Questions and more questions
I was co-presenting a workshop last week on ‘questions – why bother?’ The context was a group of Action Learning facilitators who meet every three months for peer development. It’s a subject worth exploring in a wider, workplace environment.
Why do we bother asking questions? Broadly there are two categories of questions: those that seek information or data gathering; and those that aim to discover and explore.
The first encourages convergence – how? what? why? Coming towards conclusions.
Discovery and investigation tends to be more divergent, going off into unknown territory – what if…? how about…? why not…?
Nancy Kline in ‘Time to Think‘ discusses the incisive question. The questions that can challenge obvious or hidden limiting assumptions. If that wasn’t the case, what would you do then? If you could work better as a team, how would that feel?
There is also a tendency in many workplaces to focus on the problems and what’s going wrong. We ask questions to solve the immediate crisis. We know when that’s solved (or not), another problem will soon arise, or has already. So we can lurch from crisis to crisis, for ever fire-fighting.
But what if we made time to ask other questions, to explore other possibilities? Might we discover new ways of doing and being? And what if we invested time to listen more to each other. It’s an investment, not a waste of time. The answer is often within us. We’re just too busy or frantic to discover it.
In the workshop we reviewed the TGROOW model as a framework to ask questions and listen to each other:-
- Topic – clarify what we’re discussing
- Goal – what would make a good outcome?
- Reality – discover and agree what we are facing right now
- Obstacles – what are we aware of that we have to find a way through?
- Options – exploring possibilities and alternatives
- Way forward – creating an action plan together
Questions are good. It’s how we ask them that matters – and how we listen to the answers.
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