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“Good question-asking is an art form,” writes Enuma Okoro, one of my favorite columnists and thinkers. Questioning is an art “we can all learn because it starts with deep listening and with not being afraid of not having answers for other people,” she adds. (Yes, I know. A double negative. Just work with it.)
Okoro is an FT Weekend writer featured in “The Art of Life” column. Her August 6-7 piece on the “Power of Questions” invokes a line from Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” on the wisdom of questioning. “Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
Yes, live your way into the answers. Isn’t that part of figuring out the meaning of life? It certainly is a powerful way to identify, discuss, understand, and resolve organizational challenges. We spend too much time in business meetings not asking good questions and listening well and, therefore, failing to build conversation iteratively, constructively, and focused on actions and results. We are often not listening at all in these settings but preparing instead for the next thing we want to say, no matter how hideously disconnected it is from anything anyone else has said.
Action Learning provides a remarkable antidote to this insufferable dilemma. Meeting participants can only ask questions and, of course, answer them. Imagine, you can only ask and answer questions. It really and truly works. With a trained Action Learning coach, and I am one, attendees engage in a dialogue generally stripped of monologues, posturing, drifting, and tangential bullshit. Participants drill deep into a problem and possible solutions by using questions to stay focused and on task.
The twin focus of Action Learning is for teams to engage in a disciplined conversation of sorts that leads to action and from which participants learn – both individually and collectively. Thus the name, Action Learning. Among the primary learnings is how to ask increasingly better questions – insightfully, succinctly, and in a non-prosecutorial manner – and how to engage fully in active listening.
My friend and dissertation advisor, Dr. Michael Marquardt developed Action Learning and what is now a worldwide network of coaches and clients addressing huge issues and opportunities through the demonstrable discipline of questions.
Enuma Okoro captures the point well in writing about a friend who “has an exceptional way of posing questions that cause me to consider it (a problem) from angles I hadn’t thought of.” That’s exactly the point. The power of a team asking sharp, productive questions from many different angles produces results no one individual could ever yield and no typical meeting could ever harvest.
Learn more about Action Learning and the World Institute of Action Learning at www.wial.org
