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I’m Sorry. What Was The Question?
“ I’m sorry. What was the question?” We may think of this as coming from someone that wasn’t paying attention. However, I feel that, if more people were more honest, this is a question that they would or should ask more often. Sometimes, questions aren’t as clear as they appear.
Seeking To Understand
In the self-help classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, he wrote regarding Habit 5: Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood,
“We have such a tendency to rush in, to fix things up with to really deeply understand the good advice. But we often fail to take the time to diagnose, problem first.”
Let’s look more closely at this passage. First, for this post, let’s replace “good advice” with “ answer” and replace “problem” with “ question.”
Second, when rephrasing the quote, the confusion is two-fold. The confusion can start with the person asking, then spread to the person trying to answer. When this happens, does the title make more sense?
Clarifying Questions
In past posts, I mentioned my call center training and experience. As I wrote in “ On Empathy: Why We Need It Now More Than Ever,” I mentioned the goal on one call resolution: resolving ALL of the client’s concerns within that one call. To do this, we had to clearly understand the “why” behind the client’s call. Something that I quickly learned early on was that clients would use a word or term that I didn’t understand. For example, I would use the word escrow, whereas a client might refer to it as their impound account. Different language for the EXACT same thing.
Due to factors like the above example contributing to probable miscommunication, we were taught the value of using clarifying questions. This could be as simple as rephrasing the conversation: “It sounds like you called in today to discuss X. Do I understand you?” Seems clear, right?
This was such a simple, basic, yet extremely effective skill to carry with me, even after I moved into another role. To this day, when someone reaches out to me and I am unclear, I don’t hesitate to ask the clarifying questions that I need to ask to know EXACTLY what they need me to do. I even did this on my…
