Ask the right questions early

This post is part of a series: 5 things skiing taught me about leading change. You can find the other posts in this series here.

one of my colleagues working with a guest who wanted to build confidence

This one wasn’t obvious to me for the first half of the season. I’d start each lesson with an attempt to be personable and build a relationship. I’d ask people where they were from, what they think of Montana, who they are traveling with. I’d work on memorizing names and any relationships between guests. While getting to know people is important —indeed, it’s key to establishing trust —it turns out it isn’t the most important question for either the student or the teacher. By the middle of the season, after names, I started asking two questions: "What would you like to work on today?, " and, “how fast do you like to ski?”

Asking someone what they want to work on gets to the quick of why they are taking a lesson in the first place. Many guests respond with a version of I’d like to build my confidence. Some have specific areas, I want to get better at skiing the bumps. I remember one family being quite clear: we don’t really want a lesson at all, we just want to skip the lift lines. (Turns out, after a little gentle feedback, they were actually quite open to a lesson when they felt their skiing improve). Asking people about speed gives people a chance to talk about comfort levels in a safe way. I’d often soften the question by assuring people that I’d be the one slowing us down the most. It turns out, more than technique or history with the sport, speed was the best sorting function. People who want to ski slowly can work on different things but still be a really compatible group. I had one group where ages ranged from 14 to 65, while they were all various levels of intermediate skiers, what they had in common was a desire to stop less and ski more. We made fast laps and did our coaching on the lifts. With groups of skiers who have different preferences for speeds, there was often a miss-match. The faster skiers end up waiting and frustrated while the slower skiers feel pressured to move too quickly.

I haven’t always asked the right questions first. In my experience, we often tend to find middle ground before we challenge anything. Once, my innovation team at a large health system was approached to work on primary care. Our senior leadership thought there was an opportunity to improve the experience of primary care; maybe with an app? (hint: it’s never an app!) We agreed to take a look at processes, experiences, and workflows to see what we could find. What we discovered was a growing amount of burn-out among physicians, nurses and staff. In fact, they were working so hard that most patients never even sat down in the waiting room before being taken back for their exams. The most effective solution, based on our prototyping and testing, was to reimagine the scheduling process and empower our schedulers to ask the right questions when a patient called for an appointment. Knowing why someone is really coming to the doctor —I don’t feel well could mean the flu or it could be someone who is lonely —was the key to some attainable changes that would have a big impact for patients and providers. In the end, our leadership team doubled down on their desire for an app. They wondered if we could make a virtual doctor that someone would text and get automated responses.

a nurse colleague showing us a tedious paper process in a medical clinic

If we had asked the right questions first, we could have saved everyone a lot of time and headache. Knowing that an app was the only desirable solution (although, arguably not desirable for patients), would have given us the chance to politely bow out. We weren’t an app team. Asking the right question early is hard. It forces someone to clarify their real goals. How many organizational leaders have wanted to have an innovation function without really knowing what that even means. Is it a new type of investment plan, a technology incubator, a lean-style process team? Like in skiing, there’s a chance to ask about speed too. How soon do we want to try and meet these goals? How fast is the rest of the organization prepared to move?

Without getting to real goals and comfort for speed of change early, we often set out on different paths at the same time. Expectations aren’t aligned. And the result is usually an unsuccessful effort and some dinged feelings.