Invite New Conversations for Understanding!

Well-Crafted Questions?

“Old conversations” often involve people putting forth positions and offering arguments to support those positions. One way to invite a new conversation—one intended not for winning but for understanding—is to craft questions that ask people to:

  • speak personally, rather than as a representative of a group
  • shift from expressing positions to expressing underlying dreams, hopes, concerns and fears
  • speak about uncertainties, complexities, and grey areas in their thinking, as well as what they know for sure
  • share stories about ways in which their views, hopes and concerns may have been shaped by their life experience
  • explore the meanings of buzz words or emotionally charged terms that have different meanings and connotations for different people
  • encourage participants to reflect on the assumptions, values, and worldviews that underlie or shape
  • their thinking—for example, assumptions about what information can be trusted, ideas about how
  • change happens, and worldviews related to the lessons of history

 

The questions we ask encourage participants to expand the range of experiences and information that they pay attention to and share with others.

The questions we ask encourage people to expand the range of experiences and information that they pay attention to and share with others. When participants speak from the full range of their thoughts and experiences, they begin to listen more fully to each other, they become genuinely interested in each other, and they develop greater trust in each other.

The questions we ask also lead participants to reflect in new ways on their own perspectives. When the armour required for debate is discarded—and when people set aside a mindset that searches for ways to support their own arguments and undermine the arguments of others—they gain understanding, not only about others but also about themselves.