Asking Smarter Questions

Insight drives innovation and enables us to understand the world from other peoples' points of view - our customers and colleagues, our advocates and competitors. Asking truly brilliant questions is the key to cutting through the clutter, thriving in a data-heavy world, and gaining meaningful insight. This book explains how.

Insight is the superpower that drives innovation and enables us to understand the world from other peoples' points of view, be they customers or colleagues, advocates or competitors. This new book from data storyteller Sam Knowles explains how to ask smarter questions - questions that, by design, stimulate more useful answers. This is the shortcut to better productivity, fast-tracked innovation, and organisational success - for businesses, universities, charities, and governments.

For too long, the simple act of asking questions has been overlooked as almost too trivial to contemplate. Asking Smarter Questions seeks to champion the art of curiosity by setting out a framework to make every question count. The fundamental building blocks of insight are data and information, joined together in new and often unpredictable ways. The way we surface new data and information and make meaningful connections between data points is by asking smarter questions. By taking this approach, you can make your organisation a less confrontational, more collaborative, and more productive environment in which to work - particularly in the more distributed and remote settings that will characterise the 2020s.

Managers, directors, and leaders will find the universal principles, expert interviews, and data-driven recommendations a source of inspiration to share with their teams. Asking Smarter Questions is aimed at professionals in businesses and organisations across all sectors, and will help those working in many functions, including market research, intelligence, insight, analytics, strategy, marketing, communications, planning, product development, and innovation.

Auteur

Sam Knowles is a data storyteller with more than 30 years' experience enabling organisations to use data smarter and communicate with impact. A classicist with a psychology doctorate, he helps organisations to talk "Human". Asking Smarter Questions is the third in Sam's Using Data Better trilogy of books, which also includes Narrative by Numbers (2018) and How To Be Insightful (2020).

Contenu

1. What's all the fuss about? 2. What did the bloody Greeks ever do for us? 3. Why should we even bother with "Why?"? 4. Curiosity did WHAT, did you say? 5. What makes a good question? 6. What makes a bad question? 7. Does silence and listening matter? 8. Can we go over that in forensic detail? 9. Do you like my bedside manner? 10. Just how sensitive should a question be? 11. What are the best questions in the world? 12. How can I find out more?