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Three Questions

👥 Group Setting | 🕒 5 min + 5min/person | 🔄 Iteratively | 🛋️ Required Comfort: 1

Example

Use When​

Your team members sometimes hold back instead of asking a question, or voicing a concern, when another team member speaks.

Prerequisites​

None

Tool Description​

We humans are incredibly good at impression management - the skill of making sure everyone around us thinks we are kind, smart and delightful. Rarely do we want to risk looking ignorant, intrusive or negative. This can make us choose to hold back, instead of asking the challenging questions, offering suggestions, or voicing our concerns, even in situations where they would be valid. “Three Questions” aims to address this by prompting team members to ask 3 types of interactions that could normally be viewed as ignorant, intrusive or negative, in a constructive environment.

  1. Select a team member to start. This person briefly describes what they are currently working on, and what is challenging them (max 1 min).
  2. Starting with the person to the right of the speaker, the next 4 team members will ask 4 questions to the speaker;
    • The first asks a clarifying question to the speaker
    • The second offers an idea that could be useful to the speaker’s work
    • The third challenges something in the speaker’s description of their work
  3. Start over from 1. with the person to the left of the speaker, until everyone has been the speaker. If a team member can’t think of a good question to pose, feel free to ask the team for suggestions, or simply skip that question. The important part is that questions and conversation flows freely, not that anyone is forced to ask the “right” question.

Purpose​

“Three Questions” aims to engage your team members in letting go of their automatic impression management, and instead ask questions that they might have held back on, in a low-risk environment, .

Outcome​

While “Three Questions” acts as a team work experience of posing and answering questions, having your team members clarify, challenge or offer ideas to each others work can also increase the quality of work.