Asking Powerful Questions
Powerful questions open up someone's thinking rather than lead them to an answer you already have in mind, and the skill is learning to tell the difference in your own mouth.
Questions move through a short pipeline, drafted, tested against the taxonomy, then scored for how open they leave the door.
Reach for this when…
- You keep noticing your questions are really opinions with a question mark.
- A coaching conversation goes flat and you don't know why.
- You're training new coaches and need a shared standard for what 'good' sounds like.
How to run it
- Introduce the principle: powerful questions open thinking, they don't lead to a predetermined answer.
- Share the taxonomy: open, exploratory, perspective-shifting, future-focused, challenging questions.
- Practise generating questions for a given scenario.
- Score each one: does it open or close thinking? Does it serve the coachee's agenda?
- Select the strongest three for a live conversation.
A worked example
Situation. Farhana Akter coached founders from a small consultancy in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and recorded a session to review her own questions for the first time.
Applied. Scoring the transcript against the taxonomy, eleven of her fourteen questions were closed or already led somewhere she'd decided, such as have you thought about raising prices, rather than what is price actually protecting you from right now.
Result. In the next session she asked three open questions and said almost nothing else. Her client reached the pricing decision herself, twenty minutes in.
The catch
Scoring your own questions after the fact is easy; asking a genuinely open one live, under silence, is a different skill entirely - the taxonomy doesn't train the nerve to sit with the pause. It also assumes the coach can tell the difference between curiosity and a question in service of their own theory, which takes practice to see in yourself.
If you know the answer before you finish asking the question, it wasn't a question.
Origin: Coaching tradition; no single originator