Section: The Board Room
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SEO title: The Art of Asking the Right Question | Abdul Basit Jabbar
Meta description: Better decisions often begin with better questions. Abdul Basit Jabbar explores how asking the right question improves consulting, management, immigration strategy and everyday judgement.
Some problems are difficult because the answer is difficult.
Others are difficult because we are answering the wrong question.
That distinction matters more than it first appears.
I have sat through conversations where everybody was working hard to solve something, only for one question to completely change the direction of the discussion.
Sometimes it is surprisingly simple.
“Why are we doing it this way?”
“What are we actually trying to prove?”
“Who is this really for?”
“What happens if we do nothing?”
Or perhaps the most useful one:
“What am I not being told?”
The quality of a decision is often determined before the decision itself.
It begins with the question.
Good questions expose assumptions. They separate symptoms from causes. They make people explain things they had previously taken for granted. They uncover information that nobody realised was missing.
In consultancy, management and immigration work, that can be the difference between processing what is in front of you and actually understanding it.
I increasingly think that asking the right question is one of the most underrated professional skills.
Not because questions make you look intelligent.
Quite the opposite.
Some of the best questions sound embarrassingly basic.
The skill is having the confidence to ask them anyway.
The obvious question is not always the useful one
Imagine a business owner says:
“We need more clients.”
The obvious question is:
“How do we get more clients?”
That immediately sends the discussion towards advertising, networking, referrals, social media, search engines and sales.
All potentially useful.
But perhaps the better question is:
“Why do you think you need more clients?”
That may produce a completely different conversation.
Perhaps revenue has fallen.
Perhaps the business has hired more staff.
Perhaps existing clients are not profitable.
Perhaps too many enquiries fail to convert.
Perhaps the business has plenty of work but poor cash flow.
Perhaps clients are buying the cheapest service rather than the most valuable one.
If the real problem is profitability, more clients may actually make the situation worse.
You could work extremely hard solving the problem you were given and never touch the problem that actually exists.
That is why I do not think a consultant’s role is simply to provide answers.
Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is challenge the original question.
People normally arrive with a solution already in mind
This happens constantly.
Someone rarely walks into a professional conversation and says:
“I have no idea what is happening. Please start from the beginning.”
Usually they have already diagnosed the problem.
They have Googled it.
Spoken to someone.
Read something.
Asked a friend.
Perhaps discussed it with another professional.
By the time they reach you, they often arrive with a proposed answer.
“I need a sponsor licence.”
“I need to make this employee a manager.”
“I need to apply for this visa.”
“I need to restructure the company.”
“I need to dismiss this person.”
“I need a new website.”
“I need more marketing.”
The temptation is to accept the premise and start working.
But a good adviser needs to separate two things:
what the person wants to achieve
and
what they currently believe they need to do to achieve it.
Those are not always the same.
Someone saying “I need this visa” is not necessarily asking for a visa.
They may actually be saying:
“I need to remain in the UK.”
“I need to work.”
“I need to live with my partner.”
“I need to protect my business.”
“I need certainty.”
Once you understand the objective, different possibilities can appear.
The same applies in management.
An employee may say they need more resources.
What they may need is clearer responsibility.
A manager may say somebody needs more training.
What they may actually have is a performance issue.
A business may say it needs more staff.
Perhaps it needs a better process.
Questions separate the objective from the proposed solution.
That is where useful advice begins.
“Why?” is powerful, but it can also annoy people
There is a reason children discover the word “why” so early.
It is an extraordinarily effective question.
Why are we doing this?
Why does this happen?
Why does that matter?
Why did you decide that?
Why does the customer behave like this?
Keep asking and eventually you begin reaching the assumptions underneath a decision.
But “why?” has a problem.
Asked badly, it can sound like an accusation.
“Why did you do that?”
can easily mean:
“What on earth were you thinking?”
That is not particularly helpful if you actually want information.
Tone matters.
So does wording.
I often find that softer versions produce better answers.
“What led you to that decision?”
“Talk me through what happened there.”
“What was the thinking at the time?”
“What made that option seem right?”
You are still asking why.
You are simply removing the suggestion that the person is already on trial.
This is especially important in professional fact-finding.
If someone thinks you are judging their answer, they will begin editing it.
Once people begin telling you what they think you want to hear, the quality of the information falls.
Good questions require an environment in which truthful answers are easier to give.
Sometimes the first answer is only the polished answer
People prepare stories.
We all do it.
When something has happened repeatedly, we develop a short explanation for it.
Why did you leave the company?
“It was time for a new challenge.”
Why did the relationship break down?
“We grew apart.”
Why did the application fail?
“The Home Office didn’t accept the evidence.”
Why isn’t the business growing?
“The market is difficult.”
Those answers may be true.
But they are often the headline rather than the story.
The useful information is usually underneath.
What changed?
When did it change?
What happened immediately before that?
What did you do afterwards?
Who else was involved?
Was this the first time?
What documentation exists?
Those questions begin turning a general explanation into facts.
That matters enormously in immigration work.
A client might say:
“I lived with my partner for two years.”
That sounds straightforward.
But an adviser may need to know where they lived, when each address started and ended, whether both names appeared on documents, whether there were periods apart, why those periods occurred and what evidence exists for each stage.
The point is not to interrogate someone for the sake of it.
The point is that broad statements rarely contain enough detail to make reliable decisions.
Ask for facts before interpretation
One of the most useful habits I have developed is separating what happened from what somebody thinks it means.
Suppose someone says:
“My employer treated me unfairly.”
That is an interpretation.
It may be completely justified.
But if I am trying to understand the position, I first need the events.
What happened?
What was said?
When?
By whom?
Was anything written down?
What happened before it?
What happened afterwards?
Once the facts are clear, the interpretation becomes easier to assess.
The same principle is useful in immigration.
A client might say:
“The Home Office thinks our relationship isn’t genuine.”
Perhaps.
But what does the decision actually say?
Which evidence was considered?
What point was questioned?
What reason was given?
What was missing?
You cannot properly respond to a conclusion until you understand the route by which somebody reached it.
This is why documents matter.
Memory summarises.
Documents often preserve detail.
Ask one question at a time
This sounds almost too basic to mention.
Yet people constantly ask five questions in one sentence.
“When did you move there, who were you living with, were you working at the time, and did you tell the Home Office?”
The person answers whichever part they remember.
Normally the easiest one.
Then everyone assumes the other questions were answered too.
They were not.
Good interviewing is slower than that.
One question.
One answer.
Then the next question.
This is particularly important when something is complicated.
You need to let the person think.
Silence can feel uncomfortable, so we rush to fill it.
But if you ask a question and immediately begin explaining what you mean, suggesting possible answers or asking another question, you can accidentally answer it for them.
Sometimes the best thing after asking a good question is to stop talking.
Listen for the sentence that does not fit
This is where questioning becomes interesting.
You are listening to a story.
Everything sounds consistent.
Then one sentence feels slightly wrong.
Not necessarily dishonest.
Just inconsistent with the rest.
“We had been living together since 2022, although I was actually studying in another city until the following summer.”
That needs exploring.
“Our employee has been doing this role for years, but we only created the position last month.”
That needs exploring.
“The company doesn’t really recruit, but we interviewed four people before choosing him.”
Again, something to understand.
Many important issues appear this way.
The person telling the story may not even realise there is a contradiction.
They know all the background, so the facts make sense in their head.
You do not.
A future decision-maker will not either.
That is why fresh eyes matter.
The question is not immediately:
“Are you lying?”
The question is:
“Help me understand how those two things fit together.”
There may be a perfectly sensible explanation.
But you need to know it before somebody else asks.
The question behind the question
People do not always ask what they are really worried about.
A client may ask:
“How long will the application take?”
What they might actually be asking is:
“Will I be able to start work?”
“Can I travel?”
“Will I miss my wedding?”
“Is my current status safe?”
“Can I afford to wait?”
If you answer only the surface question, you may give accurate information without helping very much.
This is common in management too.
“Are we hiring anyone else?”
could mean:
“I am overwhelmed.”
“Am I about to be replaced?”
“Is the department growing?”
“Why am I doing two people’s jobs?”
The words matter.
The concern behind them matters more.
A good consultant becomes sensitive to this.
Not by pretending to read minds.
By asking.
“Is there a particular reason the timing matters?”
“What are you concerned might happen?”
“What would a good outcome look like for you?”
Those questions often reveal the actual problem.
Ask what would change your mind
This is a useful question when people become fixed on a position.
We all become attached to our own conclusions.
Once we decide something, we start collecting evidence that supports it.
If you think an employee is excellent, you notice their successes.
If you think they are difficult, every small mistake becomes further proof.
If you believe a business idea will succeed, every positive sign feels important.
The question I find useful is:
“What would I need to see to conclude that I am wrong?”
That forces you to define your own standard.
If the answer is “nothing”, then you are no longer analysing.
You are defending a belief.
This is particularly important when advising.
A professional should not become emotionally invested in a particular outcome.
If new evidence changes the position, the advice should change.
Otherwise the adviser stops advising and starts arguing with reality.
Ask what happens next
This may be one of the most useful questions in strategy.
You are about to make a decision.
Fine.
Then what?
A business takes on a new employee.
Then what?
Who manages them?
What work will they do?
How will success be measured?
What happens if the workload falls?
A company obtains a sponsor licence.
Then what?
Who operates the sponsorship system?
Who monitors visa expiry dates?
Who knows what changes need reporting?
Who keeps the records?
Who checks whether the company remains compliant?
An applicant changes immigration route.
Then what?
How does that affect the longer-term plan?
What does it mean for their partner?
When might settlement become possible?
Are there travel implications?
A decision that looks excellent in isolation can become poor when you look at what it produces next.
Thinking one step beyond the immediate outcome catches a remarkable number of problems.
Ask what happens if we do nothing
Action has a natural psychological advantage.
Doing something feels responsible.
Doing nothing can feel passive.
But “do nothing” is still an option and should sometimes be assessed like any other.
What happens if we leave this for a month?
What happens if we do not hire?
What happens if we do not respond?
What happens if we keep the existing system?
Sometimes the answer is disastrous.
Then you know action is required.
Other times the answer is:
“Not much.”
That tells you something too.
Businesses can waste enormous amounts of time responding to things simply because they appeared.
Not every issue deserves a project.
Not every criticism requires a response.
Not every opportunity needs pursuing.
Not every process needs improving today.
Sometimes understanding the consequence of inaction helps you rank the importance of action.
Ask who benefits
This is particularly useful when reviewing processes.
“We have always done it this way.”
Fine.
Who benefits from doing it this way?
The customer?
The staff?
Compliance?
Management?
Nobody?
Processes often survive long after their purpose disappears.
A report is produced every Friday because somebody once wanted it.
That person left three years ago.
Nobody reads it now.
It is still produced.
A form asks for information because an old system needed it.
The system changed.
The question remains.
A meeting happens because it has always happened.
Half the people attending do not need to be there.
Asking who benefits has a way of exposing organisational clutter.
Ask what evidence would prove it
I use this question constantly.
You make a claim.
Fine.
What would prove it?
Not what would suggest it.
Not what would be broadly consistent with it.
What actually demonstrates the point?
Suppose a business says a vacancy is genuine.
What evidence supports that?
The organisational structure?
Growth?
Client demand?
Recruitment activity?
Existing workload?
Financial performance?
The duties themselves?
No single item necessarily answers the whole question.
But the question changes how you think about evidence.
Instead of collecting documents because they exist, you collect them because they perform a particular job.
That distinction can dramatically improve professional work.
A thick file is not necessarily a strong file.
A strong file is one where the evidence connects clearly to the proposition it is supposed to support.
Ask the question the other side will ask
Before sending anything important, try to read it as the person receiving it.
What will they question?
Where will they hesitate?
Which sentence sounds unsupported?
Which figure looks unusual?
What information would they expect to see?
If you were determined to disagree with your own argument, where would you start?
This is useful in almost everything.
Proposals.
Applications.
Business plans.
Presentations.
Negotiations.
Management decisions.
If you can anticipate the obvious objection, you have the opportunity to deal with it before it becomes an objection.
This does not mean constructing enormous defensive documents responding to every hypothetical concern.
That usually makes communication worse.
It means understanding where the natural pressure points are.
Ask the person closest to the problem
Management can create distance.
The higher someone sits in an organisation, the more their information is filtered.
Bad news becomes softer as it travels upwards.
Complex problems become PowerPoint slides.
The person doing the work may understand the problem far better than the person responsible for solving it.
If a process keeps failing, ask the person who uses it every day.
If customers continually complain about the same thing, ask the person answering the calls.
If an application process creates repeated mistakes, speak to whoever actually prepares the files.
Management information matters.
So does ground-level information.
The two are not always the same.
Good leaders need both.
Avoid questions designed to prove you are right
There is a type of question that is not really a question.
“So you agree this was the wrong decision?”
“What else could we realistically have done?”
“Surely nobody thinks this system is working?”
These are statements wearing question marks.
They invite agreement rather than information.
We use them when we want confirmation.
They may work in persuasion.
They are poor tools for diagnosis.
If you genuinely want to understand something, your question has to leave room for an answer you do not expect.
That sounds obvious.
It is harder than it sounds.
The best consultants do not rush to demonstrate expertise
There can be pressure in consultancy to answer immediately.
The client asks something.
You know the subject.
You want to show that you know the subject.
So you answer.
But knowledge applied to incomplete facts can produce very confident nonsense.
Sometimes the strongest professional response is:
“Before I answer that, I need to understand something.”
Then ask the question.
Expertise is not demonstrated by speaking first.
It is demonstrated by understanding the problem accurately enough that the answer is useful.
I would rather ask five questions and give one considered answer than give an impressive answer to a situation that does not actually exist.
The question nobody wants to ask
Every organisation has questions that become difficult because of hierarchy, habit or ego.
Is this project actually working?
Does this person belong in this role?
Are we charging enough?
Why do we still offer this service?
Is this meeting necessary?
Would the business function better if I stopped controlling this?
Did we make the wrong decision?
That final question is particularly difficult.
Once time, money and reputation have been invested, reversing direction can feel embarrassing.
But avoiding the question does not improve the decision.
Sometimes leadership means being the person willing to ask what everyone else is carefully avoiding.
Not aggressively.
Not theatrically.
Just clearly.
Questions reveal how someone thinks
There is another reason questions matter.
The questions a person asks tell you what they notice.
A junior employee might ask:
“What do I need to do?”
A more experienced one may ask:
“Why are we doing it this way?”
A manager may ask:
“Who owns this?”
A strategist might ask:
“What does this decision make possible next?”
None of those questions is inherently superior.
They are simply looking at different layers of the same situation.
Over time, I think professional growth partly involves learning which question belongs at which level.
Sometimes you need detail.
Sometimes you need context.
Sometimes you need purpose.
Sometimes you need consequence.
The mistake is using the same type of thinking for every problem.
My favourite question may be the simplest
If I had to choose one question that has helped me most professionally, it would probably be:
“What are we actually trying to achieve?”
It has saved me from a lot of unnecessary work.
It works in meetings.
It works with clients.
It works when reviewing a project.
It works when writing.
It works when somebody proposes an idea.
It works when I find myself doing something repeatedly and cannot quite remember why.
Once the objective is clear, everything else becomes easier to test.
Does this help?
Does this distract?
Does this cost more than it returns?
Does this evidence prove what we need?
Does this argument move the decision-maker?
Does this meeting contribute anything?
Does this task actually need me?
You cannot prioritise properly until you know what you are prioritising for.
Ask better, then listen properly
There is little value in asking good questions if you are simply waiting for your turn to speak.
Listening is part of questioning.
You have to hear not only the answer but the gaps in it.
The hesitation.
The qualification.
The detail that appeared unexpectedly.
The date that changed.
The answer that sounds slightly different from something said earlier.
Sometimes the useful question only becomes obvious because you listened closely to the previous answer.
That is why good conversations cannot always be scripted.
You can prepare areas you need to cover.
But the most important question may not exist until the conversation begins.
The right question can save days of work
We often associate productivity with working faster.
I increasingly associate it with avoiding unnecessary work.
One good question at the beginning can remove ten tasks later.
One contradiction identified early can save hours of drafting.
One proper conversation can replace a chain of twenty emails.
One clarification can stop a project being built around the wrong assumption.
This is what makes questioning a strategic skill rather than simply a communication skill.
It affects what happens next.
Before you answer, ask
There is a natural satisfaction in having answers.
Questions feel less complete.
They expose uncertainty.
They sometimes reveal that we do not yet understand the situation as well as we thought.
That is exactly why they matter.
The people I trust professionally are rarely the ones who have an immediate opinion about everything.
They are usually the ones who want to know a little more.
What happened?
What are you trying to achieve?
Why does that matter?
What evidence do we have?
What happens next?
There is confidence in being able to say:
“I don’t have enough information yet.”
And there is considerable value in knowing which piece of information you need.
You do not always need a more complicated answer.
Sometimes you just need a better question.
Suggested excerpt
The quality of a decision often depends on the question asked before it. Abdul Basit Jabbar explores how better questions improve management, consulting, immigration work and strategic decision-making.
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Section: The Board Room
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The Board Room
The Art of Asking the Right Question
