Thinking about powerful questions

Questions are the central preoccupation of my work. I ask them of clients, we ask them together, we ask questions about questions to be sure that we are asking good questions and when we aren’t we ask questions about what would be the better questions. In uncertain situations, the quality of our inquiry often matters far more than the quality of our answers. So much of my work deals with supporting groups and organizations as they explore uncertainty, ambiguity, and unknowable futures, that answers are usually less helpful than good questions. The question often then becomes, what makes a question good? For years in the Art of Hosting I have avoided teaching about good or powerful questions. My reticence to do so was based in the idea that knowing what a good question is is so context dependant that I couldn’t possibly tell you unless we had a context to work with. I think the role of hosts is not arrive bringing the powerful question but to arrive bringing the attention needed to…