This month’s post weaves a video from Christina Baldwin with some tips on the art of creating questions.
In this short video, Christina Baldwin, co-author of The Circle Way, shares a story that illuminates the value of essential questions and the relationship between questions, story, and circle.
Tips for the Art of Creating Questions
There is a saying amongst hosting folks: If you can only have one tool going into a room, what might it be? A good question!”
Creating or crafting a good question for a circle is an important skill. We want the questions we create to be meaningful to the people participating, and to the purpose of why they’ve gathered.
We want the questions we create to contribute to curiosity, to surface many perspectives that help open new possibilities, so that we can know more by the end of the conversation than when we began.
We want the questions to be asked with real curiosity. Not questions that we already know the answer to (people can tell!). This is both in how we ask the question - as a genuine invitation - as well as wanting to learn from each other. The work of a good question is for the group to surface together what can’t be surfaced alone.
Some principles that can guide us in creating questions:
Start with story, not opinion. “Share a moment when you were proud of this community. What happened?” or “When have you experienced a feeling of connection?” These questions offer a very different vibe than asking “What do you think about this community?”
Shift from an orientation of “right/wrong” to learning together. Instead of “Do you like the way things are going?” we can ask “What is important to you in how things are going?” Or, going even further, “What are you noticing about what’s happening here?” We can go even one more level, asking “What are you noticing about what you’re noticing?” There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, but they invite a lot of learning about what’s going on for people in their unique experience that helps us be wiser together.
Keep it simple. A short, simple question can be easier for people to jump into rather than long questions where folks might get lost in the forest of the words. It’s okay to add some context to a question when you introduce it, but think about the core question people will respond to and keep that simple. Also check that the language is accessible - de-jargon it!
Think about the journey. It’s helpful for our circle conversations to have a starting place, a middle, and a place where we end. The questions we design can help us travel that journey with some sequencing; often this means not jumping into solutions right away, but beginning with the chance to learn from each other, then to reflect on what’s important about what we’re learning, and then what might we want to do with what we’ve learned. This follows the elegant pattern of what, so what, now what.
Going back to a question shared at the beginning: “When have you experienced a feeling of connection?”. This might be a good starting question. The next question in the journey might be “What connection do you hope for here in this community?” And then the last question might be “What are you inspired to experiment with to create connection?”
Bring an equity lens. Beware of how ableism, sexism, racism, etc. may show up in question responses. The Fakequity blog has some excellent wisdom on this:
“A colleague told me she was at a meeting where the opening question was about weekend plans and most of the people there mentioned going skiing or taking a trip of some sort. Another person in the meeting mentioned the amount of privilege in the group they hadn’t even noticed until that moment. At another training I ran I used an opening prompt that touched upon relationships and justice. A participant noted she liked that question better than standard opening questions because it was a question everyone in their group could wrestle with and personalize. That story made me think about opening questions differently. A reflective opening question can do more than share out superficially.”
“I’ve tried to shift away from questions about what people are doing, to questions about how people are feeling and acting. Questions about what people do, such as “what are you doing this weekend?” or “where was the last place you visited?” don’t invite people to reflect. The answers can also expose class divides (as mentioned earlier) which can go against the overall value of creating relationships.”
Read their two blog posts here and here for more of their wisdom and some terrific question examples.
Welcome spontaneity. Often we carefully craft our questions in our planning process before the circle convenes, and there are many times when we need to shift in the moment. You might be in the first round of circle and realize OH NO! we need to adjust our question for the next section of the circle! In that moment we’re listening into what’s happening and what we’re sensing is needed now, and craft a new question in the moment. There are also times when we might not want to pre-create the check-out question, as we need to feel where we are closer to the end of a circle and create it more spontaneously.
This “spontaneous question creating” is an important skill in the art of creating questions. To be able to notice something and create a question that is an invitation to engage with each other, to encounter each other beyond the surface level. You can practice converting an observation to a question for all to respond to. For example, “The weather is changing rapidly, isn't it — what is rapidly changing in you these days? Share a bit of a story.” Another example, noticing someone’s beautiful cup of tea on Zoom, you could ask “What is filling up or depleting your cup today?”
We are all innate question-askers (especially when we were children). Be gentle with our nervousness and inner judgement as we seek to craft meaningful and accessible questions. This inherent curiosity is in us – bring some playfulness and lightness to the magic of creating questions. Though often running in the background, it is our questions that shape how we are together.