Throughout my business career, I have never been one to shy away from asking questions. Even so, I often would leave meetings wondering if I’d missed opportunities to gain insights. Perhaps I had asked a “yes-or-no” question instead of a more open-ended one that elicited the complex reasons behind someone’s success or failure. Perhaps I had expressed my opinion prior to asking for someone else’s view. I might have posed a double-barreled question, which involved two issues but left room for only one answer, which elicited a response to a question I hadn’t intended to ask. Or, worse yet, maybe I hadn’t asked questions at all, but instead rattled off statements and expected others to somehow reply. In short, I wasn’t asking good questions—but I wanted to learn how. To my surprise, I found that many of my colleagues felt the same. That’s when I knew that managers should be more prepared to engage others more effectively with great questions. This questioning skills workshop empowers students with a new approach to enquiry designed to provide them with a competitive advantage throughout their careers. The breakthrough questioning method is steeped in investigative journalism, urban design, social psychology, and Newtonian physics. It emphasises humility, finely tuned listening, and empathy. Topics include: The Optimum Questioning Mindset The Seven Deadly Sins of Questions Principles of Great Questions Strategies to Craft Compelling Question Sequences The Sawatsky Method John Sawatsky has spent most of his career challenging standard journalistic practices. His goal has been to change the culture of the journalistic interview. His method is the result of over four decades of R&D that began at Carlton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he dedicated 10 years to teaching investigative journalism. He argues that TV interviewers who adopt a prosecutorial style and rely on yes/no questions upstage their guests and merely scratch the surface of the story. To get to the heart of the story, interviewers first need to adopt an “input” mindset, best captured by Susan Cain in her new book Quiet as “extreme humility coupled with intense professional will.” Mr. Sawatsky emphasises the importance of “professional listening” and the need for self-awareness when asking questions. Most TV interviewers adopt the opposite mindset – “output” – relying on flash and charisma. It’s good for ratings! Interviewers should ask open, neutral and lean questions that explore key changes in their guests' lives and ease them into the moment of the topic. By doing so, they allow the true story to emerge unfettered by bias, hyperbole, and non-questions. He also teaches the importance of asking follow-up questions that expand upon what their guests actually said to them.

How do you cope with unprecedented levels of stress amid accelerating and unpredictable change? I have developed a workshop that draws inspiration from several sources: Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer’s research on the social cognitive perspective on mindfulness and the power of “changing the context” of any situation. Langer makes a connection between personal choice and personal well-being. The work of the late psychologist Albert Bandura on self-efficacy and personal mastery. As Bandura puts it, “Expectations of personal mastery affect both initiation and persistence of coping behavior. The strength of people’s convictions in their own effectiveness is likely to affect whether they will even try to cope with given situations.” Proven therapeutic techniques associated with cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, that are used by clinical psychologists and psychotherapists to treat a variety of anxiety disorders. The workshop, which can be delivered online or face-to-face, is not intended to create a clinical setting or foster therapist-client engagements . Rather, it is designed to give participants new ways to think about the obstacles they face in their work and private lives. One unique aspect of the workshop is that it integrates contemporary photorealistic and abstract paintings, along with modern photography. This examination of artworks immerses participants in image-rich and compelling individual and group exercises. It not only draws participants into the session in a whole new way, but also engages visual learners. Art also provides a vehicle to introduce participants to principles and concepts associated with a six-step process for cultivating resilience. These steps include interpreting your mood state, reinterpreting your mood state, framing the problem, reframing the problem, ideating solutions, and testing solutions.

Tim Brown, Chairman of IDEO, describes design thinking as 'the integration of feeling, intuition and inspiration with rational and analytical thought.’ To Roger Martin, former Dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, design thinking is a ‘balance between analytical mastery and intuitive originality’. Meanwhile, David Kelley, founder of IDEO and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, calls it a ‘framework that people can hang their creative confidence on,’ providing those who don’t consider themselves to be creative with a way to solve some of the world’s most complex problems. The enduring value of the Stanford process is that when it is applied properly, it can produce innovative solutions that emerge not from the ‘ideate’ phase per se, but from the ‘empathise’ phase – the information- gathering phase. Proper application means not moving too quickly downstream into the latter phases – what most of us would consider to be the exciting bits involving late nights and whiteboards and lots of pacing around the room – without first understanding the underlying issues associated with the end user’s experience. This hands-on session will open your eyes to the power of design thinking and provide you with a new approach to solving complex problems.

Open any book on research methods and you will find a chapter devoted to designing compelling research questions. And, yet, when I ask my university students how they chose their questions for their dissertations or capstone projects, they often reply that they simply thought of a few questions while gathering information for their literature reviews for their dissertations. They followed no formal process. But we know that research questions are the rebar and concrete that hold research projects together. The questions students choose to study set the tone—and limits—of their projects. For that reason, we need to offer students a new approach to research question design that will unleash their creativity, deepen their understanding of their chosen topics, and take their research to new heights. Luckily, such an approach already exists—in the context of the visual arts. This workshop takes research question design to a new level by combining principles of visual thinking, urban design, academic research, and critical enquiry. If urban designers can apply the concepts of visual thinking to achieve a richer understanding of the visual world, why can’t students apply them to achieve a richer understanding of the topics they study—to more closely connect their research processes to the world around them?