Hello Reader,
I asked my whole team if everything was on track. One by one, they all said yes. Weeks later I found out that several of them didn't clearly understand what they were supposed to be delivering.
They weren't lying. They answered exactly the question I asked. Things were going "fine" as far as they could tell — and fine meant "I'm doing work," not "I understand what done looks like, and I'm building toward it." People answer the question you asked, not the question you meant to ask. "Is everything okay?" tells you whether someone's in distress. It doesn't tell you whether they're aligned. Those are different things, and a yes-or-no question can't tell you which one you're getting.
Now, instead of asking "Is your piece on track?" I ask "What still needs to happen?" This questions can't be answered with "yes" — it surfaces the picture in someone's head, so if it doesn't match yours, you find out now instead of weeks later.
Open-ended questions can fail too, just differently. "How are things going?" is technically open-ended, but it hands someone infinite ways to answer, so they reach for the easiest one — the social script. The fix is specificity: not "How's the project going?" but "What needs to happen before we can call this done?" Narrow the question enough and people have somewhere real to land.
This week's video also gets into the simplest question I know for getting past someone's first, safest answer — something Michael Bungay Stanier calls the AWE question. It's three words, and it's always available.