If You Could Only Ask One Question

This activity focuses on the first part of the questioning-listening-responding dynamic that is so essential to good discussion. It asks small groups to generate only one question that they think enables them to go deeper into an issue or promotes greater understanding of content.

Purposes

• To demonstrate the power of a single question
• To practice asking questions that help a discussion build organically
• To generate questions that open up new avenues for exploration of a topic or issue
• To promote greater understanding of that topic
• To gauge the nature of questions that seem to spur the most discussion

How It Works

• We like to introduce this exercise by offering two examples.
  • First a scene from the film Color of Fear (1994) is shown in which the facilitator, Lee Mun Wah, asks a white male participant in a racism workshop what is keeping him from believing what others have shared about the harshness of racism. He then follows up with a provocative question: “What would it mean to you if it were really that harsh?”
  • Second, we watch what Bryan Stevenson, the author of Just Mercy (2014) said in his 2012 “TED Talk”: “I represent people on death row. It's interesting, this question of the death penalty. In many ways we've been taught to think that the real question is, do people deserve to die for the crimes they've committed? And that's a very sensible question. But the other way of thinking about this is not do people deserve to die for the crimes they've committed, but—do we deserve to kill?”
• The whole group then talks about the examples and how a single question can build deeper understanding of a topic or open people up to new perspectives.
• Next the facilitator introduces a new topic by giving a brief presentation on it or showing a provocative film clip.
• Participants then spend time on their own thinking about questions they would ask that would widen or deepen the subsequent discussion of the topic.
• Small groups of five or six participants share these questions with each other and, time permitting, pose one or two to see what kind of discussion these stimulate.
• The whole group reconvenes and small groups share the questions that worked best.

Where and When It Works Well

Asking a single good question can galvanize a group almost everywhere.

1. Academic settings. Many instructors emphasize the importance of students asking good questions and use Socratic questioning, so this suits colleges and universities.
2. Organizations. For corporate and nonprofit organizations the idea of asking one transformative question fits many of their leadership models.
3. Community groups and social movements Activists such as Myles Horton, Saul Alinsky, and Paulo Freire are known for asking pivotal, ground-breaking questions, so this shows how these questions are well received in community-based organizations.

What Users Appreciate

1. Practitioners in action. Seeing activists like Lee Mun Wah and Bryan Stevenson pose their transformative questions motivates participants to attempt this.
2. Small-group practice. Users appreciate the opportunity to practice coming up with their own game-changing questions but to do so in small groups in which there is less pressure to demonstrate their brilliance.
3. The power of questions. Many participants come to see how powerful a single question can be, an experience that often takes them by surprise.

What to Watch Out For

1. Frustration. Asking the right question at the right time is challenging. Urge people to keep at it because the more they bounce ideas off one another, the easier it gets.
2. Timing. This exercise is much richer if the small groups have time to test out the viability of the questions by starting to answer them in their groups.
3. Choosing good examples. We use examples from Color of Fear and Bryan Stevenson's “TED Talk” but we encourage you to use other examples that fit your context better. The key point is that they should illustrate the power of asking a single question. Video clips are especially effective at holding a group's attention.

Questions That Fit This Protocol

The examples we give in the “How It Works” section are arguably derived from two important categories of questions:

• Questions that ask us to practice technique 34, Methodological Belief: “What would it mean for our own lives if another person's experience we had resisted believing turned out to be true?”
• Questions that personalize a big issue: “What would I have done if asked to hide a slave in antebellum America or a Jew in Nazi Germany even though it would have been against the law to do so in both cases?”
• Questions that entertain the opposite or reverse of conventional wisdom on a topic: “In place of ‘Do death row criminals deserve to die?’ the question becomes, ‘Do we deserve to kill?’”
• Questions that broaden ourselves and think beyond our own personal experience: an example might be a question Myles Horton often asked “If I want something desirable for myself and believe I deserve it, shouldn't I want that same thing for all others, especially those far less privileged than me?”