Socratic Magic
How Can I Help?
This is the one question that a business mentor can ask at the beginning of a meeting to really hone in and focus on pain points for a growing startup. Funnily enough, this specific question or permeation of it, in many instances, is never posed at all.
The Socratic method is beneficial in many scenarios as it’s rooted in asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking. Based on discussion and dialogue help to illuminate ideas. How lovely. So could we learn to employ it more often? Or are those in authoritative positions afraid to ask the really hard questions for which they may not know the answer, or worse yet, find themselves stumped to answer a tough question posed by a junior?
How Can I Help? is a powerful question simply because of its bluntness and the immediate actions that may ensue – whether that be an on-the-spot email introduction or a review of a current business model. In some instances just hearing a Co-founder articulate what they believe to be the most pressing business priorities can be a useful exercise (both from a heuristic viewpoint and in order to probe the Co-founder’s reasoning and rationale further).
Inside any healthy business, at the heart of its culture, is a commonplace practice for fostering a question-friendly environment. Whether C-level or intern-level, encouraging everyone to ask those hard questions, even when answers prove completely elusive, can turn out to be truly transformational.
At the outset of a workshop or strategy session questions are a great tool for calibration. What are your paint points? What are we going to do? With the right pace (and in the right space) these types of questions can help to emphasize progress over problems. Promoting divergent thinking, and asking the really hard questions, can lead Founders down those all too rare paths to epiphany. Here are some of our favorites:
“What are the gaps in my knowledge and experience?”
– Charles Handy
“What should we stop doing?”
-Peter Drucker
“How can we become the company that would put us out of business?”
– Danny Meyer, CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group
“If we all got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what would he do?”
– Andy Gove, former CEO of Intel [This was the defiant question posed by Gove that led to Intel ditching memory for microprocessors]
Find a lot more (100 to be exact) stimulating questions, here.
And for even more thought-provoking questions we recommend Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas.