Article · July 2026
A guideline for anyone who prepares a presentation, leads a discussion, or makes a decision. By Edouard Gruwez.
Voltaire said it four centuries ago: "Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers."
Most of us are answer machines. We are trained, rewarded and promoted for giving answers, so we pour our energy into them — and almost none into the questions that produce the answer. That is a costly mistake. In business, a bad question quietly wastes meetings, emails, analyses and whole projects. Long before anyone notices, the wrong question has already sent everyone off in the wrong direction.
And with AI, the power of a question — good or bad — is multiplied a hundredfold. A prompt is nothing more than a question you ask a machine. The quality of what you get out depends on the quality of what you put in.
Good questions are rare, for three reasons. We substitute — we quietly swap the hard question for an easier one and answer that instead. We anchor to ourselves — we ask from our own perspective and lose sight of the audience's. And we stay vague — because a fuzzy question, like a fuzzy answer, feels safer than a precise one.
A question acts like a hinge between what we know and what we don't: the gap in our knowledge provokes the question, and the answer resolves it. In the TLSM framework, the question is closely related to the "issue" in the CIA structure: Context – Issue + Question – Answer. Get the hinge wrong and the whole narrative, discussion or decision swings the wrong way.
In our "to the point" TLSM model, the question sits at the very point where the two triangles meet. The top triangle is what we know — the context — narrowing to the issue; the bottom triangle is what is new, narrowing to the key message. The question is the hinge that joins the two.
A question also rests on something known — the context. "Is this good?" only makes sense if you already hold the background in your head; your audience may hold none, or a different one. Good for what purpose? Measured how? Good for whom? Without shared context, the same words become a different question in every listener's mind, and you will probably never notice the gap.
One issue can spawn many questions, and the one you choose reveals your intent. "Sales dropped 15% in six months" can lead to "How do we stop the decline?", "Why did it happen?" or "Who is responsible?" — three very different conversations, each with a different intent. Choose deliberately. And when you present, make sure the key question reflects your audience's intent rather than your own — that is what earns their full attention.
So how do you ask the right question? First, slow down. You wake that slow thinking by writing the question down. Writing forces the vagueness out — our thoughts are never as precise as they feel until we put them into written words.
Aim for a question that is:
The second habit is to interrogate the question itself — whether you are about to ask it, or about to answer one you have been handed. Look for three things: hidden assumptions, framing, and substitution.
Hidden assumptions. Every question smuggles some in. Take a real one from a critical-thinking workshop: "How can organisations avoid over-relying on individual capability and instead design for better group thinking?" It quietly assumes that organisations already over-rely on individuals, that individual capability is fragile, that group thinking can be designed at all, and that better group thinking produces better decisions. The assumptions may be perfectly reasonable — but surface them, or you will answer a question you never meant to ask.
Framing. How a question is worded changes the answer. We replicated a famous experiment: the audience watches the same video of a car accident and estimates the car's speed. One word changes the result. Asked how fast the car was going when it "smashed into" the other car, people answered 44 km/h on average; asked when it "contacted" the other car, only 26 km/h.
The same happens with gain and loss. Frame a choice as a possible gain and people play safe; frame the identical choice as a possible loss and they take the risk. Words are never neutral: choose yours consciously, and watch the frames others put on you.
Framing also sets the size of the solution space. The craft is to narrow the solution space as far as you can while keeping a question everyone still agrees is the right one.
Substitution. Finally, check that you are answering the question that was actually asked — not the easier one your mind unconsciously reached for.
None of this calls for an elaborate framework. It needs a habit: every now and then, stop and look at the question — is it the right one? When a meeting is going in circles, the most valuable thing you can say is often, "Hold on — what is the question we are actually trying to answer?" Agreeing the question first makes the answer far easier to reach.
The red flag is simple: when all your effort goes into the answer and none into the question, you are most likely answering the wrong one — at a cost that never shows up on any invoice.