Great Answers Need Great Questions

The title says it all: If you want to get the best possible information, you must know how to ask for it. Regardless of what you want to know, there are a few very basic rules for asking the kind of question that will help you find it out. For lack of a better term, I'll call them the 4 C's. Follow these four guidelines, and it's likely that you'll find the answers you need. I'll illustrate the guidelines here, with examples from my own life.

First and foremost, a good question is clear. I remember taking my daughter grocery shopping and making a brief detour through the toy aisle. She had been awesome all day, and I wanted to let her pick something out, so I asked, "What do you want?" As she pointed at one thing after another, I realized I should have asked, "Which one do you want?" I can't figure out which one toy someone wants if I don't specify that the answer to my question should include only one toy. In general, no one can help you if you can't adequately describe the help you're looking for. If you need an answer that will help you get unstuck, what exactly is the problem you're having? How are your expectations not currently being met? What have you already tried that didn't work? Be specific and detailed when you ask a question, and you're more likely to get a precise answer. "What do I want to be doing in three years?" is a much clearer question than "what do I want to be when I grow up?" That's why successful people tend to phrase life planning questions with a timeframe attached; setting clear boundaries helps focus the answer into something immediately useful.

A good question should also be concise. If your query rambles on, the person you're asking might tune out before you're finished and lose track of the best possible answer. Plus, no one likes reading a wall of text. Find a way to keep it simple. When planning a family outing, I was unsure about whether to go in the morning or afternoon. I could have asked everyone in the family an elaborate question about their daily priorities and pieced together something from their responses, but then I realized there was rain in the weather forecast for the morning. "Would you be willing to hike in the rain?" was a much simpler way to figure out the immediate preferences of the group. (And the afternoon hike was beautiful.)

"I need to know what the hell is going on with my phone!" said every customer I hated helping while working for a cell phone provider. It wasn't that I was unwilling to help these people, but their phrasing was less than courteous. Courtesy matters! It pays to be polite when you're asking someone for help. Avoid using profanity in your question, no matter how frustrated the lack of an answer is making you feel. Use the words "please" and "thank you" when appropriate. And don't write in a voice that assumes you're entitled to an answer. Whoever ends up helping you will tend to do their best work when it doesn't feel like a chore. And that's what you want: their best work for your best answer.

The last C is a little more subtle and might take some more work to nail down. A cooperative question exists alongside other questions like it without repeating questions that were already asked. It has been said that the only stupid questions are the ones that have already been answered, and cooperative questioning requires research. I was trying to get a printer issue resolved once, and I turned to the Adobe support forums with a clear, concise, courteous question highlighting my problem and asking for a solution. Unfortunately, I had not searched the same forum for terms pertaining to my queston. If I had, I would have seen the identical question that had been answered years earlier. I also would have avoided the snarky replies I got asking me to learn how to Google. Lesson learned, I suppose.

If you can master these four concepts, you'll end up asking the kind of questions that demand good answers, and less and less knowledge will be hidden from you. This is a skill that is difficult to master, so don't be afraid of messing up at first. Keep practicing, and before long you'll be an amazing questioner.