what don’t you know you don’t know?
by gary bolinger
the most valued advisors spend a lot of time listening. they spend more time listening than they spend talking. listening provides insights to enhance advisory services. of course, listening means that the advisor needs to spend time asking the right questions. questions are hard.
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if you are engaged with staff, any question you ask will be different than when meeting with a partner. and different yet again with clients and prospective clients.
when you are asking staff questions, you can get a “do-over.” if you didn’t get a clear response to a question, you can clarify. you can fine-tune your question next time around. you may even need to ask a series of questions to get to the information that are seeking. clients may not be that patient.
getting clear, relevant responses to your questions is critical to taking the next step. it is the foundation of developing a plan for moving forward. so, why do you have difficulty in getting good responses?
good questions are at the heart of good responses. ask a bad question and the response will be incomplete or flawed in some way. advisors need to spend significant time in developing questions prior to meeting with a client. over a period of time, the best practitioners will have a solid bank of questions that serve as a foundation for a variety of engagements. the context for questions is important. progression of questions is critical. ask the first question first and then progress to the related and succeeding questions.
as you prepare questions for any meeting, flash back to donald rumsfeld in 2002. during a briefing about the war in iraq, rumsfeld said, “… there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. we also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. but there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. and if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.”
he took a lot of heat for that statement. sounded a little like political double talk. but it wasn’t. the idea of unknown unknowns was created in 1955 by two american psychologists (luft and ingham) in their development of the johari window. they used it as a technique to help people better understand their relationship with themselves as well as others.
so, after that bit of history, ask yourself this: how do i get to know what i don’t know that i don’t know about this client?
you know that you know about client financial statements. you know a lot about client tax situations. you may, as an example, know that you don’t know much about the particular client’s supply chain.
but those things that you (and the client) don’t know that you don’t know are the issues that seem to come out of nowhere. those issues blindside you and the client. they negatively impact the business and set in motion unplanned activities to react. those issues may shake the client’s trust in you.
uncovering the issues that you and the client don’t know you don’t know will allow you to make sure that the client is prepared and make you the most valued advisor.