Three Golden Questions
The three golden questions are:
They are golden simply because they are the most powerful form of gathering information about something you or your client wants. If you only had these 3 questions, you can still evoke a lot of personal change in yourself or in your client.
Write these down, and keep them in a prominent place where you can see them all the time.
Many times, these questions are best asked from the future rather that the present.
What Do You Want?
Perhaps the most important question one can ever ask, either of others or of one’s self. Understanding what we want is key to getting what we want. The more specific we are, the more likely we are to get it.
The Three Golden Questions and the Rest Of The Questions build upon this basic question.
The intention of this question is to get as complete a picture of the client’s Desired State as possible. Having the Desired State specified in Sensory Information details helps the client to step into the Desired State and try it on to see if they like it. It also establishes a set of anchors and criteria they can use to remember what they want when they are in the midst of getting it (remember: “When you’re up to your neck in aligators, don’t forget that the mission was to drain the swamp”).
Alternative ways of asking the same question
What do you need at this point?
What would you like to have instead?
When you don’t have X , what will you have?
What is the outcome you want?
Tell me how you’d like this to all end up.
And asking from the future desired state:
When you have everything working well, what do you have? (from the future looking back.)
Imagine you now have what it is you want. Can you tell me what that is?
Put yourself out in time to when you have what you want. What was that?
What do you have now, in the future when you have it, that you wanted?
These last set of questions require a sort of sleight of mouth – the way they sound to client is important, because they are not very straight-forward syntax-wise, nor in a way most people talk or think. You may need to gently pace your client before you get to such a question.
What Will That Get For You
This question establishes motive and intent. It is useful to ask this because the reasons for wanting a certain thing are often complex, and before there can be a well-formed Desired State (see also Well Formed Outcomes), we must know the reasons why the client wants what they want.
Sometimes the client doesn’t know why they want something. This is why it is important to couch the question the way it is written. Simply asking “Why do you want that?” leaves things far too open for the client to give any answer. The question, as written, will direct the client to think of outcomes, which is what we want here.
It is also useful to explore this territory for awhile. Ask the question at least three times or until you get a business reason, as opposed to a procedural or technical reason.
Some other ways to ask the question include:
What will you be able to do when you have that?
What is even more important than having that?
What problem does having that solve for you?
How Will You Know When You Have It
This question establishes the metric or measure of achieving the outcome. This is how the client wants to receive the outcome. Press the client on this question to get them to think about business metrics, to go along with the business reasons established in What Will That Get For You.
This question is best asked from the future Desired State:
“When you first had d(n), how did you recognize it?”
Here, d(n) represents the sequence of desired states. The current state is d(0), although most likely the current state is not “desired”. It can be useful to stage the future desired state in order to help the client see that what they want can be achieved in stages, and that what they want now might not be their end goal.
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