Four questions that unlock co-creation

If co-creative ideation is one of our human strengths, how can leaders best nurture and support it in teams, meetings or virtually? In my experience, and as the great MIT professor Otto Scharmer pointed out, it has a lot to do with how open our senses, minds, hearts and wills are to listening to each other.

How do you orchestrate listening in a stakeholder collective? Enabling meaningful listening in teams and collectives is linked to the art of asking powerful open-ended questions. The ones that most effectively trigger reflection, solution-finding or collaborative engagement are those that start with how, why, what if... e.g. how do we need to design this product to be more efficient? Why should we invest in a deep leadership dialogue? What if we started from scratch: how would you design this project? Undoubtedly, these questions are favorable for any kind of brainstorming.

However, open questions have some disadvantages. They tend to overwhelm or exhaust people. Most of the people you're asking are caught up in a hectic daily life that doesn't make it easy for them to switch on a level of imagination. So, most answers will be colored by what people think is realistic, not necessarily what might be a possible new idea. It's also not easy for those receiving the answers. Because transferring them into generalizable insights somebody with social sciences quality research background is needed. Closed questions seem to be more favorable for scaling insights. However, they tend to collect opinions rather than reliable prognoses of behaviors. (That's why I discussed the limitations of the net promoter score when it comes to learning about people's (likely) future actions once in this blogpost.)

Closed-ended questions as the most effective way to unlock co-creative ideation. This great article of the User Experience Research Community, reminds us why: they bridge greatly the benefits of both types of questions: eliciting scalable answers from a collective, but with room for generating new possible ideas about specific products or services together. Closed-ended questions are referred to as scale, ranking, multiple choice, and photo/drawing questions:

1. Scale questions allow you to capture perceptions in a structured way. For example "On a scale of 1-7, where 1 is dreaded and 7 is very excited, what is your typical attitude towards ___?". I personally use scale questions to make co-created perception shifts visible. For example, by asking at the beginning and at the end of the meeting or workshop “On a scale from 1-7: How much do we have a common understanding about our strategy?”
2. Ranking questions help to understand priorities. For example: “Rank the features you think should be updated first in the development of product x.” Personally, I use ranking questions most often to inform or support co-created collective management decisions. For example, when a management team wants to decide together on which values, measures, project ideas, or leadership principles they see the most potential for implementation.
3. Multiple choice questions are well known but less in the context of co-creation. For example: "Create with us: The next few questions will give you a list of ways we could change a particular feature and you will be asked to choose one for each. In the end, you will have created a product!" I personally use them to allow to co-create a leadership agenda, for example allowing to choose leadership topics that people feel would be beneficial to discuss together.
4. Photo/drawing questions allow respondents to picture themselves using a particular product feature. This helps to understand where in their rooms they place or use their device, etc. In my practice it helps to co-create shared understanding about the invisible and complex aspects of a culture and make them bespokable. For example, asking for picturing how management or project success looks like, or what pictures best symbolize the current state of their culture.

Good questions foster good listening skills. Reading this article from the perspective of the User Experience Research Community confirmed greatly my experience that good closed-ended questions, improve our quality of listening which leads not only to high quality but immediately in co-created results that everybody is identified with. Imagine what a company culture would look like if employee engagement surveys went beyond rating questions and instead allowed for closed-ended questions such as scale, ranking, smart multiple choice, photo and drawing questions? Would like me to co-create one for your organization together? Looking forward to hear from you.