1 When to use a question ladder

The question ladder provides a comprehensive approach to questioning an issue that you want to explore. It helps you get at the answers that you did not know you needed, as well as those that you know you need. It also gives you opportunities to ask the same question in different ways, thereby cross-checking and adding validity to the answers, and generating responses that reveal different perspectives on the answer.

Donald Rumsfeld, a former US defence secretary, once said:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

(NATO, 2002)

Rumsfeld was ridiculed for this answer to a question about what was known about terrorist threats (BBC, 2007). However, in our context of considering the questions to ask, the question ladder might also reveal ‘unknown unknowns’, generating questions that we did not know would be useful.

Photograph of Donald Rumsfeld speaking in front of microphones with the American flag behind him.
Figure 1: Donald Rumsfeld spoke of ‘unknown unknowns’

A question ladder is a structured and systematic approach to questioning that enables you to explore an issue from a number of angles. It allows you to approach your knowledge and information needs differently. Rather than starting from ‘What do I need to know?’, and thereby setting limits to what you can discover, the question ladder opens the issue up, allowing you to gain new knowledge and information from a variety of angles.

Key point

A question ladder is a structured and systematic approach to questioning that enables you to explore an issue rigorously.

Activity 1

Timing: Allow around 10 minutes for this activity

Can you think of some situations in which a question ladder might be useful to you? (One example might be preparing for a job interview.) How have you prepared your questions before, and why do you think the question ladder may tell you something different? Make some notes in answer to this question in the text box below.

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Discussion

You might have chosen a job interview, preparation for an important meeting that you were leading, preparing a project, researching an academic problem, creating a survey, or other similar examples. Essentially, a question ladder might be used whenever you have an important issue to explore from different angles.

Previously, you may have jotted questions down as you thought of them. While this might work well enough most of the time, it is not the most systematic approach. Using the framework of the question ladder allows you to find comprehensive and detailed answers to different questions.

The question ladder can be a tool to help you answer big issues, perhaps even those that keep you awake at night. The question ladder can:

  • help you understand your motives for wanting to solve the issue
  • enable you to remove yourself from the issue, leading to more objective insights
  • enable you to let go of favoured or learned responses in order to understand different behaviours
  • help you see different ways of moving forward with the issue.

Asking questions systematically should improve the quality of the answers, and therefore the evidence upon which you plan action.

2 The question ladder approach