwards and at the work.
Same event, same person, different material — and you chose which by the words you used. Then the yield, which carries two meanings and you want both. A good question yields an answer, the way a field yields a crop. And you yield, as in give way: you stop talking and let the other person fill the gap.
Designing the question
Keep it open
It should not be answerable with yes, no or a number. "Did you speak to them?" closes the subject in one syllable. "What have you tried so far?" opens it, and the answer tells you where the person actually is.
Ask one thing at a time
A double-barrelled question always gets the easy half answered and the hard half quietly dropped. Ask the hard half on its own and wait.
Keep it short
A question longer than about a dozen words has stopped being a question and become a statement with a question mark stapled to the end. Owners do this when they are nervous about the silence that follows.
Be careful with "why" aimed at a person
"Why did you do that?" invites justification and puts them on the back foot. "What were you weighing up when you decided that?" asks for exactly the same information and gets a straight answer.
Never ask a question you already have the answer to
Everybody can tell. It is not coaching, it is a quiz with one right answer, and the only thing it teaches people is to wait until you give in and tell them.
Why this is a commercial skill, not a soft one
Your business runs on the quality of thinking done by people who are not you, in rooms you are not in. You cannot install thinking by telling. Telling produces compliance, which works precisely as long as the instruction covers the situation and not a moment longer.
It shows up on the money side too. The best salespeople in any trade ask more and tell less, because a buyer who describes their own problem out loud has just talked themselves into needing it solved. An owner who opens a sales meeting by explaining what the business does has spent the most valuable ten minutes of that meeting on the least valuable content, and will spend the rest of it guessing.
There is also a self-management version, and it is the one owners underrate. The questions you ask yourself in the car are running the business as surely as any of your meetings. "Why does this keep happening to me?" and "what have I built that keeps producing this?" describe the same month and lead to entirely different years.
An illustrative sequence
A sales manager has missed target three months running. The telling version takes ninety seconds: you need to get the activity up, block out Tuesday and Thursday mornings for calls, I want fifteen a week, let us look again in a month. He agrees, because what else is he going to do. Nothing changes, because nothing was discovered.
Now the asking version. "Talk me through a typical week." Pause. "Where does the time actually go?" Pause. "If you could get four hours back, where would they come from?" Long pause — and this is where an owner usually caves in and starts suggesting. Wait.
What comes out is that since the estimator left in March, the manager has been writing quotes himself, mostly on Fridays, and Friday used to be his best follow-up day. Nobody hid this. Nobody had asked. The fix is a quoting template and four hours a week of admin support, not a lecture about activity levels — and now it is his fix rather than yours, so it survives contact with next week.
How to use it this week
- Count to five before you speak. Ask, then genuinely wait. Most owners last about two seconds and then answer their own question, which trains everyone to sit quietly until you do.
- Ban three questions from your one-to-ones. "Have you tried...?", "Don't you think...?" and "Do you want me to...?" All three are suggestions in disguise and all three hand the problem straight back to you.
- Keep four questions in your pocket. What have you tried? What else could you do? What would you do if I were away for a month? What would have to be true for that to work?
- Ask one more question than feels comfortable. The useful answer is almost always the second or third, not the first. The first is usually the tidy one they had prepared.
- End with their action, in their words. "So what will you do, and by when?" If you say it for them, you have taken the problem back and you will own it again by Thursday.
- Turn it on yourself once a week. Write down the question you have been asking about your biggest problem. Then write a better one — forward-facing, about the system rather than about people — and answer that instead.
The mistakes most owners make
They ask a decent question and then improve the answer. Somebody offers a workable idea, and because you can see a slightly better version, you say so. Entirely well meant, and it undoes the whole exercise: the idea is now yours, the ownership has transferred back across the desk, and next time they will not bother thinking, they will just bring you the problem.
The other common failure is asking questions while visibly waiting to talk. People can tell the difference between being asked and being processed, and once they decide it is a technique, they will give you the shortest answer that ends the conversation.
Questions to ask yourself
- Out of 10, how much of your last one-to-one was you talking? Ask the other person to score it too.
- What question have you been asking about your biggest problem, and what is it stopping you from seeing?
- Who in your business has stopped bringing you their thinking, and what did you do the last few times they tried?
- How long can you sit in silence after asking something before you fill it? Try counting next time.
You cannot install thinking by telling. The questions you ask — of your team and of yourself — decide the quality of every decision made when you are not in the room.
This sits at the heart of Personal Coaching, because the hardest questions to improve are the ones you ask yourself, and it is what makes Performance on Purpose a conversation rather than a lecture. Read Ask, Don't Tell next for when to use it, and Be, Do, Have for the question underneath most stuck owners.
Get the next one in your inbox
One practical, plain-English guide for business owners each week. No spam, unsubscribe any time.
Frequently asked questions
What are the four questions worth memorising?
What have you tried? What else could you do? What would you do if I were away for a month? What would have to be true for that to work? Those four handle most conversations an owner has in a week, and they work in roughly that order. The first establishes where the person actually is rather than where you assume. The second gets past the tidy prepared answer to the real thinking. The third removes you from the problem, which is usually the blocker. The fourth turns a complaint into a set of conditions you can act on. Add one more question than feels comfortable and you will get the answer that mattered.
Why does silence matter so much after asking?
Because thinking takes longer than talking, and the person needs the gap in order to do any. Most owners last about two seconds before filling it, usually with a suggestion, and after a few rounds of that everyone learns to wait quietly until the owner supplies the answer. Then you have a business that brings you problems rather than thinking. Seven seconds feels absurdly long from the inside and normal from the outside. Count it if you need to. The discomfort you feel in the gap is not a signal that the question failed; it is the sound of somebody working, and it is the whole point of having asked.
Is this not just a technique people can see through?
They will see through it if it is only a technique. The tell is asking while visibly waiting to talk: people can feel the difference between being asked and being processed, and once they decide it is a method being applied to them, they will give the shortest answer that ends the conversation. What makes it genuine is being willing to be changed by the answer. If you ask and then act on what you hear, or say honestly why you cannot, the questions read as real. If you ask and then do what you were always going to do, no amount of good phrasing will save it, and you will have taught people not to bother.