The Economist: What separates a good question from a bad one

The Economist's Bartleby column unpacks the research on what makes a question effective. From "boomerasking" (asking just to talk about yourself) to the "curveball" questions that move share prices on earnings calls, The Economist explores all. For South African boardrooms and investor briefings, where tough, consistent questioning is often the difference between real oversight and rubber-stamping, the findings carry a pointed lesson: research shows unstructured interviews let bias creep in, while systematised questioning has closed gender funding gaps for entrepreneurs. As local firms face sharper scrutiny from investors and regulators alike, how executives are questioned (and how well they answer) matters more than ever..The Economist.From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved..Some professions are defined by questions. Detectives ask them, and suspects have the right not to answer them. A phrase like “I’m the one asking the questions” sounds appropriate when coming from a journalist, and pretty weird from the lips of a plumber.But questions are crucial in every organisation. They sharpen thinking and extract information when things go wrong. They are central to forging relationships: according to research by Karen Huang of Georgetown University and her co-authors, people who ask more questions tend to be better liked. Questions are a crude way to measure career progression. As you get more senior, you spend less time doing the work and more time asking about it. By the time you reach the boardroom, your principal output is questions.An absence of questions may indicate a culture that does not brook them. Even easy questions can be a warning sign. A paper by Elliott Ash of ETH Zurich and his co-authors trawls through interview reports posted to Glassdoor, a workplace-review site, and finds that candidates are more likely to turn down high-wage job offers when they rate the interview process undemanding. By analysing free-text posts about interviews, the researchers find that candidates view softball questions as a signal about the quality of future colleagues. Tough questions are not just a way for employers to screen for able candidates; the reverse also applies.What makes a good question obviously depends on the context. The “five whys”, a succession of “why” questions that are meant to lead to the root cause of a problem, originated in Toyota and has spread from there. But what works well as an investigative technique in a specific environment is not going to help with forging relationships. (“Why were you absent yesterday?” “I was at a funeral.” “Why?” “What do you mean, why?”)Still, some rules of thumb work across different settings. Paying attention to the answer is always a good idea. Lots of people ask questions in order to supply their own piece of information, a phenomenon christened “boomerasking” in a recent paper by Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School and Michael Yeomans of Imperial College London.If you ask someone where they are going on holiday in order to tell them that you are heading to Bhutan for the trip of a lifetime, you are boomerasking. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t land well: the researchers find that questioners are seen as insincere if they are not interested in the other person’s answer. (Some people don’t even bother with an interlocutor, conducting a Q&A session with themselves while others watch in puzzlement: “What kind of questions do I like? Rhetorical ones. Do I want anyone else to answer them? No. Do I struggle to make friends? Yes.”)If you are making comparisons, the consistency of questions matters. Unstructured interviews make it harder to judge between candidates and easier for bias to creep in. Take, for example, the funding gap between male and female founders. Investors tend to ask different questions of entrepreneurs depending on their gender: men are more likely to be asked about their startups’ growth potential and women are more likely to be quizzed about risks. By systematising the evaluation framework used by an early-stage investment platform, Amisha Miller of New York University and her co-authors eliminated, and even reversed, investors’ preference for all-male teams over female-founded ones.Yet asking the same bad question of everyone is not particularly useful. Another paper, by Nandil Bhatia and Wei Cai of Columbia University and Sameer Srivastava of the University of California, Berkeley, identifies the ingredients of a good question. The authors trained a large language model to identify what they call “curveball” questions, which they define as questions that are difficult to predict, and therefore hard to prepare for, but also relevant to what has come before, and therefore tough to dodge..Read more:.The Economist: Is company culture suffering or thriving in remote work?.They then analysed earnings-call transcripts at listed American firms, and found that curveball questions from analysts were associated with larger share-price movements and rating changes, presumably because they were likelier to elicit new information than other questions. The researchers also found that star analysts and analysts who were new to covering the firm were more likely to ask curveballs. The stars can draw on expertise. The newbies are not yet immersed in conventional wisdom. Both lead to better questions..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

The Economist: What separates a good question from a bad one

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