Harry 0:00

I want to make sure that people recognize this is a way of thinking and prioritizing questions as the category of information, and then driving you through a process of getting to an increasing amount of clarity that leads you to a more obvious place.

Narrator 0:20

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Jorge 0:30

Hey Harry, it's good to see you.

Harry 0:32

Oh, it's fantastic to see you again, Jorge. Appreciate you making time today.

Jorge 0:37

I'm always excited when, when we get to talk. I always learn something when we talk and I'm really excited to be able to share it with folks.

Harry 0:47

I've been really surprised at how much these conversations have been affecting me in a positive way. I think I mentioned that in something I posted on LinkedIn earlier, but I'm leaving feeling a little enlivened from each conversation, I'm leaving feeling a bit smarter and I'm leaving feeling a little bit more hopeful, even when the topics are challenging. And I think that's an unexpected outcome of these conversations with you.

Jorge 1:18

I'll say the same here. And I'm expecting that you've brought something to discuss and I'm excited to know what that would be.

Harry 1:26

Oh, I'm so excited about it too. Yeah, I just posted something saying I'm gonna predict that this reading is gonna come from a book that's gonna turn out to be my 2025 book of the year. So in December, we'll see if that's true. But here it goes. "To remain grounded in this fear of what you know and control, cultivate a habit of asking yourself better questions. The brain operates with a question-answer mechanism. It continuously assesses the surroundings with questions and then conjures answers. This typically happens subliminally and instantly faster than you can notice. You can, however, participate consciously in this process and influence your thoughts and feelings by introducing your own questions. "When you introduce a question into conscious thought, the mind is compelled to come up with an answer. The problem is that it's all too common to default to reactive, negative, and sometimes emotion-laden questions such as, 'Why am I so bad at this?' Or 'Why can't I succeed?' Your brain will immediately begin to give you answers to these, yet the answers will not lead to enlightenment. Rather, they will spiral you into further negativity and anxiety. "Masters of uncertainty steer their thoughts with better, more effective questions: questions that center on what they can ascertain and influence. Well aware that knowledge morphs into power, they prime their minds with inquiries like, 'What do I know? What can I control?' The brain can't help but answer these questions in ways that you put at the helm. These are inquiries that empower and hone your focus on traversing uncertainty, not succumbing to it."

Jorge 3:30

There's a lot coursing through my mind. One of my favorite movies is 8 1/2 by Federico Fellini. And one of the characters in that movie is the critic. And the critic is constantly sitting next to the director, basically doing this running commentary on what's going on. And the sense I get is that this reading has to do with this inner critic that we have in us, at least partly. What is it from?

Harry 4:03

So this book just came out and, it's called Masters of Uncertainty. It was written by Rich Diviney, and the subtitle is The Navy Seal Way to Turn Stress Into Success for You and your Team. And there are lots of books that I read 'em and I think, "Oh, I'm gonna go back and reread that one." And then, there are books where I say, "I gotta get the Kindle version so I can search it." and then there are books where I think, "Oh, I gotta get the hard copy so I can mark it up." So I already started rereading this one. I already ordered the Kindle version and I already ordered the hard copy, because this is a fantastic book that really underscores the idea that you have to start with self. And it gives such clear instruction for where to start with self in terms of improving your ability to deal with unprecedented times and the challenges that we're facing in our personal lives with the folks that we're working intimately with, and in the organizations where we're navigating toward whatever business, or civic, or other outcomes we're aiming for. So I was blown out of the water here, with this particular one. And I just loved the idea that you can train yourself to ask better questions simply because it forces you to start answering things about the environment that you're in to help you navigate the situation you find yourself in.

Jorge 5:40

When you read that part about the questions, where my mind went was our conversation about mental models. And the questions felt like a probing mechanism to build a mental model. And I think we talked about dungeon crawler games in a previous episode, this notion that you start without knowing the map, and as you transverse the terrain, you build out the map, right? And the questions might be the mechanism... that it's like a flashlight, right? that lets you see the walls of the dungeon somehow.

Harry 6:19

Totally. I don't remember if we talked about this in a previous conversation or not, but did we ever talk about my open questions framework?

Jorge 6:28

I don't think we have.

Harry 6:29

Okay, so when I read this the first time, I was like, oh man, this is gonna be great because we'll be able to leave people with a very simple tool that I've been using for many, years, and I've had a lot of feedback from folks that have worked with folks that who've worked for me, clients, and so on and so forth, that have told me, among the, hundreds of tools that I bring to bear, people often come back to me about this one. They're like, "Whoa, how did that work again? Can I use that? That's really helpful." And it's a really simple four-column framework. And the idea is that in almost any circumstance, there's a controlling question. The challenge is sometimes identifying it and then figuring out what to do with it. And so, the idea is, in a column, in a spreadsheet, or however you want to do it, you write down what your questions are. And you then just do a simple stack rank of those questions. And if you get stuck, you can do pairwise comparison. You can use a simple prioritization technique to force yourself to get clear about which question is the most important. And that's helpful. But what's really helpful is having them in a structure that I'm about to share with you. So let's just say you've managed to prioritize the questions. Let's say you've got five questions and you've got those in your first column. The second column is, what do you think the answer is for each question. And that way you know, if it's purely, "I have no clue." Okay, fine. "Really, you have no clue? You have no information, you have no thoughts, you have no hypothesis, you have nothing?" okay, that's possible, but in all probability, you've got some semblance of an idea that addresses the question. It might be completely a hundred percent wrong, but you still have a sense of it. The next column is, where am I likely to find the answer? And I typically like to point to a who. Like, who has to answer? But it could also be an information source, right? And the next column is, what is the next step to find the actual answer? And it's not always as straightforward as it seems because let's say that information source is buried somewhere and you have no idea how to get to it. Maybe it's gonna take you three levels of indirection to go find it or get to it or whatnot. And so, the next action is gonna nudge you down the path of getting you closer to the reveal of what the actual answer is. And then the last column and I'm gonna wreck my own framework here, 'cause I'm gonna add a column the last column, is what's the actual answer? What did the actual answer turn out to be? And I know for myself, I often then sketch out, what are the implications of that? So a fifth column, because often the getting to the actual answer from the question that I had leads to a set of thinking or leads to, or points to a decision or decisions that need to be made or it suggests things that... Sometimes it's helpful to spell those out explicitly. And I call this the Open Questions framework because you could just call it the questions framework, but I wanna leave it open, right? I want to make sure that people recognize this is a way of thinking and prioritizing questions as the category of information, and then driving you through a process of getting to an increasing amount of clarity that leads you to a more obvious place. And that's what I thought of when I read this, because I do that pretty naturally. I don't think I do it with the level of precision that the author, Diviney, is asking us to do in situations of uncertainty. I definitely wanna press on that. I felt like, "Wow, this is basically validating why this approach that I've been using, and somebody must have taught it to me. I don't think I made it up. I don't know where it came from, but I've been using it for years to very positive effect.

Jorge 11:18

I remember you and I talking a long time ago, and you talking about questions. So it's certainly a topic that's been top of mind for you for a long time. I was hoping that you would clarify... I think I'm pretty clear on columns two through five. I'm not as clear on the very first column. So, you said, "Write down the questions and stack rank them." But you also said that there is something you call the controlling question.

Harry 11:44

Ah, yeah.

Jorge 11:45

The way that played to me is like somehow there's what these questions are in service to, or like the ur-question. Can you clarify the difference between the controlling question and this first column?

Harry 12:00

Sure. I think what you've done is you've put your finger on something implicit in the structure, which is, to me, the first question's the only one that matters. It's the controlling question. That may or may not turn out to fundamentally be true, but that's how I think about it, which is, if you understand what the single most important question is, that's your controlling question. And almost invariably you'll find that the questions underneath it are not the ones that matter the most, somewhat by definition, but also that they tend to be subservient to the answer that comes out.

Jorge 12:43

I know that I mentioned this in a previous conversation, but the model that comes to my mind in hearing you talk about this is Roger Martin's Cascading Choices framework, right? Where there is a set of questions that the business must ask itself. And they are prioritized. Like, the very first question is, what is our winning aspiration? And the other ones things like, where will we play? How will we win? What capabilities must we have? They're all in service to that one. And they relate to each other, because if you determine that you will address a particular market, that might influence your winning aspiration. But you do have to address the kind of higher order questions first, before you start getting into details.

Harry 13:31

Yeah. You know, one of the tricks that I use in dealing with this framework is, if I'm not sure which one is the controlling question, maybe I have two that are competing, I'll often just flip them and ask myself, "If this were the controlling question, why would that be true?" And usually what happens when I do that is I'm able to address that, the friction in that, and help me then stack rank most effectively.

Jorge 14:14

How does this play in a team environment?

Harry 14:18

Actually, that's where it's most valuable. It plays in a team environment, I think, to some extent, even better than it works for an individual. I've certainly used this technique for myself by myself. But where I have found this method to be so powerful is in getting a group of people to work together to rank a set of questions and ultimately to identify what amounts to the question that is above and beyond all the other questions because the rest of the framework, if you will, is fairly mechanical, right? It's not that hard to work through columns two through five. What is hard is identifying the questions, clarifying them, and then getting them ranked in an order. And doing that in a team setting, getting the collaboration to happen so that people are on the same page about what those questions are and what order those questions are in is much of the value of having this as a tool that makes explicit this implicit model.

Jorge 15:25

It's okay if you don't have any, but do you have an example of a controlling question? Because now I'm like, "I wonder if I have any of these myself?"

Harry 15:34

Here's a personal one, here's a personal example, or one from personal lives. Like, wanna buy a new house, right? I mean, this is a thing that happened before. And there are lots of questions about buying: how many rooms do you want? What kind of layout do you want? How much is it gonna cost? There are a lot of questions you can ask, but the controlling question is, where do you wanna live? Because everything falls outta that: all the constraints and everything else, and the entire process of figuring out where you're gonna live is a result of the location that you actually would wanna live. And often there's a lot of implicit information that's embedded in that question. So, for example, when, looking for my most recent house, where did I wanna live was definitely not on the list. There were a set of criteria. I was looking for a place that was single story because I've got a bad knee. I was for a place where I could get to all sorts of services. Had I thought about just looking for small towns, I wanna live in a small town that's encapsulated by services, I probably could have saved myself a year of searching for the house. Because by focusing on the house and focusing on the characteristics and attributes of the house, I did not realize that what I was looking for was an ecosystem around the house, and the house was really secondary to the ecosystem.

Jorge 17:13

Wow, that's really powerful. What comes to mind in hearing you say that is that we tend to spend so much more time on the answers, when spending a bit more time thinking about the questions might save us a lot of grief.

Harry 17:30

Absolutely. Yeah. And certainly save us a lot of time. And I think that's kinda what Diviney is getting to, is that if we can come up with better questions... he says, "to remain grounded in the sphere of what you know and control, cultivate a habit of asking yourself better questions." It's not a complicated directive, right? But getting good at, it's gonna take time and energy and practice.

Jorge 17:56

Have you found any practices that let you ask better questions?

Harry 18:01

I think that the one that I use a lot, I'm not gonna recommend it necessarily, is "What am I assuming is true?" Or a flip version of that is, "What would have to be true in order to... fill in the blank?"

Jorge 18:17

So, for example, in the one you just brought up about where do you wanna live, it sounded like you had assumed that you would be living in the same town somehow, right?

Harry 18:28

That was clearly one assumption. Another assumption was that I could find a house that fit every other criterion I had in any town. And that simply wasn't true.

Jorge 18:39

That makes sense. Okay, so questioning assumptions.

Harry 18:42

Yeah. So quick test of assumptions, an assumption. Being an uncritically held belief, means that it isn't too hard to pressure test what the assumptions are, and so, identifying assumptions is often a good place to start to ask better questions. And then, another way into that is to ask myself, "Well, what would have to be true in order for whatever it is I'm looking for?" What would have to be true in the example that we just had. What would have to be true in order for me to really want this house if I found it? Let's say I found everything about this house was perfect, what would have to be true? "Oh, I have to be able to walk to a hardware store, a bank, a post office, a market, a bar." But I didn't even think about those things. Maybe I'm asking myself the wrong question. Maybe I should be thinking about what towns and what would the proximity to that town need to be in order for me to find a house that would satisfy me? It changes the equation.

Jorge 19:49

well, that seems really useful. I have an idea in mind right now of a situation in which I need to apply this, so it feels like a very practical outcome of this conversation.

Harry 20:00

I, personally rely on this a lot. And I really deeply appreciated the words that Diviney gave to this in Masters of Uncertainty, because he makes it very clear that this is a... it's a skill and a habit worth cultivating, because it'll get you closer to where you wanna be, quicker.

Jorge 20:21

Once again, I feel like I've learned a lot in one of our conversations, Harry. Thank you.

Harry 20:28

Absolutely. Thanks so much for the conversation, Jorge.

Narrator 20:35

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes@tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.