Effective Questions

Good questions are the most powerful tools available to us. They stimulate engagement, confront error, energise debate, foster humility, unearth reason, generate insight, build ownership, deliver progress and help us find the right answers.

Most of the tools available in the ToolChest are simply structures for asking and exploring questions, but questions do not always need a tool or template to support them.

Oftentimes simply asking the right question of individuals and groups, either in isolation, or as part of a structured sequence of questions to different groupings, will create real progress.

Furthermore, engaging with a question is often more familiar to people than working off a template on a whiteboard (although we hope that will change over time).

Questions can apply to each aspect of meetings, and we have provided a useful subset of questions to support these via the links below. We have also provided general guidance on your options for grouping people to best tackle these questions.

However, to gain a better understanding of how questions and groupings can be used together, the website Liberating Structures has developed an extensive set of tried and tested combinations. Their intention for this is the same as our own, but their approach appears to be much more dialogue centric, and this provides a wealth of options which complements the Meeting ToolChest approach.

Examples of such questions can be found below, courtesy of  Liberating Structures