This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: MSDN Blogs.
Precision questioning
is a technique used by some senior executives at Microsoft.
Although precision questioning
positions itself as a toolkit for critical thinking
and problem solving,
its use in practice doesn't always line up with its
ostensible description.
As a senior manager explained it to me,
The way precision questioning works
is that executive X is going to ask you a question,
and then after you answer it,
you'll be asked a follow-up question,
and so on until you finally say "I don't know."
You want to last as many rounds as possible before
finally reaching the point where
they asked a question you cannot answer.
I don't know if that's what precision questioning
is really about,
but that's how some practitioners use it.