Questions You Should Expect

C · Plate 11 in the On the Record series · Other Communications

Preparation tends to concentrate on the hostile question, which is the one that generates anxiety. The questions that actually cause trouble are usually mild, obvious and unprepared, because everyone assumed someone else had thought about them. They are missed not through carelessness but through familiarity.

A short list covers most of them, and the list is the same across almost every subject. It is worth walking through deliberately, in writing, before any exchange that will be quoted, because the act of writing the answers reveals which ones do not have any.

The list

How much did it cost, or what did it require. Who decided, and when. What was considered and not chosen. What happens to the people affected. How will anyone know whether this worked. When will the next thing be said about it. Six questions, none of them adversarial, and between them they account for a large share of the moments where a speaker is visibly surprised.

The last two are the most frequently unprepared. An answer to how anyone will know whether this worked requires the speaker to name a measure in advance, which many organisations avoid. Being unable to name one is itself an answer, and it is better to have decided what to say about that in advance than to discover it live.

Why obvious questions are missed

The mechanism is a kind of shared blindness. Inside a project, the cost, the decision history and the alternatives considered are common knowledge, discussed so often that they stop registering as information. The team therefore does not prepare answers to them, because the answers feel too available to need preparing, and availability inside a group is not the same as availability under a question.

The same mechanism makes the answers, when they do come, sound dismissive. A question that the speaker considers elementary is answered briefly, and brevity in response to a fair question reads as impatience. The remedy is not more words but treating the question as new, which it is to the person asking.

Preparing the awkward ones honestly

Some of the six questions have answers that are genuinely uncomfortable. The cost was higher than expected. The alternative was rejected for reasons that are hard to state briefly. The people affected have not yet been told everything. None of these is improved by being rephrased into something smoother; the rephrasing is what turns an awkward fact into a story about evasion.

The workable approach is to state the uncomfortable fact plainly and immediately follow it with what is being done about it, in that order. Reversing the order produces the construction where good news is announced and bad news appears in a subordinate clause, which every audience has learned to read straight through.

Writing the six answers takes half an hour and is the highest-value half hour in most preparation. It also frequently changes what the organisation decides to say, because an answer that cannot be written down without embarrassment usually indicates a decision that has not been finished rather than a communication that has not been polished.