Community by Peter Block

Author:Peter Block
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2018-07-19T16:00:00+00:00

The Construction of Questions

Questions are the essential tools of engagement. They are the means by which we are all confronted with our freedom. In this sense, if you want to change the context, find powerful questions.

Questions create the space for something new to emerge. Answers, especially those that respond to our need for quick results, while satisfying, shut down the discussion, and the future shuts down with them. Most leaders are well schooled in providing answers and remain rather indifferent and naive as far as the use of questions goes. How many PowerPoint presentations have you seen flooded with answers, blueprints, analyses, and proposals? How many have you seen presenting questions?

What makes us impatient with questions and hungry for answers is that we confuse exploring a question with talk that has no meaning—namely, opinions, positions, argument, analysis, explanation, and defense—talk that leaves us despairing about citizens coming together to create something. Questions that trigger opinions, argument, analysis, explanation, and defense have little power. It is significant that most of the meetings we go to, and the conversations we engage in, have these qualities. They may be interesting, but that is different than being powerful.

Powerful questions, as opposed to interesting questions, are those that, in the answering, produce accountability and commitment. They are questions that take us to statements that have power, simply in the saying. These statements are requests, offers, and declarations and expressions of forgiveness, confession, gratitude, and welcome, all of which are memorable and have transformative power.

Without strong questions, we collude with people who might attend a gathering and choose not to join in cocreating the value of the event. The point is that the nature of the questions we ask either keeps the existing system in place or brings an alternative future into the room. So I want to distinguish in more detail between questions that have little power and those that have great power.

A reminder: Questions alone are not enough. Context matters. The mind-set that people bring to the room matters. How people came to be in the room matters. The room itself matters. The social structure of how people talk to each other matters. The action of the leader/convener matters. But for this moment, let us stay with the questions.

Questions are fateful. They determine destinations. They are the chamber through which destiny calls.

Godwin Hlatshwayo

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