During the join week to kick off the iLab projects for 2016 IMBA students, Dr. ZOU Deqiang, Assistant Professor from Department of Marketing, School of Management in Fudan University was invited to deliver the speech regarding how to ask the right questions when working on a consulting project.
Asking the right questions will help consultants to explore the actual differentiated value from the project and therefore guiding the direction to find the high-quality solutions to address the business challenges.
The lecture started with a couple of real case assumptions that drives interactive conversations between the professor and the audiences. The key takeout from this would be that when we are exposed to questions that regard to which one is a better option, sometimes “It depends” might be the proper answer. Following this logic, what we would need to ask ourselves would be “It depends on what?” Professor Zou articulated that we could get the answers by thinking of alternative hypothesis to explain “why”, analyzing implications to demonstrate “so what” and using methodology for validation. Besides, according to Professor Zou, most of the time, people would have the illusion of fruitful learning by just reading the case. In reality, the knowledge return is low and there’s actually not much condensed essence to share. Therefore, asking the right questions will point us to the right direction. A four-step formula was introduced as the guiding logic which includes conceptualization, categorization, operationalization (measurement) and association (building up the relationships). Furthermore, after we master the capability of asking the right questions, we would need to apply critical thinking in the process in order to strengthen the awareness of a set of interrelated critical questions, to consolidate the ability to ask and answer the critical questions at appropriate times and to drive the desire to actively use the critical questions.
In the last session of the lecture, Professor Zou brought up the definition of Chinese phrase “Xue Wen (学问)”. Instead of interpreting this it into knowledge, scholarship, which is also what it means. He explicitly anatomized it as “Learn to ask”, which echoes back to the essence of this lecture.
In summary, everyone is encouraged to be an active learner who is curious, critical, down to earth, self-motivating and competitive. Metaphorically, we should be the chargers ourselves, not the batteries to be charged regularly. As the iLab projects will be officially kicked off soon, all the IMBA students would have the chance to apply the knowledge and tips from this lecture into the real practice soon.
Written by 2016 IMBA TIAN Miao
November 8th, 2016
