Personal change is fickle.
It’s hard to predict when the final straw is breaking the back of old habits.
It takes little wisps of straw. One by one. And then comes The One.
Ditto with ideas.
Sometimes you need to be confronted with little wisps of the same idea before – tadaaa! – one extra iteration does the job to really make the idea clear and compelling (you to act on it).
This is exactly what happened to me about the role of ‘questions’ in facilitation.
I’ve been puzzled by this for a while. To the extent that I posted a wicked question about it recently:
Yes: What is the place of questions in our practice?
The penny dropped when I listened to the latest episode of the Workshops Work podcast with no other than two friends of mine in a conversation: Myriam Hadnes (the WW podcast and NDB community founder) and Amanda Harding (the Convene owner).
As they were exploring the art of curating dialogue around wicked problems, Amanda explained despite her knowing the context in which she is curating dialogues, she didn’t see herself as the best qualified to decide what are the best questions to ask. Instead, she relied on the people joining the dialogues to come up with them.
Aha!!
So this is what suddenly became abundantly clear for me (at least for now):
In my humble opinion, and practice, the preeminent place of questions in our facilitation approach is to use our craft of exploring, playing with, reformulating, sharpening questions to understand the context of their group dynamics and relationships better, and to elicit better questions from the people in the room – the people who are intimate with the context at hand.
It is NOT about us asking the right, good, smart, definitive questions about the topic at hand.
This sits comfortably with me.
Until this point, I felt somewhat irked by the notion that questions are central to a facilitator’s practice.
Why my discomfort with questions?
Questions are certainly helpful. And powerful!
We – I mean ‘facilitators’ for short, even though I don’t look at myself as a facilitator – bring questions all the time, and should do some measure of that for sure.
However, as mentioned in the LinkedIn post, I’ve always felt that it wasn’t my place to ask the questions that the people need to grapple with. Because it’s their world. Their questions. Their answers. Their next questions. Their consequences. Their vision of where to go. Their capacity and their motivation to get there etc.
I just didn’t feel like playing the role of the smart external consultant that came to crack the problems for everyone.
Disguised as questions, our ideas may seem like they’re not setting the direction, but if you follow Myriam’s practice (revealed in the above-mentioned episode) you would never ask a question that you know the answer to… otherwise you are intentionally shaping the direction of the conversation.
So where do questions play a role in a facilitator’s approach?
That said, a few ideas for the role of questions in our facilitation approach, and a few caveats to my epiphany:
Questions are absolutely essential in process design
Yes! Process design is the realm of questions. It’s 9 why’s, Wicked Questions, but also who, what, where, when, how, and why again.
Process design is about asking questions with and to your client/partner to really get to the bottom of what it is they’re trying to crack or move forward with. Asking questions doesn’t provide the answers but delineates the boundaries of the set of conversations the group needs to be having (at least as a start).
I have a whole list of questions to ask in that process design phase: some are generic, most are specific to the context. I don’t hide the fact that it will take some time to go through all these questions. However, I’ve found that everyone is thankful for the time spent questioning things and understanding where the real issues might lie.
Whatever the question we ask (even questions about process, not content), we are influencing the group
I’m not blind to the fact that neutrality doesn’t exist.
Even though I want my role to be in the background, as a sherpa of our currently ending Liberating Journey, with a mandate to “support everyone to do their best thinking“, I am part of the system and am influencing the group as a whole too. And sometimes, as my mentor Thomas Lahnthaler would suggest, we influence the group intentionally, to provoke the status quo.
But personally, I try to refrain from doing so too much, because even if you see the solution many steps ahead of the group, if the group is not there by itself, at its own pace and with its very own dynamics, whatever change that might seem useful will not necessarily come at the right time and thus be rejected.
I want the people I serve to own their own change process.
So, though I’m still influencing them, I only choose to do as little of it as possible, and as consciously as possible, not least by working on myself.
Asking questions is a personal choice, not an identity marker
Everyone does what they want. To each their own.
Influencing the group dynamics with questions is only a move, not necessarily your ‘signature’ approach. And even if it’s your go-to move, it doesn’t mean you will ask questions in every situation…
Community At Work sometimes refer to the facilitator’s ‘influencer-accommodator’ continuum. It means that at any given moment you can decide to actively influence the group (by e.g. changing the process, pausing the process to reflect on the meta level, teaching an element of group dynamics, asking a question about content, seeking other views etc.) or to accommodate to what’s unfolding (by e.g. remaining entirely passive, letting silence unfold for a longer time, just mirroring what people are saying etc.).
It’s a choice.
And it’s a choice that doesn’t define who you are. Oh, I’m pretty sure we all have a certain overall tendency to be rather actively intervening or actively observing what is happening instead. But every situation presents another opportunity to make a call, whatever it is.
Perhaps in a given situation I’ll let confusion settle down and see how the participants grapple with it; at at another moment I will come in and suggest we take a break, or reflect individually about it, or do something in breakouts about that confusion; and yet another time I may simply enter the confusion and use my active listening skills to help the group navigate that confusion together.
What’s become more vivid for me is that I’m focusing my questions on ‘meta questioning’
The art of ‘meta questioning’
There are thousands of references on Google about how to ask the right/strong/better/perfect questions so I won’t explore that. Here I am focusing on what I see as a useful questioning practice for facilitators.
When it comes to questions, what facilitators bring to a group is the art of ‘meta questioning’: asking questions about the meta world of the process, and asking questions about questions.
Process questions
Process questions are the obvious facilitator questions.
Instead of focusing on the topic at hand (what people hear), they are about what people see: setup, group dynamics, behaviours and communication, logistics, charts etc.
Asking these questions builds the group’s process literacy. The questions reveal the ‘process scaffolding’ that contains the group conversations. They help the group: sharpen its capacity to observe without analysing (what so what now what does wonders on this); acknowledge reactions, emotions, communication styles; understand what participation formats make possible, and understand that these formats are only one aspect of facilitation; come to make a decision together; register power relations, broken relations and relations in general; appreciate the time it takes to build emotional bridges and psychological safety between people etc.
Process questions could include:
- What are you observing in the room right now?
- What emotions are coming up for you at the moment?
- How are our relationships developing as we speak?
- What did you notice about the participation format/method/structure we just used?
- What does this conversation say about (y)our ability to progress as a group?
- What might be a useful move now to set up your group to a constructive next step?
- What has this conversation made possible for you?
- …
And in addition to all that, all the questions – and interventions – related to the specific role of the facilitator (to ensure everyone does their best thinking) ie. when someone is not being heard or supported, questions related to getting people on track with the conversation at hand (rather than following anyone’s rabbit hole) etc.
Questions about questions
This second type of ‘meta questions’ also belongs to process questions, just of another kind. Only this time, rather than looking at the ‘container’, they’re geared towards helping everyone sharpen their own questions.
Active listening, in all its shades, comes in handy here. Particularly paraphrasing and drawing people out, but also helping people understand each other.
Questions such as:
- Am I hearing you say… [xyz]?
- Can someone here rephrase Adam’s question in their own words?
- Do you have anything else on your mind / to add here? (which as such doesn’t always lead to sharper questions but opens up new possibilities for better questions)
- Can you tell me more…?
- What aspect of the issue might have not yet manifested itself here?
- Does this question make sense to everyone here, and if not, what further clarity do you need?
- If you had to summarise your thought into a headline question, what would it look like?
- …
Methods like 9 why’s also come in handy here, but they focus specifically on the why, not on the whole matter…
You can also follow the ORID (Objective/Reflective/Interpretive/Decisional) question framework as suggested here, but that might put you back in the middle of the confusion about questions we ask ha ha ha.
On this introspective journey, I have learned that my attitude vis-à-vis questions is to limit them to questions that alert the group to the invisible aspects of the process, and to questions that help them better craft the questions they really need to come up with themselves.
Let me finish this post with a couple of TedxTalk videos about questions:
In the first one, Pia Lauritzen talks about the insidious power of questions, which speaks directly to this post…
In the second one, Andrew Vincent invites us to check that we disguise questions as statements, and focus on both the needs of the person you’re asking the question to (rather than your needs) and on avoiding the traps of Yes/No questions.
Where are your preferences and boundaries as a person who facilitates processes?
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