Strategic Questions
December 22, 2005 ·
Strategic Questioning: An Approach to Creating Personal and Social Change is a solid little online guide (also available in downloadable .pdf) to using questions for effective problem-solving. It’s based on a paper by Fran Peavey and edited by Vivian Hutchinson, and you can use it to broaden your conflict resolution, negotiation or leadership toolkit. Strategic questioning, say the authors,
…is the skill of asking the questions that will make a difference. It is a powerful tool for personal and social change. It is a tool for giving service to any issue … as it helps people discover their own strategies and ideas for change.
Strategic Questioning involves a special type of question and a special type of listening. We can use strategic questioning to help friends, co-workers, political allies and adversaries to create their own solutions to any problem.
Strategic Questioning is a process that usually changes the listener as well as the person being questioned. A strategic question opens both of us to another point of view. It invites our ideas to shift and take into account of new information and new possibilities. And it invokes that special creativity that can forge fresh strategies for meeting challenges.
Thanks to Bill Waters’ Campus ADR Tech Blog for uncovering this little gem.
[...] Being able to think through the noise of conflict depends on having some of your good skills accessible when you need them most. This means practicing with those skills in low-stakes, non-conflict situations. Really good listening. Asking effective questions. Uncovering interests. Framing the real problem. You wouldn’t take an Italian class, ignore what you learned for three months, then go to Tuscany and expect to be fluent, would you? [...]