As a cofounder and the CEO of the U.S. chipmaker Nvidia, Jensen Huang operates in a high-velocity industry requiring agile, innovative thinking. Reflecting on how his leadership style has evolved, he told the New York Times, “I probably give fewer answers and I ask a lot more questions….It’s almost possible now for me to go through a day and do nothing but ask questions.” He continued, “Through probing, I help [my management team]…explore ideas that they didn’t realize needed to be explored.”

The urgency and unpredictability long faced by tech companies have spread to more-mature sectors, elevating inquiry as an essential skill. Advances in AI have caused a seismic shift from a world in which answers were crucial to one in which questions are. The big differentiator is no longer access to information but the ability to craft smart prompts. “As a leader, you don’t have the answers; your workforce [does], your people [do],” Jane Fraser, Citi’s CEO, told Fortune magazine. “That’s completely changed how you have to lead an organization. You have to unleash the creativity….The innovation isn’t happening because there’s a genius at the top of the company that’s coming up with the answers for everything.”

Indeed, leaders have embraced the importance of listening, curiosity, learning, and humility—qualities critical to skillful interrogation. “Question-storming”—brainstorming for questions rather than answers—is now a creativity technique. But unlike lawyers, doctors, and psychologists, business leaders aren’t formally trained on what kinds of questions to ask. They must learn as they go. (See “The Surprising Power of Questions,” HBR, May–June 2018, among others.)

It’s not a matter of asking lots of questions in hopes of eventually hitting on the right ones. Corinne Dauger, a former VP of creative development at Hermès, told us, “In a one-hour meeting, there are only so many questions you can ask….So where do you want to spend the time? When you’re asking one question, you’re not asking another.” If any one line of questioning dominates, it inevitably crowds out others. Leaders must also watch for complacency, diminishing returns, avoidance of sensitive topics, and stubbornness.

In our research and consulting over the past decade, we’ve seen that certain kinds of questions have gained resonance across the business world. And in a three-year project we asked executives to question-storm about the decisions they’ve faced and the kinds of inquiry they’ve pursued. In this article we share what we’ve learned. We offer a practical framework for the types of questions to ask in strategic decision-making and a tool to help you assess your interrogatory style.

The Great Unasked Questions

Before we lay out our framework, we want to emphasize one point above all: The questions that get leaders and teams into trouble are often the ones they fail to ask. These are questions that don’t come spontaneously; they require prompting and conscious effort. They may run counter to your and your team’s individual or collective habits, preoccupations, and patterns of interaction.

The late scholar and business thinker Sumantra Ghoshal once said that leadership means making happen what otherwise would not. In the realm of inquiry a leader’s job is to flush out information, insights, and alternatives, unearthing critical questions the team has overlooked. You don’t need to come up with the missing questions yourself, but you do need to draw attention to neglected spheres of inquiry so that others can raise them.

All this is harder than it may sound, for two reasons. First, you may be hampered by your expertise. Your professional successes and deep experience may have skewed your approach to problem-solving. (See “Don’t Be Blinded by Your Own Expertise,” HBR, May–June 2019.) It can be hard to escape the gravitational pull of such conditioning unless you take a hard look at your question habits. Second, the flow and diversity of questions can be hard to process in real time, especially amid heated exchanges. Often it’s only after the fact that you realize certain concerns or options were never raised.

Our research reveals that strategic questions can be grouped into five domains: investigative, speculative, productive, interpretive, and subjective. Each unlocks a different aspect of the decision-making process. Together they can help you tackle key issues that are all too easy to miss.

[Here is the first of the five “great unasked questions”:]

Investigative: What’s Known?

When they are facing a problem or an opportunity, effective decision-makers start by clarifying their purpose—asking themselves what they want to achieve and what they need to learn to do so. The process can be fueled by using successive “Why?” questions, as in the “five whys” sequence devised by managers at Toyota. Successively asking “How?” can also help you transcend generic solutions and develop more-sophisticated alternatives. Investigative questions dig ever deeper to generate nonobvious information. The most common mistake is failing to go deep enough.

It sounds like a straightforward process, but lapses are surprisingly common. In 2014 a failure of investigation led a team at the French rail operator SNCF to neglect an essential piece of data during its €15 billion purchase of 1,860 regional trains. No one thought to ask whether the platform measurements were universal. They weren’t. The trains proved too wide for 1,300 older stations—a mistake that cost €50 million to fix. The Spanish train operator Renfe discovered a similar oversight in 2021: The 31 state-of-the-art commuter trains it had ordered were too big to pass through some tunnels in the mountainous areas they were meant to serve. The problem was detected before the trains were built, but delivery was significantly delayed.