Powerful Questions

Enterprise Design Patterns | Behavioural Patterns

#14: Powerful Questions

“I never learn anything talking. I only learn things when I ask questions.”
- Lou Holtz

Related Patterns:

#3: Coalition Building, #13: Nurtured Trust, #15: Listening to Understand, #29: Capture Stories

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You need to explore the full wisdom of other people to co-design great enterprises.

In this context:

People seldom give the whole picture when asked for information. You need to encourage people to dig deeper to get to their full wisdom.

Therefore:

You learn to ask powerful questions and ask ‘why?’ a lot. You practice curiosity about everything the enterprise does. You question things everyone takes for granted. You use powerful questions such as:

• Exploration: "When you say X, what do you mean?"
• Challenging: “How sure are you about this? Is there evidence to support this?”
• Solution-focus: e.g. “What would make your task in process X significantly easier?”
• Circularity: e.g. “What would department X do if we’d implement solution Y?”
• Scaling: e.g. “On a scale of 1 to 10…how would you rate the efficiency of process X?”
• Hypothetical: “If we change this customer journey, how would that make things worse/better for you?”
• Miracles: “If we magically replaced our host-based legacy with microservices tomorrow – what benefits would this have for you?”

These questions help people drill down to the core of their enterprise understanding. You capture their stories.

Consequently:

You help your interview partners understand their own enterprise challenges better. This significantly enhances everybody's understanding and thereby the quality of the Enterprise Design creations and nurtures the trust you need for the safe negotiation space.