How many questions on an average do you ask per day?
Asking or answering questions is an integral part of our communications. In our everyday personal and professional lives we either ask or answer a host of questions.
Some interesting statistics are as:
- About 7600 + questions are posted per day on Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com) on various topics (data collected on 09-01-2014).
- Mothers are asked nearly 300 questions a day by their children, study finds.
Questions have become an integral part of communication in our day-to-day life; be at home or at work.
Asking questions apply to every walk of our life few of them are listed below:
- Requirement gathering (understanding customer requirement)
- Attending Seminars
- Training (both instructor and students may ask questions)
- Root cause analysis (such as 5 Why analysis)
- Interrogation
- Meetings (includes almost all categories of meeting)
- Posting Questions on Websites/forums/social networking websites
- Conducting Surveys (such as client satisfaction survey)
- Making Purchase
- Conducting Interviews
- Personal communication
In this article you will see two examples of asking questions.
Vidhi was 4 years when she demonstrated how asking the right question could direct to an effective response to her question.
She would find it difficult to differentiate between the pair of slippers to wear in its respective foot. She designed a simple question to address this issue.
Every time, she would wear one of the slippers to her right feet and asked her dad innocently “is this correct?”
This question restricts the response to a Yes or a No. Excellent thinking and a super question!
Another example;
A 4 year kid goes for a hair cut accompanied by his dad. The barber in order to engage the kid during the course of hair cut asks his name. The shy kid does not respond to the barber inspite of several attempts during the course. After the hair cut was over, in a soft voice the kid answers ‘Ronny‘. It was not difficult for the barber to figure out that it is his pet name. The barber wanted to know his full name (as registered in his school) and he asks him “what is your school name?”
The kid innocently replied “St Josephs English School”. The barber asked the same question again. This time also the kid’s response was the same, but he was irritated with the same question asked again.
The barber thought for a while and realized his mistake and changed his question. He asked “By what name does your teacher call you?
The kid smiled and said “Ranbir“.
What you ask is very important because the response to that may impact your next steps.
In Vidhi’s situation, it was done with one question and with limiting the response to the question to a Yes or a No. In Ranbir’s situation, wrong question asked not only wasted time of the parties involved but also irritated the respondent.
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions – Claude Levi-Strauss
Author: Daljit Rana
Image Credit: http://www.zcool.com.cn/u/5/ (downloaded via http://all-free-download.com)
References:
- http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#questionsperday
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9959026/Mothers-asked-nearly-300-questions-a-day-study-finds.html