The Power Of Questions
Tom Atlee
Co-Intelligence Institute November 2003
"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and
try to love the questions themselves...
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
live along some distant day into the answer."
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
ACTIVE INQUIRY
Management experts like Peter Senge and others suggest that dialogue involves balancing inquiry and advocacy. In the inquiry dimension of dialogue, we seek to understand what is true for others or real for the group. In the advocacy dimension, we offer our own perspective as a contribution to the "group soup." (Note that this kind of advocacy is a far cry from asserting our truth as The Truth.)
Some therapists and social change activists take inquiry further. They have noticed that active inquiry -- asking good questions and really listening well, or convening people to explore together powerful questions that have heart and meaning to them all -- can have a transformative effect. The transformative impact comes not from leaders knowing what to tell people, but from listeners or convenors knowing what to ask and creating an open-ended, vibrant space to explore in.
Active inquiry involves shared exploration towards shared understanding, and so exemplifies co-intelligent dialogue. It requires the heartfelt participation of all parties. It is people truly listening to people truly speaking.
In active inquiry, questions play a different role than they usually do. We aren't so interested in answers -- and we definitely aren't interested in The Right Answer. The main point is that well-crafted questions elicit new awareness and feelings of empowerment. Any answers that emerge are icing on the cake. Often a powerful question changes the questioner, as well.
Below are some excellent resources on powerful and generative questions:
Strategic Questioning - Fran Peavey's brilliant description of questions that generate change -- even when they aren't answered
Appreciative Inquiry - This method specialize in questions that evoke positive possibilities
How To Create Appreciative Inquiry Questions from Imagine Chicago
Appreciative Inquiry: Asking Powerful Questions (doc) - from Vogt, E., Brown, J., and Issacs, D. (2003). The Art of Powerful Questions: Catalyzing Insight, Innovation, and Action
Practice Tools: Positive Questions and Interview Guides - AI Questions used in specific instances
Quaker Queries - Quakers create and carry these questions-for-reflection into their silent meetings for worship, their business meetings, and their lives. The spirit of this practice also inspires the Quaker innovation of "Clearness Committees" in which Friends help a person deal with a personal challenge by asking him or her generative questions.
The World Cafe - The excellent bookThe World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter by Juanita Brown with David Isaacs and the World Café Community -- read Tom Atlee's review of it here -- has a lot about what makes a powerful question, with over a hundred examples. To get a taste, here's a page of world cafe questions about the world cafe process and the life-principles it is based on.
Self-Awareness and Exploratory Self-Questioning (pdf)- by Dennis Rivers (Chapter 8 of The Geometry of Dialogue) - Exploratory questions from many fields of conscious inquiry, and their underlying logic and utility.
Another set of personal reflection questions is here, and some personal empowerment "powerful questions" are here.
The Dynamics of Emergence (pdf) - Peggy Holman's description of the role of questions in emergent processes
Open Question Circles - What would make __ more wonderful for you -- and what would that do for your personally?
Socrates Cafe - Here the questions are designed to surface unexamined assumptions, embedded concepts and values, and to maintain a spirit of intellectual and moral challenge. Bears some resemblance to Bohm Dialogue.
Questions with a Difference - distinguishes six types of questions useful in corporate (and other) coaching
Organic Inquiry - Feminist research methodology theory that includes non-linear, transformational varieties of research and knowledge
SAMPLE QUESTIONS ABOUT SOCIAL ISSUES AND CRISES
Questions for reflection about the 911 attacks - written the day after the attacks happened
'Listening to our neighbors" Programs - also about 911
Some of the Big Questions about Y2K and Life - some of which may be applicable to potential new crises
See also