Joe and the magic questions

Reading The Coaching Habit got me thinking about asking questions, then I started paying attention to the ones that were yielding increased participation, energy, and understanding.

• How would we know if a “bad thing” happened?

• What’s the worst thing that could happen?

• Apply the 5 Why’s to get to the root “bad thing”: Why would that be bad? And why would that be bad? And why would that be bad?

• Michael Bolton runs a great exercise to introduce people to Rapid Software Testing. He describes a calculator and asks what the first thing is that you would do to check if the calculator is working correctly. People say things like: I’d add 2 plus 2 and make sure it equals 4; I’d take the batteries out and see what happens; I’d turn it on and see if the display blinks. Michael lets this go on for some time, then he says well… “I’m confused because…” and he clicks to the next slide which is the picture of an abacus. I enjoyed this exercise immensely at STAREAST Virtual 2020. And it reminds me to ask questions like: “would our system work…in space?” or “would this work…underwater?”

  • By asking some outlandish questions we might get out of locally optimized questions about risk and find that there’s a global risk we were missing altogether.