questioning

Using questions in knowledge work

Group Resource

KM professionals and facilitators need to understand and appreciate the role and power of questions in knowledge work. Further, we need to be able to apply questions in order to create and discover knowledge. There are some compelling reasons for this including:

  • Questions are strong attractors in the chaos of ideas, they gather, focus, attract and energize the conversation.

  • Only? questions have the power to beak our current midsets, they set in motion the deep relection needed to alter our beliefs.
  • It is the place and the space 'between not knowing and our desire to know' where we are most attentive, self-aware and alive. Questions hold the key to this special area.
  • Compelling and quality questions drive knowledge creation and expansion in a fundamental way. Knowledge emerges around good questions.
  • Questions energize and glue our conversation, draw people into the circle to participate and gather diverse opinions.
Submitted by storytelling on 28 October 2009 - 11:32am. categories [ ]

Anti-knowledge – the unknown as reservoir of the possible

YinYang

Anti-knowledge refers to the collective set of questions that form an antithetical structure to a subset or the sum of knowledge. Put more simply, Antiknowledge is whatever we don't know. Of course, we can't know what we don't know and so the only way to find out is to ask a question. Thankfully, the questions we can ask are the Who, What, Where, Why, How and When questions which operate on Anti-knowledge converting the questions into knowledge by structuring them. There are two fundamental types of questions:

  1. Learning questions - questions about knowledge that exists

  2. Knowledge Discovery Questions - questions that form knowledge when structured
Submitted by storytelling on 17 June 2009 - 8:51am. categories [ ]

What is the smartest question you can ask?

Group Discussion Topic

There is an important concept in KM that suggests that all knowledge is created by asking questions; the question is therefore a basic tool of KM. The the question here is, what is the smartest question that you can ask? Here are some possible answers to the question:

  • What is a question?

  • What is the smartest question I can ask?
  • What does "is" mean?
Submitted by storytelling on 9 May 2009 - 11:42am. categories [ ]