Revisiting How to Ask Powerful Questions

To celebrate CEI's 15th anniversary, we're spending 2024 reflecting on 15 of our most favorite pieces.

What it is

How to Ask Powerful Questions is a webinar hosted by former CEI Associate Director, Tanya Beer . It digs into one of the 5 learning habits that has the potential to increase our capacity to learn from each other, across siloes, and in a forward-facing way.

This webinar defines powerful questions—how to construct them, their scope, and what assumptions may be embedded. Moving from idea to practice, it offers recommendations for how powerful questions can be used to do more than gather information, they can be used to make decisions and determine future actions.

Why it's a favorite

How to Ask Powerful Questions remains a favorite of ours and our network. Its focus on the utility and practical nature of the habit makes it a tool that is worth revisiting. We love this webinar because it approaches this learning habit as something that can be used in formal learning agendas and evaluations, as well as in day-to-day conversations. If we want to embed learning in our daily work, we must make it a habitual practice instead of forced process.

Asking powerful questions unlocks a sort of catalytic, action-oriented imagination that is the kind of thing that changes systems. When we apply curiosity and creativity to our learning, we can free ourselves from existing constraints and ask questions not that shift how we think and what we think is possible.

How we're thinking about it now

Since publication five years ago, this piece has proved to be timeless. It remains a favorite of our team’s and the field and is a practice we hear named across our work.

One thing that has been on our radar lately is how the 5 learning habits can be combined, especially as they connect to asking powerful questions. For example, how can your powerful questions make your thinking visible? Or combat biases and unearth assumptions? How can making our thinking visible attend to our causal inferences?

As we continue to build our learning practices by adding accessible, practical daily habits, we can start to think about how these habit build off of one another.