We recently tried an experiment on a call with some of our network weaving changemakers: it’s called the Question Game. We wanted to share it with you as a tool to try and burst forth with changemaking and zap a bit of fun energy into your day!
This game was inspired by two things: First, finding good questions is a creative, generative process and the more questions you ask the deeper you get. The second one is a clip from an old movie based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. You don’t have to understand what’s going on in the movie to watch the clip, don’t worry. I’m pretty sure the main characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spend the whole movie unsure of even which one of them is which.
As you can see from the clip, even though they did not engage with them, some of the questions which came out were quite deep. They’re ones the players might come back to with greater insight if given the chance (unfortunately, we already know by the title of the movie that the characters soon end up dead).
The basic idea of the question game is this: one player asks a question. The next person then has to ask another question of that question, etc. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern keep track of their game like tennis, but you don’t have to: the goal is to just keep asking questions of each other. We separated our call into breakout rooms of two people and gave everyone three minutes to play questions. We told them we’d be debriefing at the end and having them share their favourite questions. When everyone re-appeared in our main call, the room was filled with smiles.
When I asked everyone how they felt on return and what was alive for them, our brave questioners all seemed to agree that it felt different. Often we listen to a question to hear when to jump in with our answer. By only being able to answer a question with a question we found new ways to have ‘conversations’, with dramatically different results! We spent some time after the breakout pondering the process, but it was also a great time to pick up the questions which felt most alive and answer them as a wider group. As our conversation prior to the Question Game Breakout had been one about rural youth and their opportunities to engage in mental wellness, we discussed some of the tensions which come out of that work; it bled into our questions. This means this is a great bridging exercise to help zap life into the middle of a larger session.
When we discussed why we felt energized on leaving the game session, several participants had great insights:
There’s a humility in being curious. Allowing time to ask questions we know we aren’t going to answer right away (if at all) means we can acknowledge that we don’t know and don’t have to have the best answer right now.
Curiosity and exploration gives a sense of agency. The need to have the best answer at hand is deeply embedded in a colonialist structure, and tends to quash the exploration of other ways of thinking or learning. In some ways, team members noted, taking away the value of the answer meant repositioning the importance of the question in a way that felt decolonizing. As opposed to figuring out deliverables and action, questions show the value in not knowing something.
The questions surfaced tensions. Some of the easiest ‘volleys’ of questions were ones that listed out tensions in the work. Rural vs urban? Big vs. small? Close to, or far from? What does impact mean, both micro and macro? How do we make space for more questions? How do we hear questions being asked of us in subtle ways? Living in the questions lets us live in the tensions.
Jargon mattered less. If the questions built and allowed us to probe a topic, we could do it either without using jargon or we could choose intentionally which jargon to include. Someone observed that social innovation feels different when we do it without calling it social innovation.
We can unlearn the need to answer all the time. Not every question was picked apart to come up with some sort of an answer, though we did discuss several topics which came up in questions. Asking questions expecting not to have some of them answered changed the types of questions we asked.
Questions can be polarizing. Not everyone enjoys this sort of activity. You can try to minimize the feeling of ‘unknown’ by pointing out this is only a two-minute process and trying it to see. Did you discover something new in the process? Email us to let us know how it went for you!