Question Behind the Question(QBQ): A Mental Tool
I listened to a short audiobook called QBQ!: The Question Behind the Question by John Miller. A terrible name to be sure, but nonetheless a book worthy of discussion. If Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership resonated with you, QBQ will resonate too.
Implementing Extreme Ownership reduced my desire to blame others. Not that I was going around blame others all the time. But even to the moderate degree I blamed others for things I thought was reasonable to blame others for, Extreme Ownership reduced even this tendency. Nothing takes the wind out of complaining quicker than owning up to everything. Taking a page out of Akon’s book…
Make no mistake: the ability to proclaim “it’s my fault” is a superpower. It not only shuts down pointless rationalizations, it also shuts down complaints — whether they’re from your opposition’s mouth or your own head. The speed and reliability with which negative self-talk is rendered handicapped by those three little words feels like nothing less than magic.
While “it’s my fault” suffices in some cases, it only works for some cases. What about the cases for which “it’s my fault” falls short? For these cases, we need something else — something that takes “it’s my fault” a step further. What follows lays out a formula for proceeding.
Enter QBQ.
QBQs are structured as follows:
- “What” or “how” starts the question
- “I” is the subject of the question
- The subject performs a constructive action
So, a QBQ might look like “How can I make this situation better?” “What can I do to prevent this problem from ever happening again?”
According to John Miller, a kind of question to avoid are called IQs, Incorrect Questions. They violate one or more of the QBQ requirements above. IQs look like “Why don’t they pick me?” “Who’s doing the picking?” “When will I get picked?” Lots of R&B artists are guilty of asking these kind of questions…
While IQs are considered universally bad, the reality is different. Without question, they can yield useful answers. For instance, if the IQs get you to begin to see things from the perspective of other people, you’d be aligning with Stephen Covey’s 5th habit of highly effective people: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” If some person cuts you off in traffic asking: “Why would a reasonable person do that?” could be a very useful question to ask ourselves despite technically being an IQ. Seeing things from other people’s perspectives makes them more reasonable, more human. And from a human relations standpoint, any time you get that view of another person, you’re much more likely to have successful interaction.
We see this all the time in airports. When the airline rep behind the counter mentions that there is a flight delay, people flip out on the airline rep. Very few people take the time see things from that rep’s perspective, because if they did there would be far fewer people flipping out on airline rep’s due to something outside of the rep’s control.
As useful as this question may be, John Miller would likely claim that you would do better by asking yourself a QBQ. In the instance where someone cut you off, you may ask yourself: What can I do to prevent people from cutting me off? What you would likely find is that there isn’t much you can do to prevent this from happening. This realization would (theoretically) lead you to drop it. However, humans aren’t robots. Some folks will likely stew about this situation and may need a better part of their morning to deal with their emotions. The same can be said about the flight delay scenario.
Now, while acknowledging the caveat above, here’s a rule-of-thumb for when to use QBQ:
Whenever you’re affected by an event you don’t like.
You had your heart set on getting that grande chocolate mocha, but they’re all out! You could ask yourself: “Why doesn’t this cafe keep enough ingredients for all drinks? It’s literally 10am in the morning!” A textbook IQ. Alternatively, you could ask: “What can I do to increase my odds of being able to get my grande chocolate mocha?” From this question, all kinds of ideas are likely to spawn.
You might ask the barista when is a good time to show up to ensure you get your favorite drink? Or, maybe you make a small request to the barista to save you some of your favorite drink because you’re a repeat customer that comes in daily at 10am. Or, you might realize that this shop doesn’t do anything you can’t create yourself on the cheap. So maybe you start creating the drink for yourself at home and avoid the whole commute to the cafe.
What the above example shows is that QBQs have a powerful ability to create unforeseeable outcomes that raises your status quo — and with it, your life.
