Please work your way through this section, making notes and reflecting on what you have learned

We know that questions are more transformative than answers and are essential tools of engagement. Questions create the space for something new to emerge. However, in the busy world of task, target, fix it and sort it, answers are still valued more than questions and in the short-term often feel easier.

Answers, especially those that respond to our need for quick results, while satisfying, shut down the discussion and the future shuts down with them.

What can make us impatient with questions and hungry for answers is that in organisational life there is confusion between the process of exploring a question and ‘talking shop’. The latter has no meaning and leads to an ego-based argument, analysis, explanation and defensive behaviour. The former creates space for new thinking to emerge.

 

Useful for

• Preparing for conversations that you want to be different
• Identifying the ‘heart’ of what you want to inquire about
• Defining patterns of questions for events, conversations with teams or one-to-ones

Resources: Powerful Questions

Empathy Journeys

Empathy journeys are conducted to enable us as leaders and change-makers to really understand the thoughts, feelings and experiences of others. This is strongly linked to the development of excellent powerful questions and the work around levels of listening and rules of engagement.

Empathy journeys find out what is going on for people in the system, they get underneath titles and dismantle assumption through genuine inquiry and listening. These empathy journeys can take many formats from a one-to-one conversation to intensive shadowing, to graphic recording and films.

Whatever the methodology, the purpose remains the same to discover what you can’t see and feel.

 

Useful for

• Engagement with people who use systems or services that you are trying to change/improve/innovate
• Working with teams to understand the diversity of thinking and feeling that may not be visible
• Gathering themes and insights, illuminating blind spots, and dismantling assumptions