Questions and Effective Communication - Part 4 of 5.

To begin wrapping up our five part miniseries on questions I am going to give you some examples of each type of question and then illustrate a scenario where they can be used to further the progress of the communication.

Now in rooting around the internet you will find a ton of “types” of questions. I want you to understand that although some of the noted researchers, academics and philosophers of the world may have coined some of the more popular “types”, there is no formally accepted universal group of question sets.

One of the more popular set comprises the Kipling questions. Rudyard Kipling wrote a short poem outlining what he calls his six honest men… I keep six honest serving men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.

Probably the most academically used and accepted formalized set is based on what is known as Bloom’s Taxonomy which is a classification of the different objectives that educators set for students (learning objectives). We will spend some more time on these in another post, but as a quick illustration they are made up of Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluative types of questions. Their usage is based on increasingly complex levels of learning and is applied in that fashion.

What I would consider the most famous questions are “Socratic” questions. These are laser specific, acute style questions that lead a person down a predetermined path to the desired outcome. Socrates, obviously, used this style and gave it the fame that it has today.

A  list of some of the more popular and most often used types are:

1. Open – These allow for an almost infinite number of possible answers.
2. Closed – These are generally answered with a yes, no, maybe or a specific single subject.
3. Specific – Eliciting a laser specific answer based on an acute thought process.
4. Probing – These types of questions elicit more specific information to elaborate on the currently held subject.
5. Hypothetical – This is a form of question that throws out the presently held “rules” of reality in order to free the mind of confining parameters and produce new unique information.
6. Reflective – This type causes the person to think through previously occurring situations and thereby giving them the “future” oriented temporal position. Have you ever heard of the term “retrospect is always 20/20”?
7. Leading – These questions do just what they are called… The lead someone down a specific path.
8. Descriptive – These questions will draw out details of description of an event or object.
9. Relational – These will extract information that helps to “bind” or “link” two objects and/or events together.
10. Clarifying – These questions are like probing in that they extract more information from an already held subject. The difference though is that clarifying questions extract more information about the person’s actual answers, rather than about the subject of discussion…
11. Verifying – These questions simply solidify the “correctness” of your understanding of the subject at hand.
12. Qualifying – These types of questions are fashioned to extract specific informational parameters that help the questioner determine whether or not to move forward with the communication.
13. Dialoguing – These questions are simply a binding agent in the communication. Their utility is to grease the wheels and keep things moving along.
14. Cause/Effect – These questions elicit information that is a super specific binding agent between a causal agent and the resulting effect. They help facilitate the direction and placement of responsibility and thereby assign an action agent for any future change.
15. Factual – These questions erase any emotion and seek ONLY unbiased, objective information.
16. Evaluative – These types of questions solicit a person’s currently held complex equivalence of the subject at hand.

So let’s get into the1st of the 5 functional classifications that we discussed above, talk about an example and illustrate how it can be used. We will finish up the following 4 tomorrow...

Quantum – Inductive and deductive questions are crystal clear examples of quantum style questions. Inductive questions expand the scope of the thought process that someone is currently employing. For example, let say that you are talking about a “tire”… inductive questions will expand the person’s attention upward to the level of “car” and then further to the level of “transportation” and then possibly further to the level of “the universe”… Deductive go in exactly the opposite direction…

In sticking with the inductive example, let’s take a look at a scenario where this would be beneficial. Imagine that a friend of yours is pining away over a recently lost love… Now we have all been down this path and we know what is going on in their head. Loneliness, all of the great “potential” lost, they are never going to love again… blah, blah, blah… A great question to ask them would be “How do you see this break up fitting into the overall plan of your life as a whole?” What this does is immediately open the attentional-scope of the broken-hearted lover and gives instant perspective to their situation. By effectively placing the “drop” (their breakup) into the big bucket of water (their entire life) you will have a great start on diluting the short term damaging effects of the breakup.

Tomorrow we will wrap things up by finishing the last four classifications… To learn more about questions and other forms of effective communication, please visit my site The Communication Expert.

The Communication Expert | David J. Parnell
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