Effective questions lead to useful results.

When you decide to conduct a survey of your organisation's stakeholders, the first questions to ask are, "What do I need to know?", "Why do need to know it?", and most importantly, "What do I plan to do with this knowledge when I find out?”

These questions help establish the goals you wish to achieve with your survey and bring focus and clarity to the survey development process.    If you know exactly what you are trying to learn as a result of this survey, the task of formulating the questions to draw an unambiguous response from your stakeholders is easier.

If the survey is properly designed, you may discover insights you had not anticipated when the results are tabulated and analysed. This additional wisdom is a bonus and may add depth and understanding to help facilitate use of the results.

But if you didn't know what you needed to know before you started, the challenge of recognizing what you may have learned increases significantly, and most certainly the opportunity to take action on these "unexpected" results is diminished.