QUESTION TO LEARN

Writer, speaker, and workshop facilitator Lalley’s business book aimed at encouraging asking questions to bring about a functional workplace.

This guide encourages readers to approach work life with a sense of curiosity, using questions as a way to become engaged with a subject, discover a business’s needs and effective approaches, and connect with others on an authentic level. The book shows readers how asking questions can get people out of a rut of standard processes and assumptions, allowing them to discover what customers actually want, how a system can be optimized, and what might help a team to work more effectively. Lalley draws on cited research, as well as anecdotes from his own experience of asking useful questions in professional settings and training others to do so; he even unexpectedly includes lessons learned in improv classes. Along the way, he fills pages with examples of companies and individuals using questions to achieve success, as well as observations about environments that limit opportunities by closing themselves off to queries. The book also acknowledges that there are plenty of ways to misuse or manipulate interrogatives as a tool, but there are plenty of positive cases of rooting out causes of problems and possible solutions. Overall, the book is highly readable with a conversational style. It lacks the end-of-chapter summaries often found in business books, so readers are left to ponder their own takeaways. However, it’s not difficult to extract actionable tips; at one point, for instance, the book highlights when a CEO responded to the author’s statement of “I don’t know” by encouraging him to find an answer, instead of punishing a lack of knowledge. Overall, readers are likely to find it worth the effort to put the book’s thesis into practice by applying their own curiosity.

A persuasive argument in favor of a question-based approach to decision making.