The Art ofAskingQuestions

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MANAGEMENT DECISION 32,9

While much effort is made to improve management techniques, the art of asking questions has been ignored.

between staff and manager. Both aim to contribute to the overriding good of their organization and will be equally interested to explore the views and insights of the other. The quality circle is one exemplification of this ideal. Given the crucial role of asking questions in managerial situations, indeed in human intercourse generally, it is surprising that this matter is frequently taken for granted. Although children start off by making statements, pointing at and identifying objects such as mothers and fathers, in due course they graduate to asking questions and, having discovered the question, there is no stopping them. From then on the question is taken for granted. This is not wise when it comes to the adult world, as was suggested by Payne[1].

The Art of Asking Questions

At the present stage of development of the survey method, improvements in question wording and in other phrases can contribute far more to accuracy than further improvements in sampling methods can. I don’t mean that the sampling experts should stop seeking further improvements, trying to knock a few more tenths of a percent off the statistical error. But, while they are laboring with tenths of a per cent, the rest of us are letting tens of per cents slip through our fingers.

Gerald Vinten

Management Decision, Vol. 32 No. 9, 1994, pp. 46-49 © MCB University Press Limited, 0025-1747

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did, I said I didn’t know.

There is, of course, an exact equivalence in management, with considerable effort on improving management techniques and applications while simultaneously ignoring the imprecisions and biases arising through poorly phrased questions. This article supplements texts[2] which aim to supply a number of ground rules on simplifying language and avoiding ambiguous terms.

Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi When I use a word, it means what I choose it to mean. Humpty-Dumpty

It was A.N. Whitehead who described spoken language as “merely a series of squeaks”. Squeaks and grunts, if not ambiguous in the animal kingdom, are certainly incapable of conveying a wealth of meaning. In the human kingdom we convey spoken meaning through either pure poetry or prose. Poetry can be highly elusive in meaning, a meaning which may sometimes be unclear even to the poet. So far, there is not a rich store of management poetry! It was prose which our friend Mark Twain was surprised to find he had been speaking all his life, without realizing it. Prose, as indeed poetry, may consist of either statement or question. Anyone who spoke exclusively in statement or question would be considered antisocial and boring. Statements often result from questions and vice versa. Inevitably, questions play a large part in management work, with the staff questioned providing the statements by way of answer. In the more participative styles there may be a more even balance of question and statement

The Quest for Meaning A most thorough investigation was undertaken by Belson[3]. He analysed 29 questions and their corresponding answers in great detail. These were questions typically used in social surveys and which were regarded as having passed the test of time. An example was: “When you turn on your television in the evening, do you generally go on viewing till the end of the evening or do you just watch one or two programmes?”. This short question gave rise to 59 interpretations, only 25 per cent of which were considered to be “as intended” or “permissible”. The benchmark was the original formulation of the question, its objectives and the meaning to be attached to each of its elements. The main points of difficulty or of failure on this question included: (1) “you”, taken to include others in the family; (2) “turning the set on”, interpreted as “starting to view”; (3) “go on viewing”, thought of as “leaving the set on”; (4) “till the end of the evening”, converted into “till the end of your evening” (for example, 10.30 pm);


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