Asking Your Way Out of Awkward Conversations

Image from pixabay by Dean Moriarty, CC0 I‘ve written before about the value and importance of asking good questions. I described the qualities of a ‘good question’, including Warren Berger’s emphasis on: Why… (eg Why Isn’t Someone Doing…), What If… (eg What If We Tried Doing…), and How Might… (eg How Might We Accomplish/Test/Improve…) questions. A lot of ‘good’ questions are about eliciting imaginative and creative thinking, unearthing unique insights, or engaging people about a subject for the first time. Quite a few of them are suitable for interviewees interested in learning from their interviewee subjects (rather than unproductively confronting them to create clickbait). My five favourite questions right now: What’s Really Going On Here and Why? Is it really that simple? What are we missing and how can we find that out? What Are Our Alternatives? What is the potential risk and potential benefit of each? What is the risk of not doing anything? What’s Holding You Back? How might we…