Questions and answers

This weekend I joined a workshop on questions and dialogue. In the beautiful village of Fulda (where every single person somehow seemed to expect us!) we made our own dialogue-game. As a researcher asking questions is one of my biggest passions. As a consultant I learned the power of questions in creating conversations that really matter. In the workshop, facilitated by Carsten Ohm who is initiator of Unfolding Cards, we explored different kinds of questions. I very much like the distiction between:

• Questions for the mind --> Thinking (T)
• Questions for the heart --> Feeling (F)
• Questions for the body --> Sensing (S)
• Questions for the soul --> Intuition (I)

It depends on the people, the time, the context, what questions appeal. A group of managers who just came back from a retrait might ask different questions than a professor from university.

Each of us developed her/his own game. It were quite different kinds of games: one for conflict solving, one to stimulate innovation, one to tame your inner cremlins... We found out that many questions however (some with a little adaptation) could be used in different games:

• Whose opinion would add something now? (T)
• What slogan should accompany the innovation? (F)
• When you couldn’t hear and would enter the room, what would you see? (S)
• When this innovation project would be part of a bigger project/movement, what would that be? (I)

The workshop did of course also bring up some new questions (what else should a workshop on questions do..). We forced ourselves to formulate them into Thinking, Feeling, Sensing and Intuition-questions (an amazing exercise!). They sound like this:

• (T) How does the experience of the game changes by changing the rules?
• (S) What and whom do you need to host your first game?
• (I) Which process us your game a part of?
• (F) How would children play the game and what could we learn from that?

A variation on this way of working is to formulate your urgent question in 4 questions, T, F, S, I. That offers quite new perspectives!

Obviously, making a game that wants to stimulate learning is quite different from a game like monopoly that is developed to relax. One of the main differences for me that learning goes together with action (you want to start doing something else, act differently e.g). One of the questions that stays with me: how can a question-game, that mainly stimulates a refelection process, can lead to the design of a first experiment?

The facilitator of the workshop, Carsten Ohm was, just as some of the other participants, involved in the Pioneers of Change-network. Their website is worthwhile visiting, lots of unknown treasures!. Ohm supports the idea of open innovation very much. He works with a 'friend-chise concept' and games created can be found at the Creative Commons, a (nonprofit) organization with a great mission. Creative Commons uses private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare "some rights reserved."

Read more on making your own game...

Rules
When making the rules of your game, think of:

• What kind of dialogue do you want to start? Here we used the four forms of dialogue as divided by Otto Scharmer: Do you want people to talk nice; to talk tough; to have a reflective dialogue; or to have agenerative dialogue.
• What behaviour will this rule evoke?
• Are your rules pointed at win-win or win-loose; at competition or collaboration or at both?

Phases
The phases Ohm divides, are:

1. Sensing the game (what game is played here? why do they play it? what does it bring them?)
2. Seeing your role (what is your role in the game?)
3. Changing your role
4. Creating a new game