The single most important skill an auditor can develop is not reading a standard or writing a nonconformity. It is asking the right question at the right moment and then staying quiet long enough to hear the answer. Open questions in auditing are the primary tool for drawing out genuine information from auditees, and yet many auditors either underuse them or misuse them entirely. This article explains what open questions are, why they work, how to construct them well, and how to use them across every stage of an audit from the opening meeting to the closing stages of evidence gathering.
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What Makes a Question Open?
An open question is one that cannot be answered with a single word. It invites the auditee to explain, describe, or walk you through something. The answer requires thought and usually reveals far more than the auditor expected to find.
Contrast these two questions:
- Closed: Do you have a procedure for handling nonconforming products?
- Open: Can you walk me through what happens when a nonconforming product is identified on the line?
The first question gets a yes or no. The second question gets a story. That story is where the audit evidence lives. You find out who identifies the issue, how it gets recorded, who makes the disposition decision, whether that matches the documented procedure, and whether the person in front of you actually understands the process or is simply reciting what they think you want to hear.
Open questions typically begin with words like how, what, describe, tell me about, walk me through, or explain. They signal to the auditee that you are genuinely interested in understanding how things work, not just ticking a box.
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Why Open Questions Produce Better Audit Evidence
When an auditee is asked a closed question, they engage the minimum amount of cognitive effort required to respond. A yes or no does not require them to think about the actual process. It does not reveal gaps between what the procedure says and what actually happens. It does not surface the workarounds, the informal practices, or the breakdowns that every real-world system contains.
Open questions do something different. They ask the auditee to reconstruct a process in real time. That reconstruction is where the truth lives. If a person genuinely understands and follows a process, they will describe it fluently, with detail, and in a way that matches the documented procedure. If they do not, the gaps appear quickly.
There is another reason open questions work well: they reduce defensiveness. An auditee who is asked whether they are complying with a requirement may feel accused. An auditee who is asked to describe how something works feels like they are being asked for expertise. That is a very different emotional starting point, and it produces a very different quality of conversation.
Building Open Questions From Audit Criteria
One of the practical challenges for new auditors is translating a clause from an ISO standard into a useful interview question. The clause tells you what the requirement is. The question needs to reveal whether the requirement is being met in practice.
Take ISO 9001 Clause 7.2, which requires the organisation to determine the necessary competence of persons doing work that affects quality, ensure they are competent, take action where necessary, and retain documented information as evidence. A checklist-based auditor might ask: Do you have a training matrix? That is a closed question that points straight at a document.
An auditor using open questions might instead ask:
- How do you determine what skills someone needs before they can work on this process?
- What happens when a new person joins the team and needs to work on this line?
- Tell me about the last time someone was not yet able to perform a task. What did you do?
Each of these questions is grounded in the clause requirement but asks the auditee to demonstrate understanding through their own experience. The answers will either confirm conformity or reveal exactly where the gap is, and they will do it in the auditee's own words, which makes writing the finding much easier.
If you want to sharpen this skill, the article on audit interviewing techniques covers the broader framework for structuring your interview approach from start to finish.
Common Types of Open Questions and When to Use Them
Process Description Questions
These are your starting point in almost every interview. You are asking the auditee to describe how something works from beginning to end.
- Walk me through the process from the point an order is received to the point the product leaves the site.
- Describe what happens when a customer raises a complaint.
- Tell me how you plan for a new project from a quality perspective.
Process description questions are excellent for mapping what actually happens against what the procedure says. They also help you identify where to probe further.
Experience-Based Questions
These questions ask the auditee to draw on a specific real-world example. They are particularly effective because they anchor the conversation in reality rather than theory.
- Can you give me an example of a time that happened?
- Think about the last nonconformity you raised. What triggered it and what happened next?
- Tell me about a recent change to this process. How was it managed?
Experience-based questions are hard to fake. An auditee who has genuinely done something can describe it with specifics. An auditee who is describing what they think should happen will often be vague, use passive language, or describe a generic scenario rather than a real one.
Ownership and Responsibility Questions
These questions clarify who is accountable for a process or outcome. They are particularly useful when auditing Clause 5.3 requirements or when you suspect that responsibilities are unclear.
- Who is responsible for making sure this step is completed correctly?
- If something goes wrong with this process, who would you go to?
- How do you know when this is your responsibility versus someone else's?
The answers often reveal whether responsibilities are genuinely understood or simply documented in a procedure that nobody has read.
Frequency and Monitoring Questions
These questions establish whether a process is actually being performed at the required frequency and whether someone is checking that it is working.
- How often does this review happen?
- What tells you that this process is working as intended?
- How would you know if this was not happening?
These are particularly useful when auditing performance evaluation requirements under Clause 9.1 or monitoring and measurement obligations under ISO 14001 and ISO 45001.
Structuring Your Interview Around Open Questions
A good audit interview is not a random collection of questions. It has a shape. The most effective structure is a funnel: you start broad, gather a picture of the overall process, and then narrow in on specific areas where you want more detail or where something does not quite add up.
Start with a scene-setting open question to get the auditee talking. Something like: Can you give me an overview of what your role involves and which processes you are responsible for? This is low pressure, it gives the auditee a chance to settle, and it gives you a map of where to go next.
From there, move into process-specific open questions based on your audit checklist. Use the auditee's answers to decide which threads to pull on. If they mention something that does not match the procedure, or something that raises a question about a related requirement, that is where you go next.
Finish with any specific evidence requests: Could you show me an example of the record you just described? or Where would I find the documented information for that process?
This approach is covered in more depth in the article on common audit interview mistakes and how to avoid them, which is worth reading alongside this one if you are working on your interview skills.
What to Do With the Answers
Asking a good open question is only half the job. What you do with the answer determines whether the interview produces usable evidence.
First, listen. This sounds obvious, but many auditors are already thinking about their next question while the auditee is still speaking. You will miss important details. You will miss inconsistencies. You will miss the moment when the auditee says something that opens a much more productive line of inquiry.
Second, take notes on what the auditee says, not just what you expected them to say. If they describe a process that differs from the documented procedure, note the difference in their words. That is your evidence.
Third, follow up. An open question that produces a vague or incomplete answer should be followed by a more specific question. You mentioned that someone checks the records weekly. Who does that check and what do they do with the results? This is where open questions connect to probing questions, which form their own discipline in audit interviewing.
If you want to understand how probing fits into the questioning sequence, the article on probing questions: digging deeper without interrogating picks up exactly where this one leaves off.
Adapting Open Questions to Different Auditees
Not every auditee responds to open questions the same way. Some people are naturally expansive and will give you more information than you need. Others are guarded, nervous, or simply not used to being interviewed. A few will be deliberately evasive.
For nervous auditees, start with easier questions about their role and daily work before moving into process-specific territory. Reassure them that the audit is about the system, not about them personally. Keep your tone conversational and avoid anything that sounds like a test.
For talkative auditees, you need to manage the conversation without shutting it down. Open questions can produce long answers that drift away from the audit criteria. Use a gentle redirect: That is really helpful context. Can I bring you back to the point about how the records are maintained?
For guarded or evasive auditees, stay patient and stay with open questions. Closed questions will only make the conversation more transactional. If an auditee gives a short or deflective answer to an open question, try a different angle: Tell me about a specific example from the last few months. Specificity is harder to evade than generality.
The article on what to do when an auditee gets defensive during an audit has practical strategies for the more challenging interview situations you will encounter.
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Internal Audits
In an internal audit, you often know the auditees personally. This can make the interview feel less formal, which has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that people are more likely to be honest with a colleague. The disadvantage is that the conversation can drift into casual chat that produces no audit evidence.
Keep your open questions focused on the process, not the person. Even in a relaxed internal audit, the questions should be grounded in the audit criteria. The fact that you know someone does not mean you should assume their process is working correctly.
Supplier Audits
In a supplier audit, open questions are particularly valuable because you are trying to understand a system you have never seen before. You cannot rely on prior knowledge of the organisation. Start broad and use the auditee's answers to build your understanding before moving into specific requirements.
Be especially attentive to how supplier staff describe their processes. Are they describing something they actually do, or are they describing what is in the procedure? Ask for examples. Ask to see records. Ask to observe. The combination of open questions and direct observation is the most powerful evidence-gathering approach available to a supplier auditor.
Certification Audits
In a third-party certification audit, auditees are often well prepared and may have rehearsed answers to common questions. Open questions that ask for specific examples and real-world scenarios are much harder to rehearse for than standard checklist questions. They reveal the actual state of the system, not the prepared version of it.
Developing Your Open Question Repertoire
The best way to get better at open questions is to prepare them deliberately before every audit and then reflect on which ones worked and which ones did not. Before each interview, look at your audit criteria and write out three to five open questions for each major area. Do not rely on improvising in the moment, especially when you are new to auditing.
After each audit, review your notes. Which questions produced the richest answers? Which ones produced one-word responses, suggesting they were actually closed questions in disguise? Which answers led you somewhere unexpected? That reflection is how you build a repertoire that becomes instinctive over time.
At Audit Workshop, developing this kind of practical interview skill is a core part of both the Internal Auditor and Lead Auditor training courses. The training is built around real audit scenarios, not just theory, so participants leave with question frameworks they can use immediately in their own organisations or in the field. If you are working towards your first audit qualification or looking to sharpen your existing skills, the courses at auditworkshop.com are worth exploring.
