As a cofounder and the CEO of the U.S. chipmaker Nvidia, Jensen Huang operates in a high-velocity industry requiring agile, innovative thinking. Reflecting on how his leadership style has evolved, he told the New York Times, “I probably give fewer answers and I ask a lot more questions….It’s almost possible now for me to go through a day and do nothing but ask questions.” He continued, “Through probing, I help [my management team]…explore ideas that they didn’t realize needed to be explored.”

The urgency and unpredictability long faced by tech companies have spread to more-mature sectors, elevating inquiry as an essential skill. Advances in AI have caused a seismic shift from a world in which answers were crucial to one in which questions are. The big differentiator is no longer access to information but the ability to craft smart prompts. “As a leader, you don’t have the answers; your workforce [does], your people [do],” Jane Fraser, Citi’s CEO, told Fortune magazine. “That’s completely changed how you have to lead an organization. You have to unleash the creativity….The innovation isn’t happening because there’s a genius at the top of the company that’s coming up with the answers for everything.”

Indeed, leaders have embraced the importance of listening, curiosity, learning, and humility—qualities critical to skillful interrogation. “Question-storming”—brainstorming for questions rather than answers—is now a creativity technique. But unlike lawyers, doctors, and psychologists, business leaders aren’t formally trained on what kinds of questions to ask. They must learn as they go. (See “The Surprising Power of Questions,” HBR, May–June 2018, among others.)

It’s not a matter of asking lots of questions in hopes of eventually hitting on the right ones. Corinne Dauger, a former VP of creative development at Hermès, told us, “In a one-hour meeting, there are only so many questions you can ask….So where do you want to spend the time? When you’re asking one question, you’re not asking another.” If any one line of questioning dominates, it inevitably crowds out others. Leaders must also watch for complacency, diminishing returns, avoidance of sensitive topics, and stubbornness.

In our research and consulting over the past decade, we’ve seen that certain kinds of questions have gained resonance across the business world. And in a three-year project we asked executives to question-storm about the decisions they’ve faced and the kinds of inquiry they’ve pursued. In this article we share what we’ve learned. We offer a practical framework for the types of questions to ask in strategic decision-making and a tool to help you assess your interrogatory style.

The Great Unasked Questions

Before we lay out our framework, we want to emphasize one point above all: The questions that get leaders and teams into trouble are often the ones they fail to ask. These are questions that don’t come spontaneously; they require prompting and conscious effort. They may run counter to your and your team’s individual or collective habits, preoccupations, and patterns of interaction.

The late scholar and business thinker Sumantra Ghoshal once said that leadership means making happen what otherwise would not. In the realm of inquiry a leader’s job is to flush out information, insights, and alternatives, unearthing critical questions the team has overlooked. You don’t need to come up with the missing questions yourself, but you do need to draw attention to neglected spheres of inquiry so that others can raise them…[MORE]

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To read the entire article by Arnaud Chevallier, Frédéric Dalsace, and Jean-Louis Barsoux, visit the HBR site: The Art of Asking Smarter Questions