The Art of Disruptive Questioning

Many of our clients are feeling confused and bewildered by the amount of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity existing in business today.

Rather than see these phenomena as constraints, innovators perceive them as opportunities for creating powerful new business models and game changing products and services that people will value and cherish.

Mastery of a new, powerful, disruptive and provocative skill set allows us and our clients to flow and flourish, rather than to flounder and fail, in these challenging times. This is because “Innovators provocative questions push boundaries, assumptions and borders. They leave few rocks unturned when they cultivate the garden.”

The rise of the disruptive provocateur

A disruptive provocateur courageously questions everything; they use disruptive, thought provoking and bold questions to challenge the status quo, often with an uncommon intensity and with great frequency. They use disagreement, conflict and dissonance to generatively inquire, listen, and debate the best possible ideas to achieve mindset flips, paradigm shifts, and high level meta thinking that creates business and industry inflection points!

What is a disruptive question?

Disruptive questions enable us to cultivate fresh perspectives and insights about ‘what currently is’ and ‘what could’ or ‘might be’ in the future. They fearlessly puncture ‘in the box’ thinking to uncover counterintuitive and surprising solutions. They are invitations to think differently about a person, situation, decision, challenge or problem. They are also key creative catalysts that allow, provoke and emerge possibilities for innovative ideas, decisions and solutions that may not have previously existed.

Why is disruptive inquiry a critical lever for creating the safe holding space for innovation to occur?

Disruptive questions enable people to adopt a systemic perspective, to better understand the business problems, and get to the core of the issue at hand. They enable us to make better business decisions and to re-frame problems into generative systemic challenges that can be transformed into breakthrough innovation.

The Four Steps of the Disruptive Generative Inquiry Cycle[1]

Step One: Elicit a description of the territory

Like all great coaches know, it starts by eliciting a description of our clients’ territory.

This enables us to explore, understand and describe the specific operating (cognitive, emotional, and visceral) territory our client operates within.

When we listen deeply, we reveal ‘what is’ and connect with our client to understand how it feels to be located in that kind of territory.

Asking who, what, when and where questions such as

–      What is the real problem?

–      What does this problem/that really mean to you?

–      How does this impact on your customer?

–      Who else is involved?

Step Two: Identify the causes of the current reality occurring in the territory

To really know the territory we have to immerse ourselves in it to generate a deep understanding of our clients’ and their customers’ current situation or business problem. This enables us to evolve a hypothetical disruptive solution, which can later be prototyped, tested and validated for breakthrough innovation. Asking causal questions helps get to the core of the business problem, and it requires shifting listening across the facts, to the data, as well as from the heart.

Ask causal questions such as;

–      How does that issue relate or link to the core problem?

–      How are you framing this problem?

–      How is that important to you?

–      What else might be at play around your core problem?

–      What are some of the possibilities in this situation?

Step Three: Be willing and able to disrupt the territory

It’s important to make the shift from specific and descriptive questions towards generating intentionally disruptive ones. To create collisions between people’s internal programming, perspectives and thought patterns to initiate mindset shifts, create cracks, openings and thresholds that elicit possibilities for solutions.

When we demonstrate deep coaching presence, we automatically create a safe holding space which basis for empathetic and compassionate relationships. Doing this effectively enables us to unconsciously create an assertive, candid, non-threatening and constructive, generative debate.

Asking deeper ‘what’ and more ‘why’ and ‘why not’ questions such as;

–      What do you really believe about that?

–      What is your purpose in this?

–      What could be possible?

–      Why do we do it that way?

–      Why is it so important to you to solve this problem?

–      Why not think differently about that?

–      Why aren’t our customers happy with that solution? 

Step Four: Elicit creative ideas through generative debate

This step uses conflict, disagreement and dissonance to generate a deeper, provocative and creative debate. This enables the coach or the leader to draw on the potentiality of the essentially inductive debate to elicit a range of unexpected possibilities waiting to be revealed in the emergent space.

Asking ‘what if’ and ‘how might’ questions such as;

–      What if we were to think differently about that?

–      What if we could reframe the problem into an opportunity?

–      What if that did/didn’t work?

–      What if we do the opposite to that?

–      What if this product could be available to everyone?

–      How might we explore that idea more deeply?

Being able to generatively question and listen are not only symbiotic, when we master this vital innovative coaching skill set, we demonstrate generosity, respect and appreciation for one another which makes collaboration and co-creation an effortless and easy experience. This, incidentally, is the basis for developing innovative organizational cultures.