Blog #4 Question Tennis - Exercising the muscles of curiosity!

Prompt"Can you build me a picture that embodies the two words 'Question Tennis'"

This tool is a pretty straight forward one that often brings unexpected outcomes.

The set up is this. As people walk into a room, you get them all to write their name in a list on the left of a white board.

Soon you’ve got a list of names which you can quickly turn into a tennis competition by simply pairing them from the top as competitors. The winner gets paired with the next paired winner until you land on a champion. Too easy and pretty random.

Rules and umpiring the match!

The rules of question Tennis are:

1.     You have to ask a question

2.     If you answer a question you lose

3.     If you repeat the other persons question you lose

4.     If you take too long (umpires discretion) you lose

Then flip to see who goes first.

People immediately feel a competitive tension between each other that they’ve never felt before which gets us all out of our comfort zone. This is done standing up and it’s not obvious who is going to be more powerful.

I recall one of the marketing assistants, a short Philippine lady go up against the regional strategy head who was a tall, European. She took an immediately fierce stance and that completely distracted him to the point where she totally bull dozed him in this competition.

Fairly quickly people will move from asking inane questions with no relation to each other to questions that build upon each other.

When we get to the end, I explain that there are three levels of maturity in this silly game.

1. Inane questions

2. Questions that build on each other

3. One of us is the customer and the other the supplier

The winner gets to joust with me, but at level 3. They can choose to be the customer or the supplier. All (so far!!) choose to be customer. The catch is that we move to , however one of us is the customer and the other is the supplier as they perceive that this must be easier, as we’re always getting beaten up by the customer!

The reality is that both roles of being a supplier and a customer are hard. That there is so much movement in business (think of the Jelly!) that from one session to the next the situation may have changed materially.

Where did Question Tennis come from??

Throughout my career I’ve spent a few stints working in the very mature telecoms technology space (Ericsson) as well as the operator space (Vodafone NZ at the time).

I noticed that as infrastructure sales people, we would take a discussion with a customer, then turn that into a 50 slide presentation to be presented a couple of weeks later.

When turning up to the customer, our head space is 2 weeks old, but theirs had moved on.

I would watch in horror as the customer would say ‘Hey, can we switch to <insert issue area>.. ‘ and the sales guy (almost all were men), would say ‘Can I just get through my presentation first?’

At that time they were all senior to me so I couldn’t really rebuke them easily without causing issues.

So I created Question Tennis and ran a number of communications session which had this as a ‘fun activity’ with several not so hidden messages including:

1.     If the customer asks you a real question, rejoice! They are being vulnerable as they don’t know themselves and they’re inviting you into the tent!

2.     Don’t take yourself out of the tent because you’ve done a bunch of homework for that meeting. That work will all be useful, just not in the order that you did it!

3.     When in doubt ask a question. You need to create space to enable the customer to highlight the challenge of the day and potentially invite you into the tent!

4.     Question Tennis feels inane because it is. Asking question after question is not the goal. Rather it is like doing exercise to prepare for competition.

5.     Your competing against the customer keeping their problem and taking it somewhere else. You want the customer to bring their problem to you.

6.     Don’t let your ego get in the way of the customer sharing what’s hurting them

What's the point?? Focussing on the customers 'now' is the point!

This was a fun and different way to get the point of customer centricity across, rather than more PowerPoint slides.  I ran this as part of the development for a few teams who were going through leadership development and of course developed my own questioning skills along the way.

Good luck and if you're looking for a good umpire, I know a guy!