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Open Questions: Powerful Lessons from last nights Negotiation Club meeting

club night

Last night’s Negotiation Club meeting delivered a simple reminder: it’s easy to feel confident after asking a “good” open question — and still be wrong.

We built an open question that we believed would extract three key pieces of information. We got answers that sounded complete. We assumed we had what we needed.

We didn’t.

If you want to develop negotiation skill properly, the next step is always practice.

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Lessons from an Open Question

The lesson wasn’t “open questions are powerful” — we already knew that. The lesson was that open questions can mislead you when:

The conversation before the question frames the answer
The question contains hidden assumptions
The answer sounds complete, but isn’t specific
The negotiator stops listening once they hear what they expected to hear

This is where technique turns into skill: not in knowing the definition of an open question, but in testing whether the question actually worked.

To go deeper on the tactic itself, see How to Use Open Questions in Negotiations .

Suggested practice focus:

Ask the open question
Stay silent long enough for the other person to keep going
Summarise what you heard
Ask a follow-up that checks the missing detail

The Tactics That Make Open Questions Work

Open questions become far more reliable when paired with three supporting behaviours:

Tactical Silence : don’t rescue the other party from thinking
Summarising : confirm meaning instead of assuming it
Pause : control your reaction before asking the next question

These are all practiseable behaviours — and they are observable to an observer.

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You Only Learn Negotiation by Doing Negotiation

You can discuss negotiation skills and tactics endlessly, but there is no substitute for practice.

Role-play is not a performance. It’s a controlled environment where misunderstanding is safe — and therefore visible. That’s why practice works: it reveals the gap between what we think we’re doing and what we’re actually doing.

For external context on why role-plays work as a learning method, see Learning From Negotiation Role-Plays (Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School) and then try one for yourself....