Making Questions Work

A Guide to How and What to Ask for Facilitators, Consultants, Managers, Coaches, and Educators

Dorothy Strachan

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780787987275
• eBook ISBN: 9781118047279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

This book is an invaluable desk reference for facilitators, leaders, coaches and anyone who wants to engage in more effective learning and decision-making conversations. It offers over 1700 rich questions that you can borrow or adapt to improve your inquiry skills, and provides clear frameworks that point to when, where, and why particular questions are most useful.

PART 1

HOW TO ASK QUESTIONS

1

Questions That Work

When it comes to facilitation, questions make things happen; they are the engine that drives healthy and productive group processes.

Facilitators develop questions in response to facilitation challenges. The right question is the one that works best at a particular moment in a particular situation with a particular group of people. Sometimes a question works brilliantly with one group and not at all with another—context is critical.

Questions work when they contribute to the purpose and objectives of a process. In the hands of a skilled facilitator, effective questions are the foundation for such activities as opening a session, building consensus for decision making, enabling action, thinking critically, addressing issues, and closing a session.

A few years ago, a national think tank brought together Canada’s “top thirty” corporate chief executive officers to create a national strategy to develop and support up-and-coming young leaders in business. As part of the opening session, we asked participants to introduce themselves by answering the question, “What is an important learning you have had about organizational leadership in your working life? Please answer in the form of a commandment.”

Responses to this question were varied, rich, and concise. They energized the group, focused the discussion on what new business leaders need to learn, encouraged risk taking, generated new ideas, and initiated development of a national leadership vision.

Participants said things such as:

• Enable people to mourn the past so that they can change in the future.

• Build on the organization’s legacy and traditions.

• Get the organization change-ready.

• Lead toward something, not away from something.

• Organizational leadership takes passion and big steps; leadership is not a spectator sport.

• Political and business leadership do not always go in the same direction.

Watching these responses work their magic with that group was a satisfying experience. Questions have not worked as well during other introductions, for a variety of reasons; perhaps they weren’t focused enough, or they confronted participants too much or too little. At other times, in writing a final report we have discovered that a session might have been considerably more productive if we had just tweaked a few questions during small group discussions so that they directed participants more clearly toward a specific outcome.

When questions really work, you can almost see them sweating to support the process and enable participants to get where they want to go.

PROCESS FRAMEWORKS

A process framework is a step-by-step conceptual guide to what a facilitator does in a structured group experience.

It is like a map organized around facilitation challenges. It makes the process explicit, furnishes a reference point for keeping a process on track, and supports facilitators in thinking about questions consciously, whether for a single workshop on strategic planning or a long-term, multisession team development initiative.

Although all processes have their own unique history, situation, objectives, and complicating factors, they also share typical facilitation challenges. Five process frameworks (Figure 1.1) for common facilitation challenges are found in Part Two of this book.

Figure 1.1. Five Process Frameworks.

One way of looking at the world as a whole is by means of a map, that is to say, some sort of a plan or outline that shows where various things are to be found—not all things, of course, for that would make the map as big as the world, but the things that are most prominent, most important for orientation—outstanding landmarks, as it were, which you cannot miss, or if you do miss, you will be left in total perplexity.

—Schumacher, 1977

Process frameworks offer a concrete approach to a facilitation challenge. Most sessions use a minimum of three frameworks—one to open the process, one to address a specific challenge, and one to close the process. Once you are clear about the framework or combination of frameworks required for a process, the questions you need will become obvious by looking at the key parts of the framework: they enable you to make conscious decisions about what to ask to accomplish your objectives.

For example, if you are facilitating a group to move toward specific action based on recommendations in a report, you can use the process framework for enabling action (Figure 1.2, and Chapter Five) to guide how you think about the questions required.

Figure 1.2. Process Framework for Enabling Action.

On the basis of this process framework, at some point in the session you will be paying close attention to questions in the “now what” section that help drive the process toward decision making. These questions may be developed ahead of time, or you might make them up on the spot. Either way, it is the process framework that helps you consciously shape the questions required to enable the group to move forward.

Learn and lean on your process frameworks; don’t leave home without them.

Process frameworks are flexible. Just as a map is not the territory, so a framework is not the process. However, it is a strong reference point and suggests a basic structure, which is what makes it useful (Korzybski, 1933). Instead of a facilitator feeling stuck in a session and wondering what she should ask next, she leans on the process framework for the kind of question she needs, thinking, “We’ve spent enough time discussing what stands out in this report; they probably need to move on to the reflection part of the framework.” In this way, a process framework is a reference point for questions that fit a specific situation. For example, if you want to encourage critical reflection (see Figure 1.3), lean on the process framework in Chapter Six to guide how you develop and use questions.

If you notice that people need more time to make their assumptions and perspectives explicit than what you have allotted on the agenda, you might decide to spend an additional twenty or thirty minutes using questions that you create on the spot to clarify perspectives further.

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

—Naguib Mahfouz, 1988

A process framework both requires and enables facilitators to take a participant-observer stance. In this stance, the facilitator functions in a dual role, attending to both content and process, noticing how questions are working and also making decisions about what to ask next (see Chapter Two).

Just as it takes a lot of experience to become a skilled navigator in the wilderness, it also takes a lot of facilitation experience to become a skilled participant-observer in a group. This involves using a process framework to guide a session, tracking group process, noting stages of group development, and intervening when appropriate to achieve objectives.

Figure 1.3. Process Framework for Thinking Critically.

CONSCIOUS QUESTIONING

Questions that work have intention; they enable a group to get where it wants to go. They are created deliberately to support achievement of the purpose and objectives of a process and are situated within a process framework that guides participants toward expected outcomes.

To create effective questions that have meaning in a specific context and process, facilitators need to know:

• The purpose and objectives of the process

• The situation and related facilitation challenges

• The people involved

• The process frameworks required to address the facilitation challenges

• Themselves

Conscious questioning is based on clear intention and comprehensive preparation. It includes time spent learning about your client, the organization, the situation, and the participants. It can also involve reviewing background documents, interviewing people, summarizing main issues, and researching recent publications. The final challenge—knowing yourself as a facilitator—is grounded in how you understand and apply your core values, as described in Chapter Two.

Framing Questions

There are many ways to frame questions. For example, Bloom’s taxonomy is based on six categories: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (Bloom, 1956). The focused conversation approach has four levels of questions: objective, reflective, interpretive, and decisional (Stanfield, 2000a). The critical thinking community talks about three types: those with a right answer, those with better or worse answers, and those with as many answers as there are human preferences (Paul and Elder, 1996).

Other ways to classify questions use a variety of labels: hypothetical, lower-andhigher-level, factual, abstract, convergent, divergent, focused, conceptual, philosophical, dichotomous, analytical, strategic, operational, and so on.

We are in the age of “searchculture,” in which Google and other search engines are leading us into a future rich with an abundance of correct answers along with an accompanying naïve sense of certainty. In the future, we will be able to answer the question, but will we be bright enough to ask it?

—Brockman, 2005

Rather than depending on any single question taxonomy for all situations, facilitators base their questioning on the type of process framework required to achieve a group’s objectives. Once you have decided on a process framework, you develop questions on the basis of key points in the framework, your intentions, the purpose of the session, expected outcomes, and how much time you want to spend.

If you are opening an in-house, half-day workshop for six people who have been working together for a year and are going to start a new project, then refer to the process framework in Chapter Four to create a new question for this situation. Two useful ones might be, “What is one thing you have learned as a result of being a member of this team?” and “What is one thing you would like to learn by working on this new initiative?”

Planned Questioning

Whether facilitating an in-house meeting, a national workshop, a regional think tank, or a global issues forum, facilitators usually prepare some of their questions well in advance as part of a workshop design or script. They also create some questions on the spot in response to what is going on in a session.

Given the evolving nature of process, sometimes questions that are planned in advance may end up tweaked, dropped, or moved to another place according to the facilitator’s assessment of the situation. Questions in a more formal agenda are less likely to be changed on ...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• The Author
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART 1 - HOW TO ASK QUESTIONS
• PART 2 - WHAT TO ASK WHEN
• In Closing: About Questions—What I Know for Sure
• References
• CONTINUATION OF COPYRIGHT PAGE