The Importance of Asking Questions
The smartest person in the room isn’t necessarily the one who has answers but one with great, insightful questions. Asking questions stimulates discussion, encourages collaboration, and ultimately leads to more informed decisions. In fact, Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
Watch Digging Deeper this week as Dennis emphasizes the importance of asking questions to create a more collaborative and successful environment in your organizations. How do you come up with innovative solutions for challenges with your teams? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Please share with us in the comments below.
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Good morning, everybody. Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.
In our Four Things Newsletter recently, we wrote a little bit about listening and questions and all of this, and really
questions, listening and collaboration are the secret sauce to business success now and into the future. One of our clients
sent me a quote this last week, and the quote comes from Albert Einstein, and again, some of you may be too young, but
growing up in the 50s and 60s, Albert Einstein was a pretty big figure. The theory of relativity, and a rocket scientist, and
all this other stuff that Albert Einstein was, but he is a pretty smart dude. He said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I
would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper questions to ask. For once I know the proper questions, I could
solve the problem in five minutes." Wow. I'm not sure I had ever heard that quote before, but really think about that. If I
know the proper questions to ask, I can solve any problem in five minutes, basically. And that just highlights the importance
of questions.
And the whole thing about questions is nobody's got all the knowledge, but if we know what questions to ask and we ask
them, we can bring knowledge from so many sources. And of course, we have to listen to that knowledge to be able to
make it effective, and we've got to be good communicators or people won't share their knowledge.
But basically, if you've got the right questions, you get the right people in the room, you can solve any problem and you
can solve it fast. The smartest person in the room is not the one with all the answers. The smartest person in the room is
the one with all the questions. So, think about that. Can you be the person with the right questions in that room that can
bring things around and bring it together? The fact is the collective knowledge and talent is always greater than any
individuals. All right. So, your ability to bring people together, bring out their knowledge via the right questions, synthesize
then those facts and that knowledge into a plan everybody can be get behind, which is the essence of collaboration. With
this simple process, there's no problems that can't be solved. There are no conflicts that can't be resolved. And find
positive ground. Basically, there's no obstacle to stop your future success. It's all about asking the right questions, listening,
and collaborating on solutions.
Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.
