If you haven’t read about The Something Effect, go back to Part One to lay the base for yourself.

The “Something” Effect: you assume everyone has a similar understanding of what you deem as “common sense,” but in actuality your own common sense was uncovered through much work and in-depth exploration. The challenge here is to calibrate your own insights and understandings to your conversation partner’s insights and understandings -- to get on the same page, as it were.

The Great Inquisition

The quality of the question determines the quality of the answer

In order to gain insights into where your level of understandings overlap with others is to run through a series of questions. To know something is not the same as understanding something. As my learners will say, “Just because you know how to spell a word does not mean you understand how to use it in a sentence.”

Initially, you may wonder what questions you should be asking. However, step back one more level and consider the question you need to answer first: what are you optimizing for? This question sets all other questions into motion.

What Are We Even Talking About?

More and more I am observing conversations (which often turn into debates) between individuals who do not know what they are optimizing for within the conversation, nor are even discussing the same situation to begin with. People may enter into a conversation regarding the same topic, but context is never established. Context is the missing ingredient time and time again to allow growth, understanding, and possibly empathy. Here is an example:

Two educators are discussing their grading practices. Educator A shares that they allow redos, they do not take points off for late work, and they are working their way toward assessing their learners by individual standards instead of an average of their grades. Educator B shares they have higher expectations and accountability measures for their learners, which is why they do not allow redos or late work.

Both educators are not listening to one another. They both have different lenses on this specific topic because context matters. So their translation of each other’s grading practices are skewed. Furthermore, what are they optimizing for? Though they are discussing grading practices, they are not talking about the same situation. Educator A is focused on gathering data of what their learners can do. Educator B is focused on gathering data of what their learners can comply with. It is not as simple as saying one educator is “right” in this matter. There are nuances that deserve more uncovering. However, if we do not know what we are optimizing for, we are quite literally not talking about the same matter. This is where emotions come into play (quite human) and room for growth has been taken up by it. More importantly, this is where we stop asking questions to find better solutions.

Ask and You Shall Receive

The secret to funneling and sorting through misunderstandings is to ask questions. More specifically, ask quality questions. As stated before, the quality of your questions determine the quality of the answers you receive.

The Harvard Business Review wrote a piece on how to ask better questions in the article “The Surprising Power of Questions” (Brooks & John, 2018). In the article, they state how asking questions can help with interpersonal relationships, emotional intelligence, and remind us of Daniel Carnegie’s advice (from his book, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)), to “ask questions the other person will enjoy answering” (Carnegie, 1936). The deeper situation we can find ourselves in, as humans often do, is the context of the entire situation upon entering a discussion. “…the sheer number of questions is not the only factor that influences the quality of a conversation: The type, tone, sequence, and framing also matter” (Brooks & John, 2018). Therefore, keeping it human-centered is key.

Human-Centered questions have depth, curiosity, and compassion woven into the framing. Utilizing questions beyond a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is a great place to start. Open-ended questions allow the listener to gather more nuanced data. Being present and intrigued by the speaker provides an opportunity to ask follow-up questions. This not only keeps you practicing your listening skills, but also gains you interpersonal points. However, if you are attempting to uncover where your understandings overlap with another’s understandings, you must know what you are optimizing for, contextually.

The Ladder of Inference

The Ladder of Inference (Chris Argyris), is an organizational tool to help work through The Something Effect; assumptions, misunderstandings, and cognitive biases. The Systems Thinker provides a helpful visual to show how to utilize the Ladder of Inference as a cyclical framework to narrow down understandings and prune unnecessary information that could be clouding our optimization.

Much like how mindfulness asks for us to look at situations objectively, having a system in place when deepening our understandings with and of another human being can be helpful.

As I further develop The Something Effect and its framework, I am finding that I must adhere even closer to the question, “What Are You Optimizing For?”, in order to ensure a defined purpose and intentional outcome.

References

Brooks, A. W., & John, L. K. (2018, May). How to Ask Great Questions. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2018/05/the-surprising-power-of-questions

Carnegie, D. (2018). How To Win Friends And Influence People. Simon & Schuster. (Original work published 1936)

The Systems Thinker. (2016, January 10). The Ladder of Inference - The Systems Thinker. The Systems Thinker. https://thesystemsthinker.com/the-ladder-of-inference/