Better Questions is the Answer

Having words served up at the touch of a button has become our new normal. Whether you use Copilot, GPT or Claude. AI is helping a lot of us get a lot of our writing done quickly.

I’m all for having my time freed up for other tasks just like you, which is why I’m sharing an interesting conversation I had last week with a client. It went something like this:

“ChatGPT didn’t help.”  

“Didn’t help with what? What were you looking for?”

 “I’m not exactly sure, I wanted to see if it would improve an important email I wrote.”

“What would have helped?”

“Quickly arriving at the words best suited to influence the person on the receiving end of my email.”

It was clear that AI wordsmithing wasn’t the answer. The options served up were grammatically correct and concise, but unlikely to move the discussion in the direction he wanted, ergo, not the right words. We agreed that the right words are the ones that inspire action, so our discussion moved to how we can more readily access them.

The answer is to ask better questions. Whether to AI in our prompts, to ourselves as we write or to a trusted advisor. Here’s what I mean:

To AI:  What would this text become when rewritten to appeal to a colleague who believes X, is motivated by Y and in the past showed a preference for Z?

To Ourselves:  Why do I believe this proposal is the best option for my colleague to achieve X? What’s their position on the matter? What’s at stake for them? What are their likely objections and have I clearly shown I’ve considered them? Why do I believe this idea is the best option for them to achieve X?

To a Trusted Advisor:  This is an important communication opportunity, will you review it and give me feedback based on these success criteria?

One last thing, it's worth asking yourself this foundational question always.

Should this email be a conversation instead?