Strategic Questioning

Carson L¹

1. University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

This workshop will draw on the work of Fran Peavey who believes that there is an art to asking the right question and that this art can be learned. Carson will provide an overview of Peavey’s Strategic Questioning framework and the power of questioning to effect social change. Strategic Questions dig deeper, create options and ask the unaskable. Workshop participants will have an opportunity to apply Strategic Questions to a challenging problem in order to improve their repertoire of questions. Peavey believes that we become stuck in asking the same narrow group of questions and practice is essential if we are to broaden our range. This workshop gives us a chance to experiment with “deep and dynamic questioning and listening where solutions are limited only by our imagination” (Peavey 1995:38). A powerful question can rattle around in someone’s mind for days or weeks and such questions are surely more powerful than answers in the pursuit of change.