Eva is chatting with Tom, who tells her about a minor car accident he was in yesterday. Eva says, “Yeah, I had a fender bender just like that last year …”
John is talking to a colleague at work who is worried her higher insurance premiums are going to eat up this year’s raise. John says, “Same thing happened to me last year …”
You’re talking to that potential donor again, who says the best place in a hospital is the maternity ward. You say, “Yes! When my wife had our son …”
Stop! Stay focused on your listening and asking. Keep your questions like your eyes, locked on that other person, on the project you’re discussing, and on the shared goals. Mission questions demand selfless listening. Talk about we, not I. Ask more, speak less. This conversation is about common goals, not what you think or what you have done. Understand the connection between the question and the listening. General Colin Powell has a 30 percent rule: When you’re running a meeting, speak 30 percent of the time; that forces you to listen 70 percent of the time.
“Questions actually help you listen better,” Karen Osborne says. “They help you focus.”
And the golden rule in listening is to listen to others as you would want others to listen to you. Be genuinely interested in the other person and what the person has to say. Find the facets of that person’s story that are significant or surprising or remarkable to you. Know what they’ve accomplished or been up against. Be familiar with what makes them special and unique.
Now you’re exploring common goals and shared purpose with someone you care about.
Solve Problems with Purpose
Recently, I interviewed a panel of experts who work with the disabled. My job was to ask them about the challenges they faced in connection with a new law about employment for people with disabilities. The discussion centered on the new rules, but my hosts didn’t want it to get lost in the weeds of process and bureaucracy. So we focused on the calling, and how to work most effectively with the 38 million Americans who have a disability. I found Rick Leach’s organizing questions a useful outline for the conversation.
What is the challenge?
What can you do about it?
What can each of you bring to the enterprise?
What will it take?
In your work and volunteer activities, you can define mission and rally people by asking them first to think about what matters and then where your interests overlap. Ask how they want to participate and engage. Ask them to aim high. That’s what Rick Leach does when he asks people to join his campaign to end global hunger. It’s why he believes hunger is a “solvable problem.”
CHAPTER 9
INTO THE UNKNOWN
Scientific Questions
WE LIVE IN AN AGE of instant answers. I googled this question: How do we know the earth is round? In less than one second, I had 168 million results at my fingertips. If I spent one minute on each, it would take me 320 years to get through them all.
?
We live in an age of assertion. I can fire off a tweet or post an opinion, no matter how accurate or incendiary, and get the attention of the crowd, maybe even go viral. Politicians throw out untruths or half-truths and, even when proven wrong, they will double down and assert again. In 2015, Representative Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, declared authoritatively that climate data clearly showed “no warming” for the past two decades. He didn’t back down even though 14 of the 15 years from 2000-2015 logged in as the hottest on record, according to data from NASA. Truth is often eclipsed by attitude.
Instant answers and easy assertion populate our digital information age. I can surround myself with friends and associates, virtual or real, who will be my echo chamber, ratifying my ideas and validating my logic. I can live in a media universe where everyone will agree with me, and my social media tribe will cement my certainty.
How do we slow it down?
Can we allow ourselves to be wrong?
Can we ask in a different way?
Up to now, my quest to understand how we ask more of ourselves and one another had taken me through several lines of inquiry, each connected to its own distinct outcome, each calling for its own unique approach. In all of them, the artful question leads to information and awareness, understanding and answers.
But there’s a line of inquiry characterized by the slow question, the one that doesn’t yield an immediate answer and dares you to embrace uncertainty. I wondered, can the slow question, the kind that requires painstaking work and enduring patience, where you try to prove yourself wrong in order to see if you might be right, be a viable alternative in our world of instant answers? Can it prove to be a reliable path to truth?
The answer, of course, is yes. The slow question exists with a distinctly different approach. It is expressed through the inquisitive lens of science, which ventures into the unknown, seeking to explain the mysteries of the physical world. This questioning method represents a way of asking that recognizes the vastness and uncertainties of the unexplored. The method builds logically from the ground up.
Observe a problem, frame a question. Take what you see or know to be objectively and measurably true from the real world and ask a question. What’s going on here? What’s causing this?
Offer an explanation. Based on your observations, your experiences, and the facts and data that exist, put together a clear hypothesis that could explain the situation.
Put your hypothesis to the test. Experiment and measure over time. Try to prove yourself wrong. What else could explain this situation? What did you miss? What could be wrong with your approach and your data? If your hypothesis holds up, you are making progress.
Share. If you think you’re onto something, shop it around and show it to other knowledgeable people. Let them review it. Do they see something that you didn’t? Do they have any problem with your data or your methods? If not, you might just have a theory you can act on.
Scientific questioning drives a process that revolves around data, experimentation, and observable fact. It is a method that tackles a daunting quest and challenges attention spans in an instant-answer world. The discipline this line of questioning imposes makes for better inquiry and better decisions across the board. Think back to a choice you made or an action you took that didn’t turn out the way you hoped. Ever wonder how different things would have been if you had more information or looked at what you did have a bit more skeptically? Have you ever worked off an untested instinct or an unchallenged belief and then wished—knowing what you know now—that you could do it all over again, or that you could have road-tested your hunch before you acted on it? How would things have been different if you could have been more scientific in selecting the car you bought or the business you invested in? What if you could turn your search for answers into a science?
The Doctor’s Quest
I wondered: Can we inject a little scientific method into the questions we confront every day? How can scientific questioning be useful to the rest of us? First, I had to see how it works. I went to the sprawling campus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) just outside Washington, D.C., to speak with one of the country’s leading scientists. He’s worked all his life trying to figure out the unknown, in a world where research is subject to criticism, hypotheses exist to be disproved, and answers leads to more questions.