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The Art of Asking Good Questions
Paperback
PhilosophyBusiness GeneralSelf-Help
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Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 74
Weight: 0.21
Height: 0.15 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
We are taught, from the earliest years of school, to prize the answer. We are graded on it, interviewed for it, promoted because of it. Nobody grades us on the quality of the question that produced it, and this is a peculiar oversight, because the ceiling of any answer is set by the question that came before it. Ask a shallow question and the most brilliant mind in the world will hand you back a shallow answer, delivered with all the confidence of a deep one.
The Art of Asking Good Questions makes the case, plainly and without hedging, that we have this the wrong way round. Drawing on Socratic method and Zen inquiry, on decades inside university lecture theatres and broadcast studios, and on a career spent moving between software engineering, quality assurance, and applied ethics, David Tuffley sets out what actually distinguishes a question that opens a conversation from one that merely fills the silence until someone gets to the answer they wanted all along.
This is not a book of communication tips dressed up with a new vocabulary. It examines the actual architecture of a question: the difference between curiosity and interrogation, between a question that invites an honest account and one that has already decided the verdict before it is asked. It shows why listening, properly done, is not preparation for a good question but the very medium in which one is formed, and why the two second pause most of us cannot manage to sit through is often the most consequential silence in any conversation. It looks at the questions that repair a relationship and the ones, grammatically almost identical, that wound it. It borrows the five whys from the factory floor and shows why the same discipline that finds a fault in a production line will find the real cause of a stalled career, a failing project, or a problem that keeps recurring no matter how many times it appears to be solved.
There is a chapter here for anyone who leads or teaches, built around an uncomfortable but well-earned observation: the best instructors and managers Tuffley has known over a near thirty year academic career answered questions least readily, not from indifference but from a disciplined patience with other people's thinking, patience that is harder to sustain than it looks and considerably more valuable than the quick, satisfying answer it resists giving. And there is a chapter, perhaps the most personal in the book, on the particular kind of nerve required to ask the questions that actually matter in a marriage, a friendship, or a family, where the stakes of getting it wrong are measured in something more lasting than an awkward pause.
Written in the sober, unhurried prose of a scholar who has spent a lifetime explaining difficult things to people who did not ask to think that hard before breakfast, this is a short book with no padding and no formula, only a considered argument, worked examples drawn from real practice, and a closing set of exercises for readers who would rather practise the skill than simply read about it. If you have ever sensed that the quality of your thinking depends on something upstream of the answer, this book names what that something is, and shows you how to get better at it.
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