The method I use to turn any encounter into a source of information
It has happened to me hundreds of times. I arrive at a dinner, a business lunch, a reception after a keynote. Everyone is talking at once. Around me, the conversation is about the weather, the traffic, the schedule for the evening. Twenty minutes in, I look at my watch and I ask myself the question you have asked yourself too: what am I doing here?
I am an introvert. For a long time, those evenings were something I had to get through politely.
Then I understood something simple, and they changed completely.
The problem is not the people at the table
We leave those dinners telling ourselves the other guests were not interesting. That is almost always false.
Those people have lived improbable lives. They have made hard decisions. They see things every day that I will never see from where I stand. None of it makes it into the conversation, for a reason that is not mysterious at all: nobody at that table, myself included, asked a single real question.
The person across from you is not boring. The question nobody asked them is what is missing. A conversation without questions runs empty. It produces small talk, not because people are small, but because nothing came along to tip it somewhere else.
Tipping a conversation takes far less energy than we think. It takes one question, and it takes having it ready.
What I call a curiosity meeting
I call a curiosity meeting any encounter I decide to treat as an exploration rather than a social obligation. A dinner, a train ride, a queue, a client meeting, the stranger in the next seat on a plane.
The principle is simple. I always keep a short list of open questions in mind. I never ask more than two or three, chosen according to the person, the context and my mood. It is not a questionnaire. It is a reserve I draw from once the conversation has settled.
One good question, asked at the right moment, is enough to turn a wasted evening into an encounter I will still remember ten years later. I have tested this in more than forty countries, with executives and with complete strangers.
My questions fall into two families, and they do very different work.
First family: going toward the person
These questions open the conversation. They tell the person in front of you that you are interested in them, which is the condition for everything else.
- What do you spend most of your time on?
- Why did you decide to do what you do?
- At your level, what is your biggest problem right now?
- What are you most proud of?
- What is the part of your work that outsiders never suspect?
- If today were your last day and you had to leave your family a manual in three sentences, what would you put in it?
And my favorite, the one I almost always end with:
- How could I help you?
That last one is not a polite formula. It changes the nature of the encounter. You stop being someone who takes and you become someone who gives, and that is usually the exact moment the conversation becomes genuinely interesting.
Second family: going toward what the person sees
The first family tells you about the person. The second tells you about the world, through them. It is the one I use most these days, and the one that changed how I work.
- What are you seeing right now in your field?
- What are you hearing around you?
- What has caught your interest lately?
- Have you read anything good recently?
Four ordinary questions, on the face of it. They do work that nothing else does.
We live in an age saturated with information, where each piece of news pushes out the one before it, well before we have had time to think about it. We receive feeds, alerts, summaries, digests produced by machines. We receive enormously, and we go looking very little.
The best information you will get this week is not in a report. It is in the head of someone who has already filtered it for you. A person telling you what they see from where they stand gives you something no algorithm will: a situated point of view, with their judgment inside it, on ground you do not occupy.
This is a principle I have applied for a long time, and I put it this way: I go and look for information, information does not come to me. These four questions are the simplest tool I know for doing that, and they cost nothing.
The secret is not the question, it is the listening
There is a very efficient way to ruin a curiosity meeting: ask an excellent question, then think about the next one while the other person answers.
The producer Brian Grazer, who has practiced this for decades, says it better than I can: we all know people who ask really good questions, who seem engaged and energized while they are asking them, and who check out completely the moment it is your turn to answer.
The question is only the trigger. What matters comes afterward, in your ability to build on what the person just said instead of working through your list.
If you only get the answers you expected, you were not being very curious. Surprise is the only reliable indicator. An answer that astonishes you, or better, one that unsettles you a little, is worth ten answers that match what you imagined.
A routine, not a talent
None of this requires being extroverted, funny or brilliant in company. I am none of those things.
It requires one thing: doing it every time. Two questions per encounter, at every encounter. That is exactly what I call an exponential routine, a tiny action, repeated, whose effects accumulate before you see them coming. Three questions a week for a year is a hundred and fifty conversations that would not have happened, and a few that will change something for you.
The direction is curiosity. The repetition is practicing it at every encounter instead of waiting for the important ones. That is what I sum up as Direction plus Repetition, and it is as true here as it is in running an organization.
If the broader subject interests you, I have explained elsewhere why curiosity is not a vice but a survival skill.
Why this matters more than it used to
In a stable world, you can get by on what you already know. Maps stay valid for a long time, and accumulated experience is enough to decide.
That is no longer the world we work in. What you knew yesterday is no longer enough to understand what is happening today, and the tools of classical management were not designed for this ground. In a world like that, your advantage no longer comes from the volume of information you receive. It comes from the quality of the people you actually listen to.
Pick two questions from this page. Try them at your next lunch. They are free, they take thirty seconds, and you will know by tonight whether they work.
If you want the other tools I share on stage for navigating uncertainty, they are gathered here: thrive in uncertainty, 5 tools.
We have never had so little control, and we have never had so much power to influence things.
Bruno Marion is an expert in chaos theory applied to leadership and management. An international bilingual English-French keynote speaker, he works with executives and organizations in more than 40 countries. He is the author of Chaos, A User’s Guide and Not Everyone Will End Up with an Axe in the Forest.
