Your Question Is Not Neutral

Coaches like to think we ask questions in order to understand the client's world. But what if the question is also helping to build it?

Recent research suggests that humans have something of a Goldilocks bias for complexity. (research paper here) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-76247-3.pdf

In short the research suggests that when reality is relatively simple, we tend to find more structure than is actually there.

When reality is extremely complicated, we simplify it.

We seem to prefer explanations somewhere comfortably in the middle. Which becomes particularly interesting in coaching. Because the client isn't the only person in the room making sense of things, the coach is too. And every question we ask can direct attention.

Haesun Moon's work has made me increasingly interested in the extraordinary power of very ordinary words. What we choose to repeat, emphasise or inquire into affects what becomes larger in the conversation.

Imagine a client says:

“My boss didn't invite me to the meeting. I think she's losing confidence in me.”

The coach could ask:

“Why do you think she's losing confidence in you?” which is a perfectly reasonable question.

Except notice what just happened: Losing confidence has moved from the client's hypothesis to the organising principle of the conversation. We can now spend twenty minutes gathering evidence for something that may never have been true.

Alternatively the coach could ask:

“What makes you connect not being invited with her losing confidence in you?”

A tiny linguistic shift, but suddenly the relationship between observation and interpretation becomes available for examination.

Or the coach might ask:

“What else might explain why you weren't invited?”

And an entirely different landscape appears.

What is striking is how coaches (and their teachers, mentors and supervisors) often talk about following the client's agenda. But following an agenda and reinforcing a narrative are not quite the same thing.

If humans naturally add complexity to simple situations and compress complicated situations into neat explanations, then coaches need to watch not only the client's meaning-making but their own.

A coach fascinated by childhood may find childhood.

A coach looking for limiting beliefs will rarely leave empty-handed.

A coach listening for strengths will hear strengths.

A coach expecting systemic complexity may discover seventeen stakeholders and a whiteboard.

None of this necessarily means the coach is wrong. I think it means attention is consequential. And perhaps one of the disciplines of coaching is therefore to notice which words we are helping to become important.

Using the example above when a client offers a compelling explanation, we might deliberately test it in both directions:

Could this actually be simpler than that?

and

What complexity might this explanation be collapsing?

And perhaps add a third question, this time for ourselves:

What is my question inviting the client to notice, and what might it be inviting them to ignore?

Because questions help create the version of reality that appears next.