Monday, April 23, 2007

Questions

I need your help!

Our business is about listening, right?

In fact, isn’t all dialogue about listening?

Isn’t one of our key unique business propositions about our ability to help our clients’ listen to their customers?

And, isn’t one of the key benefits of the web the ability to really listen and listen carefully?

So if listening is the key, then do you agree with the following:

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
James Thurber

It got me thinking.  It suggests that helping our clients frame new, insightful, interesting, different and “out-of-sight-of-the-box’ questions is more important than walking in with lots of answers…

Knowing the questions—the real questions, the hard questions, the wild questions—will get us to answers we might never before have considered….Do you agree?

And, that is my question…

Posted by David on 04/23 at 08:06 AM
(6) Comments • Permalink

  1. A prudent question is one half of wisdom.

    Posted by Sir Francis Bacon  on  2007-04-23 15:07:08

  2. If the array of questions differ from the norm, then shouldn't the customer have all the answers. But as we are all customers - in one particular frame of mind, then shouldn't we have all the questions? Interesting, isn't it!

    Posted by Bernard Baker  on  2007-04-23 15:46:12

  3. If one half of wisdom is the question -- and that means a really good/focused question -- maybe the other half is listening to it -- dialouge....

    Posted by david sable  on  2007-04-23 16:22:03

  4. "Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?" "I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is." -- Douglas Adams And this is probably the most definitive explanation I've come across as to why [the results weren't what we expected | the client didn't like the work | the campaign failed]. Answers are the easy part. The hard part is getting to the right question.

    Posted by Glenn White  on  2007-04-23 16:46:12

  5. Even the right question needs to be asked carefully. If it's uncomfortable for the client, she may stop coming for guidance. But then one might say, "That isn't the right question then!" Maybe that depends on whether the client is ready for the answer.

    Posted by Vladimir Leonov  on  2007-04-24 17:14:26

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