Using SCQA to Improve Your Communication

Incorporating frameworks like SCQA is helpful to facilitate discussions and deliver presentations. It establishes context, gains alignment from participants, and identifies potential solutions.

SCQA expands to situation, complications, questions, and answer(s).

• Situation: context or current state

• Complications: defines factors influencing the situation, plus existing and potential impacts

• Questions: unanswered or rhetorical questions needed to support a resolution

• Answer(s): solutions or recommendations to resolve the situation

Leveraging SCQA is especially helpful in a sales context (including “selling” internal stakeholders), reacting to problems that arise, and for communicating organizational changes.

For calls and meetings, use SCQA to define the agenda and structure your notes in advance of the discussion. If you don’t have an answer ahead of time, you can establish one during the discussion or end with something like “we’re going to review and follow up shortly”.

For presentations, use SCQA or one of its variations (see below) to establish the outline for the deck, and return to it as a reference point when rehearsing content to ensure each slide and associated talk track supports your argument.

SCQA is also easily modified to increase its impact in certain situations.

Stating the answer first (ASCQ) and optionally restating at the end (ASCQA) is worth considering if participants have limited time or attention spans, or if the need exists to establish credibility early.

Dropping the answer (SCQ) allows for closing with questions that establish direction for further exploration, which is a helpful technique to continue dialogue about a particular situation.

TLDR: Try using SCQA or one of its variants when run your next call, meeting, or presentation.