Tech Explained: This AI tool helps you ask better questions, get more authentic results in Simple Terms

“Just ask ChatGPT” (or Gemini, or Claude) is becoming a familiar refrain as people increasingly turn to large language models for answers and prescriptive advice. That same generative artificial intelligence technology can help leaders ask better questions, which often results in more effective problem-solving.

Hal Gregersen, a digital fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, has long championed the idea that individuals and teams can benefit from asking the right questions — lots of them, in rapid-fire succession. This method, which he calls “question bursts,” can unlock new avenues of insight and impact, especially when people and teams get stuck.

Catalytic questioning meets AI

In a recent webinar, Gregersen detailed how he has turned this primarily analog exercise into a digital one by taking advantage of the speed and dexterity of LLMs to augment the human process of formulating high-impact questions. (Gregersen explores this approach in depth in his MIT Sloan Executive Education course, Questions Are the Answer: A Creative Approach to AI-Enhanced Inquiry, Insight, and Impact.)

Gregersen said that rather than taking humans completely out of the loop, his Question Burst Catalyst tool demonstrates how humans and AI can work together to amplify inquiry and subvert LLMs’ tendency to follow the path of least resistance. The tool is available as a Gem in Gemini and as a custom GPT in ChatGPT.

“LLMs typically give an average, meme-type response,” Gregersen said. “The Question Burst Catalyst tool works with humans to maximize impact.”

Questions Are the Answer: A Creative Approach to AI-Enhanced Inquiry

Live Online

Register Now

How Question Burst Catalyst works

There are four steps associated with the Question Burst Catalyst tool.

1. Define the challenge. After a user describes a problem, the tool creates a more concise version of it and gives them the option to accept or modify it. In the webinar demo, MIT Sloan Executive Education senior director Peter Hirst offered a 49-word question around the role of AI and humans in organizations that the tool summarized as “How do we ensure AI adoption does not crowd out investment in essential human, organizational, and business capabilities?”
2. Generate related questions, with the human going first. The tool prompts users to generate their own short, challenging questions in rapid succession before the AI contributes any. That sequence is a deliberate choice based on MIT IDE’s “human-first” approach to AI, Gregersen said. Teams that outsource their question generation to AI risk having their own capacity for catalytic inquiry atrophy, he said.
3. Add a persona. Users have the option to assign the AI a persona — a historical figure, a fictional character, a professional archetype, or even a nonhuman perspective — to generate questions through a different lens. The goal is to push the AI away from generic responses and toward more unexpected, provocative questions as the user continues the question burst process.
4. Generate insights and an action plan. The tool compiles and categorizes all of the questions by theme and then invites the user to identify the single question most worth acting on. From there, it generates action options organized by type (explore or experiment) and risk level (low or high). 

   In the webinar example, a low-risk option was to interview five colleagues across functions and ask, “What human capability will become more valuable, not less, because of AI?” A higher-risk option was to reallocate a portion of an AI training budget toward explicit human-capability development.

Real-world use cases

The Question Burst Catalyst tool is designed to counter LLMs’ tendency to return bland and sycophantic results that tell users what they want to hear, Gregersen said.

The tool can be used by an individual to prepare for a meeting or by a business team to enhance collaboration and drive better results, among other scenarios. It’s been used at scale, including at Chanel, FM, and Procter & Gamble, where managers have piloted the AI-enhanced tool across select leadership development programs within their secure enterprise environments.

“Shifting the frame from answers to questions is a powerful thing, especially in this world of AI where there are pretty sophisticated answers and even more sophisticated questions,” Gregersen said.

Hal Gregersen is a digital fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, a senior lecturer in leadership and innovation at MIT Sloan, a former executive director of the MIT Leadership Center, and a co-founder of the consulting group Innovator’s DNA. He is the author of “Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life” and co-author, with Clayton Christensen and Jeff Dyer, of “The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators,” among other books.

Gregersen’s Question Burst Catalyst tool is available as a Gem in Gemini and as a custom GPT in ChatGPT.