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- Is the answer to every question you ask “it depends”?
- Is it hard to form rapport with potential clients?
- Do you find your efforts all too often ineffective?
Perhaps you are asking and trying to solve the wrong questions. We talk about questions a lot, but rarely think about them. Effective Questions, Intelligent Questions, Power Questions, Open Questions, Closed Questions, Dumb Questions, Inappropriate Questions, Precision Questions, Good Questions, and Great Questions. Professionals spend their entire career, including their school days, becoming better at answering questions. But it's rare that any effort is spent forming better questions, let alone great questions.
Great Questions can:
- Provide critical information in their answer.
- Make your solutions and effort much more effective and cost efficient
- Allow you to build rapport with clients, staff, management and stakeholders
- Improve your negotiating and persuasion skills
But how do you ask good questions? Is there a framework for thinking things through? Who is good at this stuff? We don’t know the answers to this so we have gathered a panel of experienced people to talk to the topic.
We want to talk about:
- The difference between a good question and a great question
- The rewards and the costs of your questioning ability
- Whether there's methodologies for questions you can apply
- The Question as part of a larger conversation
PANELLISTS
Soozey Johnstone
Soozey wants to change the world, one business at a time. Born with a passion for business running through her veins, she is one of Australia’s most experienced and respected executive advisors, and is the brains behind dramatic turnarounds in the performance of many diverse organisations, solely by focusing on their people and their behavioural self-awareness. ‘Impossible’ is not a word in her dictionary. Despite being engaged by an organisation as the specialist, Soozey is constantly learning from the people and teams she works with. She shares her learnings in the pages of her new book I Am The Problem.
Soozey's work focuses on the gap between what people want for themselves, and what their organisations want from them, and how to bring those two areas into alignment — in the process releasing a gale of productivity for the organisation and vastly improved personal satisfaction for the individuals concerned.
She is the brains behind dramatic turnarounds in the performance of many diverse organisations, solely by focusing on their people and their behavioural self awareness. A by-product of Soozey's work is that many individuals either make a positive career move or are awarded a promotion.
Tracey Rankin - Alchemy
Tracey is the Director of Alchemy and an experienced qualitative researcher and anthropologist. She has honed her skills as an interviewer and observer of human behaviour through her involvement in market research studies for the last 25 years. Tracey worked with some of the larger research companies before setting up Yellow Door Research in 2002 and more recently Alchemy Research & Insight in 2012. Her experience spans fifteen countries, a multitude of product categories, and countless different types of people and scenarios in which she has interviewed. She has specialised in the area of consumer motivations and emotions and therefore many of her interviewing tools have been developed to help elicit things that people do not consciously know about themselves.
Jeremy Yuille - Principal, Meld Studios
Jeremy has over 20 years of experience in design, particularly around human interactions and user experience, fostering collaborative working across multidisciplinary teams, with a focus on achieving impact for a diverse range of clients. He has an uncanny ability to synthesise, translating between and drawing on, many different disciplines. Jeremy is a strategic thinker who shares his ideas visually.
with special guest Moderator - Brendan Lewis
