How to ask powerful questions for critical analysis

A phrase that my coach taught me a long time ago, she said, if you get a no, you've either asked the wrong question or you've asked the wrong person. And that has stuck with me for 25 years. What I've learned from that simple truth is that the limitations to our own knowledge and our own learning is relevant and directly correlated to the questions we ask somebody. If you ask a simple question, you'll most likely get a simple answer. If you ask a closed-ended question, you'll get a yes or no or a closed-ended answer. When you start asking more profound or deeper thinking questions, you will ultimately get more from the person or maybe the AI as a response. And what I found in working with people, specifically not just senior leaders, but in general, it tends to be people who manage other people. If they're thinking very linearly and they're not outside of the box, if you will, when it comes to asking questions about performance or about their team or about themselves, then they're limiting their knowledge base. They're limiting the opportunities to grow. They're limiting the potential to learn something new. As a coach, where I focus working with individuals is their blind spots. So if you think about it, the questions that we want to be asking live outside here, they're outside of our peripheral, they're in our blind spots. This is where deep thinking and deep level questioning really comes into play, where we can unlock more about who we are, what is derailing us, what may be hurting our career personally, professionally. I think asking the right questions and really diving into what makes a good question great and a great question excellent is a skill set that everybody should be learning right now, not just because of AI and technology is advancing but because it can unlock so much within our own heads and our own hearts and it's for us to do. There are a lot of components to asking a powerful question. I think it really depends on the situation, the individual, and ultimately what are they trying to learn. There are times where clarifying questions, close-ended questions, can be very powerful. But what I found is that those questions typically come when you've already had an exchange or a dialogue, or some information has already been communicated to you, and you just want to make sure that you understand what is being communicated to you. But when you ask open-ended questions, when you ask questions that can't be answered with a simple yes or a no, or uh-huh or OK, that's when you start to engage. That's when you open up a dialogue versus a monologue. And that's where you can learn. And right now, that is the opportunity both within the work that I'm doing, both for this course, both as a coach, and with senior leaders and leaders and organizations all over the world right now. We need to upskill our level of thinking. We need to be more curious. And we also need to just be more creative. So here's what I want you to do next. Before your next meeting, I want you to write down two open-ended questions about any topic that you have at hand that's important to you. Aim to challenge an assumption or probe beneath the surface, but bring at least one into that conversation. Watch the level of analysis rise. At some point, we stopped being curious about things. Most people forget that when little kids between the ages, I don't know, four to maybe seven or eight, I forget the specifics, they ask hundreds of questions a day. And adults, we ask on average, I think, seven. Seven. So just think about that. If I asked you and said you only have seven questions to ask throughout the entire day, would you think a little bit more about the questions you ask and who you ask them to? Or would you just ask the ones that you're currently asking?