INsight/ AI before AI
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Photo by the author, taken in Ubud, bali.
Manila, 2 November 2023 — Asking great questions unlocks many doors.
Story
It happened in 1985. Long before our current access to AI, there was another AI, which is still with us today and has grown in power and influence since its creation. Just like the ‘new’ AI is changing the way we work and live today, the earlier AI changed the way people looked at the world around them, especially about how to make positive changes happen. The ‘earlier’ AI was born in 1985 at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where David Cooperrider in his PhD thesis proposed “a new methodology for understanding and enhancing organizational innovation.” He called it Appreciative Inquiry, and it involved asking appreciative questions.
So what was new about appreciative questions and why did they spark a global movement of change, much of which we are already taking for granted today? In essence, Cooperrider’s appreciative questions were like the choice to see a glass half full and to wonder how you could fill it up further until it overflowed, as opposed to the decision to see it half empty and analyze what caused it to be half empty. A choice between unleashing more deficit thinking on our problem-solving—prevalent until that time—versus discovering something new, an alternative model of inquiry into finding new ways of improving and innovating organizations. It turned out that the world was ready for the latter.
In a way that far exceeded his initial expectations, Cooperrider’s research attracted a host of collaborators and sparked so much excitement that AI soon generated an international movement for change among business and government leaders, including a commitment by large corporations to form the UN Global Compact for sustainable development. A decade after Appreciative Inquiry was born, the birth of positive psychology generated a similar and complementary movement around the world to influence positive changes by building on human strengths (glass half full) rather than limiting the analysis to what was wrong with people (glass half empty). As with AI, the transformative impact of positive psychology was unlocked by the choice to ask a different set of questions.
Challenge
What we can see from these two examples is that questions are important and that the kinds of questions you decide to ask can lead you in different directions. Of course, the practice of asking questions is as old as humanity and has flourished around the world for a long time. Think of Socrates and the Buddha who, each in their way, led their followers to discover the power of questions. The advent of science sparked more interest in questioning the status quo of knowledge, beliefs, and methods. A century ago, Albert Einstein challenged us to question everything. And that is certainly what scientific researchers and philosophers do for a living. Yet for most of us, asking questions is still a challenge, for several reasons.
This month, we are exploring the Three Question Traps in our Grow3Leaders community, together with new ways to ask questions that challenge the status quo in the three arenas of our personal world, our social world, and our observed world. Mindful of the motto that good leaders ask great questions, popularized by John C. Maxwell, a prolific author on leadership, we push boundaries to learn and practice new behaviors around asking questions. In doing so, we can build on the research generated by AI (Cooperrider’s version) and positive psychology.
As always, our focus is on turning theory into leadership practice as soon as possible. That means practicing to question how we lead ourselves (personal world), how we lead in relationships with others (social world), and how we lead by playing a bigger game in our business, communities, and society (observed world). Our exercises include how to use meta-questions to inspire situational leadership, how to ask our audience questions in a way that speaks to their heads and hearts, and how to empower our daily and weekly leadership reflections with smart questions. Building proficiency in these skills helps us to grow into trusted leaders who master the art of asking over telling, and who know how to ask questions for a wide range of purposes.
Question
As leaders, our ability to use the power of questions on ourselves and others matters a great deal when we want to influence positive changes. The benefits include finding new information, more knowledge, better understanding, clarification, insights to solve problems, encouraging conversation, critical thinking, evaluating new ideas, challenging assumptions, building stronger relationships, making better decisions, increasing engagement and participation, and empowering a process of learning and growth in ourselves and others.
How are you leveraging the power of questions in your work and life? That is my question for you this week.
Your answer matters when you want to open more doors in your work and life. And who doesn’t? I hope that you choose to become a pioneering human innovator too, like the role models in this story, and in your unique way and style. Now you know that besides the AI of today, the AI of yesterday is also in full swing among the leaders around the world who dare to ask themselves great questions and build on human strengths and ingenuity. Questions are, of course, also the main tools of leadership coaches who help you navigate your next leadership transition. Rather than telling you what to do, we hand you the key to unlock the door to your next adventure.
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