Flipping questions on its head

A cardinal sin when it comes to design research is when some one asks a leading question. If you’re interviewing a consumer of Pepsodent toothpaste, you should almost never, ever, ever, ask “How much do you enjoy using Pepsodent toothpaste?”. That’s a leading question, and the answers you might get from this question are usually loaded with confirmation bias. It would be more along the lines of ‘what they think you might want to hear’, rather than ‘what they actually think/feel/do’.

This guiding principle of interviewing without asking leading questions applies to various facets: market research for F&B brands, company interviews, philosophy debates, and even some negotiations. The thumb rule here is to start initiation and ask more generic open-ended questions such as “How does your day in your life look?”, and then gradually narrow down some topics based on what the end-user wants to say/express.

More recently, I’ve created a variation of the the ‘leading question’, and flipped it on it’s head. I call it as the ‘non leading leading question’. I can’t think of a better term without convoluting the crux of what this does: Let me illustrate this 4D chess move with an example.

Let’s say I want that there is a restructuring in your company, and you are being moved to a new team and a new project. Your expectation is that the new team/project is much more ambitious/chaotic, highly charged and even (stressful) at times. (This is counter-intuitive and not what everyone would want). But you are hell-bent on wanting to work in such an environment, and the mythical “work-life” balance is not something you are considering it as much. How do you then gauge if this new team/project is ambitious/chaotic through a series of questions?

What I would do in such situations is to pull up the “non leading leading question” card.

I would ask — “Would there be good work life balance in the new team?”. The natural expectation for the manager here would be to say that there is good work-life balance. It’s not against the grain, and it’s not counter-intuitive. But by doing so, you reveal the true nature of the new team. The inverse of the inverse question has helped you reveal how this team works, in other words, the question has achieved it’s purpose.

The manager thinks this is a leading question (as they think you’re inclined towards changing your role into a new team where there is better work-life balance, but you’re not revealing your cards entirely and playing a bluff here)

If for the same question, “Would there be good work life balance in the new team?”, the manager says, “Actually, Shreyas, you know what, this is a mission-critical project, and a lot of dependencies to get the right outcome.” Even in this case, this question has achieved it’s purpose. You are now being posted into a more ambitious, growth-oriented team hungry for shipping fast, and moving at break-neck speed. This is what you want!

On the contrary, if I had asked — “Would there be too much stress in the new team?”, there might be a risk of getting a lot more smoke signals which make the response unclear.

This was one specific example, but there could be more situations where such non-leading leading questions can be leveraged.

I’d used this in a more recent interview I’d taken. To one of the candidates, I’d asked — ‘How do you ensure that you do ethnographic studies for all your projects?’ (what I expect here is them calling out the bluff, that it’s impossible to do extensive user research for all projects as in reality you’re dealing with tradeoffs of time/effort/complexity etc). Again, the non-leading leading question acts as an inverse-of-an-inverse.