Question this

❓ If you ask a question that you know the answer to, is it a question?

❓ Is a statement, re-phrased as a question, just showing off?

❓ What makes a question ‘strategic’?

❓ When does a question become 🗝?

❓ And what’s it called when people ask and answer questions in the same breath?

Questions have been front of mind for me lately. A mentee, let’s call him Geoff, observed just how hard it was to land on the ‘right’ question when he was designing an activity for a workshop. We spiralled through a circle of questions until we landed on one that ‘felt’ right.

We know that question landed because our eyes lit up, our energy lifted and yet, at the same time, we felt as grounded as a plane coming to a halt on a runway.

Another facet of questions became apparent as we worked on Geoff’s workshop design together. Geoff says he is facilitating but I pointed out that he is teaching. I’m not splitting hairs – it’s an important distinction.

Geoff’s program supports middle managers to step up as future leaders. He’s been a leader in the industry and has a lot of knowledge and information to teach groups. He knows the answers to all the questions he asks in a workshop. Geoff had had feedback that he was doing most of the talking, and his groups didn’t get much time to share their own stories or experiences with each other. He wanted to change this and asked me to help make his workshops more participatory. He wanted to his teaching to be more ‘facilitative’.

Questions are a good place to start. They distinguish a teacher from a facilitator, according to Brandon Klein:

'A teacher will rarely ask a question without already knowing the answer; a facilitator should never ask a question if they already know the answer.’

Klein’s words are compelling but as with most things, it’s not so cut and dry. It depends on the context, the purpose and the person doing the teaching or facilitating. An independent facilitator who is there to guide a group to achieve its purpose should never know the answer. If the facilitator is internal and has a stake in the outcome, they are likely to be chomping at the bit to share their answer!

And not all teachers know the answers. Mrs Jenkins, my brilliant Year 8 English teacher, didn’t know all the answers to questions we asked about Shakespeare. She was as curious about weighing up different answers as we were. I bet she knew that we’d absorb Shakespeare’s words and themes if we thought through the answers to our own questions. Looking back, I’d called that facilitative teaching. Her teaching process helped us do our best thinking.

Klein’s belief that '…a good facilitator should be the last person in the room to see the answer...keeps all plausible options open far longer than anyone else’ resonates more strongly. The bulk of my facilitation is with communities and stakeholders who have come together to help an organisation find their way through a trickly problem, to weigh up pros and cons and settle for ideas and solutions that most people can accept and live with. There are rarely winners and losers from these conversations – except the process. I’m more invested in what contributors to these conversations think about the process they experienced, the connections they made and the new perspectives they heard, rather than what they think about the result.

Even if they don’t fully agree with it. Just like ‘Cranky Chris’ said on camera a few years ago. He was the ‘difficult person’ in a series of workshops I co-facilitated in a regional town. When I returned with a camera operator six months after to talk to participants about the project’s impact, Chris said the ‘process was fair’ and ‘we could all contribute’ even though he didn’t agree with where the group finally landed. I can just imagine what he would have said to camera if we’d known the answers to the questions we asked the group.

Geoff is an expert. He felt like he was letting people down if he didn’t get give them all the answers. My job was to help him let go, phrase questions that would trigger conversations among his participants, so that they came up with their own answers, listening to each other’s stories and experiences. He could still give them his answer, but I bet he will hear some new ones from his groups.

I’ll give the final word to Klein:

'...the answers our participants provide are only a fraction as useful as the questions they have to ask themselves to arrive at those answers.’

Link: Brandon Klein and Dan Newman, Facilitating Collaboration

P.S. What’s is it called when people ask and answer questions in the same breath? Breaking form here – I do know the answer 😊 Send me your response and I’ll share mine with you.

Be (fl)awesome!