This exercise was adapted from an ice breaker published on the Dr. Clue website.
Materials & Set Up: A classroom with seats and/or tables.
Process: Pose this question to the group:
“If you could ask just one question to discover a person’s suitability for [job title/position], what would your question be?”
Issue one situation for the whole group or allocate a different job/position to each team member or pair/team to work on.
Ask people to work individually or in small teams to devise their questions. Then have people work in paris or threes to test, reflect on, refine, and role play the questions.
Give a time limit for question preparation and a separate time limit for testing/role playing.
Debrief:
- Are there advantages in preparing questions in advance, rather than relying on instinct or invention at the time?
- What else happens while we ask questions, aside from the words between us? (Explore body language and non-verbal communications.)
- What sort of questions are least effective and should be avoided? (Try to identify characteristics of ineffective questions.)
- What sort of questions are most effective? (Try to identify characteristics of effective questions.)
- How do we feel when being asked effective/ineffective questions?
- To what extent and how should questions be tailored for the particular listener and for the questioner’s needs?
- What crucial questions do we ask (at work/in life) which we could prepare more carefully?
The Point: There are no absolute “right” or best questions. There are, however, many effective questions, depending on the situation and people’s needs. Likewise, there are certainly questions which do not work well and which should be avoided.
Questioning is powerful and helpful when prepared well, but wastes everyone’s time and creates problems when it is not.
This was originally published on Mel Kleiman’s Humetrics blog.