Consider this: Clayton M. Christensen was perhaps the greatest management thinker of the last 30 years. His “How Will You Measure Your Life” is a Harvard Business Review bestseller and one of the five best articles on personal development I’ve read, and his theories on innovation and disruption changed business. But my most memorable encounter with Christensen was a talk at Harvard Business School where he discussed his own approach to his time as an MBA student decades before.

He said HBS was where he learned to ask great questions. Impressed with his classmates, he would carry a notebook to class and write down the most insightful questions other students asked. He’d then go home and reflect on how and why the students had formulated them. Ever curious, Christensen laid the foundation for his future insights by first studying the process by which people formulated their best queries.

You can approach curiosity just as rigorously — and use that process to get a better view of a new situation or solve some of your toughest problems. Here are a few ways to enhance your ability to interrogate even the most difficult topics:

Hold your hypotheses loosely.

As a former analyst at McKinsey & Company, one of the first things I learned was “hypothesis-driven thinking.” Based on the scientific method, this process is what allows McKinsey teams to work through problems quickly and efficiently. It involves formulating an early answer to a problem and then digging into the data to seek to improve and refine it. Core to this approach, however, is holding your hypothesis loosely. If you are too attached to your initial answer, you may refuse to let it go, no matter where the data leads. But if you treat your own answer as a strawman, holding your assumptions loosely, you’ll be willing to totally abandon it if the situation calls for it.

In critical thinking exercises we often fall rapidly into an intuitive and jointly held “answer” or hypothesis — particularly in groups — and we ask questions that seek to prove rather than disprove our thoughts. Critical questions, however, may force us to fundamentally reconsider our initial conclusions, and we have to be willing to do so freely without defensiveness.

Listen more than you talk.

This sounds simple, but the key to great questions is active listening. Active listening is the process of understanding what another person is saying — both explicitly and implicitly — while showing then you are engaged and interested. Successful active listening allows you to fully grasp an argument, making it easier to question its logic.

Active listening also helps to override your brain’s “prediction engine” to ask better questions. Our brains are wired to generate efficient, intuitive answers, but that can limit your point of view. Deep listening is a way of overruling that function and opening ourselves to a wider array of answers. It also allows you to demonstrate to your counterpart that you care about what they are saying and take their perspective seriously, which keeps them engaged in the conversation and more open to your perspective.