Sculpture and the art of asking questions

Peter Druker is credited with saying that one of his greatest skills as a consultant was his ability to ask good questions.

Scott Ginsberg is famous for at least two things and one of them is a great opening line he uses, “Let me ask you this.”

I just completed a 45 minute call with a long-time client who has been stuck on the horns of a dilemma for about six months. The call was set up to give him a chance to verbalize replies to a series of probing questions I’d sent him in an email.

By the end of our chat, he had a couple of action items related to solving the problem and he shared that he was “encouraged for the first time in a while.”

La Pieta

He admitted that he’d already thought about some of the action items but wasn’t clear on how they would work or if his perspective was correct. I didn’t have the answers, but the questions I asked helped him clear away the debris and see things differently.

Reminds me of a Michelangelo quotation,

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”

The best solution is quite often already there, waiting for someone to use questions like chisels to chip away and reveal a masterpiece.