Open-Ended Questions Go Beyond The Facts

from the desk of Ron Sukenick

Have you ever spent at least part of your Thanksgiving holiday sharing a feast at someone's home? Have you noticed how the layout of the house affects the way guests relate to each other? I love to watch people, anyway, and I find it so interesting to notice how the architecture and the furniture actually influence the interactions.

Here's what I mean: If there's an open archway or a wide hallway leading into the kitchen, people will congregate around the "island" in that room, moving freely in and out of the kitchen as they carry on their conversations. Then, if there are big spaces opening up into a sunroom or even a bedroom or sitting room, small groups will move into those rooms and continue talking. In other words, the more open the rooms are, and the easier it is for people to move freely in and out of them, the more likely people will be to chat with a lot of different groups and individuals. Then, I noticed, the more filled with furniture a room is, the more likely people will find a spot and just stay there the entire time, talking with the same group of folks.

No, I'm not a realtor, but I am a student of human behavior. I see a parallel between these house "traffic patterns" and relationships, whether they're business or personal ones. Open-ended questions keep a conversation flowing freely. With closed-end (fact-only) questions, once the question's been answered, conversation seems to stop. Remember me talking about the three magic words "Tell Me More"? Those three words are an open invitation to keep talking. Fact questions are closed. Think about the difference between "Where do you work?" and "What do you like best about your work?", or between the question "Will you be attending the networking meeting tomorrow?" and "How do you find this networking group compared with others you've belonged to?".

One "closed" question, "What do you do?" can actually be turned into an open-ended question. Next time I plan to offer some tips on innovative ways to answer that one. For now, though, just remember, Beyond Networking conversations, the ones that use open-ended questions and open-ended answers, the ones that lead to Connection and then to Relationship - those aren't about facts, not really at all. Those conversations are about people.