Strategic Questioning
Reviewed and Updated: January 2008
Asking questions can lead to resolution, unexpected solutions, reconciliation and transformation. Dynamic questions will dig deep, open options and help people explore how they can move on an issue to actively work together and create contributions to change. An environment is created where people can see the solutions that are within themselves.
Strategic Questioning was developed by Fran Peavey (1992) ‘to facilitate ‘dynamic’ listening…and to create information rather than communicating information already known’. It is particularly useful in a context where innovative new ways of thinking are required.
Strategic questioning involves the skill of asking questions that will make a difference. It changes the listener as well as the person being questioned and opens both to another point of view.
The essence of strategic questioning is to empower the person in the process of unearthing information for themselves. A facilitator assists this process by asking a set of well-planned questions. With the right combination of questions, the facilitator can move a group forward from identifying issues through to developing strategies to address obstacles.
Types of questions may include:
- Information questions: ‘What have you heard about the issue?’
- Affective questions: ‘How has the issue affected you?’
- Visionary questions: ‘What do you think should happen?’
- Change questions: ‘What would it take for this to happen?’
- Option questions: ‘What would be the consequences of these options?’
- Involvement questions: ‘What would it take for your support?’
- Action questions: ‘Who would you talk to, to help make this happen?’
Websites
Workplace Global Network
The Workplace Global Network is one of the leading organisations that are dedicated to the development of work teams in Australia. The Network provides a comprehensive set of resources including publications and coaching programs.
Strategic conversation with industry:future of e-learning
Summary report, published 2006, of the Australian Flexible Learning Advisory Group’s strategic conversations with Industry on the future of e-learning. Example of Strategic Conversations in use. Published 2006.
Publications
Innovative
Advocacy Strategies - Unit 4 Environmental Advocacy, James Whelan
Griffith University 2005
Sue Lennox was an environmental educator at Freshwater High in Harbord in Sydney. In the early 1990s, after a Fran Peavey workshop, Sue began to experiment with strategic questioning. Her high school class were investigating water quality and identified industrial discharges to local waterways as one factor leading to fish kills and major contamination events. Students composed a sequence of strategic questions to ask local residents and industrial operations. The questions effectively prompted respondents to consider the facts, their feelings about local water quality and their preferred solutions, and were based on the assumption that respondents were aware, concerned and committed. The Freshwater High Waterwatch project and its consequent community action outcomes are documented in the video Wake Up Call! A Sutherland Shire Stormwater Action Project (2000) OzGreen.
GREEN, T & Woodrow, P with Peavey, F 1994, Insight into Action, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia.
Insight into Action uses strategic questioning as both an individual process and a strategy for group and community action to discover and support a life of integrity and commitment to change.
PEAVEY, F, Levy, M & Varon, C 1986, Heart Politics, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, 73-91.
A collection of essays outlining social change philosophies and practices. The book traces Peavey's development of strategic questioning as an innovative form of questioning conducive to progressive social change objectives. Fran tells of her encounters with elderly tenants facing eviction from their residential hotel, with alcoholics and street people longing for self-respect, with ordinary citizens awakening to the threat of nuclear war, with Indians dedicated to cleaning up the Ganges River, with prostitutes in Bangkok worried about their children’s education, with civilians caught up in the tragedy of the Middle East conflict. She shows that people can respond to critical issues with humanity and humour.
PEAVEY, F 1992, Strategic Questioning: An Experiment in Communication of the Second Kind.
Outlines the fundamentals of strategic questioning and assists in developing a personal set of strategic questions.
PEAVEY, F 1995, Strategic Questioning - An approach to creating personal and social change, In Context, Number 40, p36.
An explanation of strategic questioning as a tool to create personal and social change. Explains how to 'shape' strategic questions to create motion, options and dig deeper.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT NETWORK, TAFE NSW 1999, A Facilitator’s Handbook: Facilitating Groups in the Workplace
A practical and easy to understand resource consisting of a compilation of facilitator techniques and case studies centred on 16 key issues including observation, listening, intervention, feedback, appropriate styles and reflection.