The Subversive Power of Questions

Since questions point to answers, we must learn to ask the right questions - that is, the ones that point to helpful answers.

~ Roger Schank The Creative Attitude: Learning to Ask and Answer the Right Questions

Questioning is a basic tool for rebellion. It breaks open the stagnant hardened shells of the present, revealing ambiguity and opening up fresh options to be explored.

~ Fran Peavey "Strategic QuestioningManual" (see resources below)


There is no doubt that questions are dangerous.

The higher a person rises in an organisation, the more they have invested in the status quo. The organisation as it is (and as it has been in the past) values (and valued) that person enough to promote them.

However, to question the status quo may appear to the senior manager to question their contribution to the organisation or to raise doubts about the wisdom of their previous decisions.

The best questions open:

• closed doors or
• doors that no-one even knew existed or
• doors that people didn't know were doors or
• doors  that people have ceased to see as doors or
• doors that people don't want to talk about (or some people anyway)

And in the process they may let in a breath of fresh air. Or show the skeletons in the cupboard. Or show that the Emperor really does have no clothes on. Even the (so-called) 'dumb' question can show that something hasn't been understood as well as previously thought and open up new areas for improvement.

Questions reduce certainty - to question is to doubt the existing answer, to say "what if this isn't the case? What if there is a better answer?"

The best questions open up possibility rather than shut it down. They show how things can change for the better rather than staying the same, that maybe things don't have to stay the way they are.

And this is one of the reasons they are subversive and why the better the question is the more dangerous it is for those who hold positions in the status quo. Because a good question also raises further questions such as "Why didn't so-and-so think of that?" or "Why have we been doing this so inefficiently for so long under so-and-so as manager?" or "Why did so-and-so put that barrier to progress in place or maintain it when clearly it was unnecessary?"

And questions are more dangerous than answers. An answer can be attacked logically or factually or in any number of other ways.

But to attack a question is to reveal insecurity about what the question concerns and effectively to justify the asking of the question in the first place.
Strategic Questioning Manual (Fran Peavey)
at The Change Agency website

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Resources