Discerning the Question

 The Question Establishes the Movement

Every Collective Intelligence Lock Point is organized around one consequential question.

The question is not selected from a list or brought into the room because it sounds interesting. It emerges from what is happening within the team or organization, what people are living within that change, and what may need to be encountered together.

The question is not simply written.

It is discerned.

What Movement Does the Conversation Need?

A river lock creates passage through vertical movement.

Sometimes the vessel must rise before it can continue forward.

Sometimes it must lower.

Neither direction is better. The movement depends upon the passage required.

The consequential question in a Lock Point works in much the same way.

Before asking what the question should be, we ask: What movement does this conversation need?

Rising Toward Aspiration

Some questions invite people to look toward what they are reaching for.

They may bring attention to what people feel they need to preserve, what they want to become, what matters enough to carry forward, or what they believe should remain consequential as conditions change.

These are questions of aspiration.

They raise the conversation toward what-might-be.

A rising question might sound like: 

What must remain consequentially human as artificial intelligence becomes more capable in our work?

What do we want to be able to say about who we became through this change?

What must we carry forward from who we have been into who we are becoming?

Lowering Toward Collective Identity and Lived Experience

Other questions invite people deeper into what is already being lived.

They may bring attention to experience, identity, memory, relationship, uncertainty, tension, loss, or something present within the organization that has not yet found language.

These questions move beneath what the organization can report about change toward what the people within it are actually experiencing.

A lowering question might sound like:

What are people living within this change that our organization may not yet recognize?

What are we carrying that has not yet had a place in this change?

What do we understand differently when we listen to how this change is being lived across the organization?

Higher Is Not Better

Rising is not progress and lowering is not retreat.

A river lock raises or lowers a vessel according to what passage requires.

The same is true here.

An organization may be highly focused on where it is going while needing to move deeper into what its people are living.

Another may understand its present circumstances well but need a place to encounter what it hopes to carry toward the future.

The purpose of discerning the question is not to decide which direction is preferable.

It is to recognize which movement may matter now.

Recognition Before Articulation

Sometimes the consequential question is apparent immediately.

Often it is not.

People may be experiencing something before they understand it clearly. They may recognize something before they have language for it. An organization may know that something is changing without yet knowing what question the change is asking of its people.

The field moves. Awareness comes. Language follows.

Question discernment makes room for that sequence.

The first conversation with James is therefore not simply about choosing a topic. It is an opportunity to listen for what may already be present but not yet fully articulated.

One Question

A Lock Point does not attempt to address every issue facing an organization.

It does not need a collection of discussion questions to keep the conversation moving.

It needs one consequential question capable of holding different experiences, perspectives, knowledge, uncertainties, and hopes without determining what participants should conclude.

The question provides the threshold.

The people provide the intelligence.

The dialogue provides the encounter.

Not a Menu of Questions

The questions on this page are illustrations, not a menu.

The same question should not automatically be carried from one organization to another. Even organizations experiencing similar reported changes may have people living very different human changes within them.

Each Lock Point therefore begins again.

What is happening?

Who is living within it?

What may not yet be recognized?

What movement does the conversation need?

What question is worth encountering together now?

Finding the Question Together

The host does not need to arrive at the first conversation with the consequential question already written.

That is part of the work we do together.

Through the initial conversation, we explore the circumstances, the people who may participate, what is already known, what may still be emerging, and whether the conversation needs to rise toward aspiration or lower toward collective identity and lived experience.

From there, the consequential question can emerge.

Not because Becoming Gate already knows the answer.

Because the question may create a threshold through which what is already present can begin to show.

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