Business Book Review: The Art of the Question by Sean Grace
The best decision-making, solutions and relationships start not from what you know, but acknowledging what you don’t - and asking all the right questions.
My Rating: ★★★★
Length: 304 pages
Publisher: Luma Press
Released: 2024
Key Takeaways for Personal Branding
The Art of the Question by Sean Grace will have you questioning if you’re asking enough questions.
The book’s opening words are powerful ones:
“It’s been said that knowledge is knowing the right answer, while intelligence is knowing the right questions.”
Grace’s book delves into the science and art of asking questions. Positioned as a guide for seekers, dreamers, problem solvers and leaders, it shares what the best leaders, coaches and consultants already know - the solutions lie in the right questions, asked at the right time. It’s what truly allows you to understand the problem. And to make better decisions and have better relationships as a result. Yet, as we climb the corporate ladder, so many of us become the problem-solver. The person with the answers, rather than the inquirer. Questions become sidelined for solutions.
Leaders must instead learn to continually exercise their questioning muscles.
Developing a Curious Mind
The relentless focus on questions stems from a curious mind. From knowing you don’t have all the answers. From knowing the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. Much like Socrates, who famously declared:
“I know that I know nothing.”
Cultivating a curious mind can come from, as Grace gracefully puts it, ‘reading wildly’. From developing a growth, over fixed, mindset. From engaging in creative activities like playing an instrument, writing or pursuing artistic endeavours. Or, from travel and exploration to unfamiliar places.
The Four Stages of Competence
Graces highlights a concept in psychology detailing the stages of competence:
1. Unconscious incompetence: when you don’t know what you don’t know.
2. Conscious incompetence: when you start to acknowledge what you don’t know.
3. Conscious competence: when you start building the skills, but still need to think through steps.
4. Unconscious competence: when you’ve internalised the actions of the skill and don’t have to think as much about execution.
The question is, how often are you operating from a place of unconscious incompentence? And without you realising it, missing the opportunity to learn what you don’t know you don’t know. Remember, the Dunning-Kruger Effect proposes that we tend to overestimate our ability to execute a particular task.
Catch and Return
The Art of the Question is brimming with meticulous examples of the types of questions to ask, and when. One questioning technique is particularly worth noting. The simple, yet powerful approach of mirroring. Paraphrasing what someone has said to you and returning their own words to them as a question. Too simple a masterful technique to not remember to use regularly.
Grace delivers a thorough guide through the art of questioning. Philosophy meets the modern-day workplace, with admirable attention to detail on how to open your mind to new possibilities with the power of questions.
The Art of the Question by Sean Grace: Available on Amazon.
