Orange Desk: Invite others to imagine
Our questions make all the difference in the answers we live
Before I start my essay for this week, I want to thank you all for reading. Two months after starting on Substack, I received this graphic and a congratulatory note from them yesterday because of you. While I’m not much for external measures of success, I appreciate everyone reading these words each week, and each paid subscriber allows me more time for thinking and writing. Thank you.
I especially love that the bestseller “status” is indicated by an ORANGE checkmark. As you might guess from this newsletter's name, I love orange quite a bit. It started at a young age, as you’ll see from my childhood bedspread.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke
There’s another step that Rilke is missing here. Yes, live the questions. But also tip the questions up on their nose, fling them into the air, and see where they land, much as William Burroughs cut up his writing and let it fall where it may. Shake the questions, flip them, enlarge them, and ask them to invoke imagination, not certainty.
This week’s essay is all about questions. Not answers, but questions.
Years ago, I gave a keynote speech in Australia about diversity in the workplace at an HR conference. I used odd, little-known scientific photographs to illustrate my talk centered around diversity in scientific fields, drawing lessons from science into human conversations about diversity in the workplace.
My opening line was “Consider the flea,” delivered with a photograph of Robert Hooke’s engraving of a flea (Micrographia,1665), the first seen through a microscope created by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. It was shown on a forty-foot screen to an unsuspecting audience of a thousand business people, showing the intricacies of a structure that had never been seen before, which I then related to the act of really seeing other human beings in their aliveness and individuality, asking people to move from seeing “whats” to seeing “whos.”
If nothing else, it was a surprising approach.
One example from that talk sticks with me. It’s about questions. Here’s the simplified version: Humans tried to create flying machines for a long time by asking, “How can a machine fly like a bird?” Over and over, this question was asked, to no avail.
Finally, German aviator Otto Lilienthal (1848-1896) turned the question upside down. He asked, instead, “How does a bird fly like a machine?”
This tiny shift was enormous. Turning the question around made all the difference.
As a result, Lilienthal was the first to make well-documented, repeated, successful flights with gliders, making the idea of "heavier than air" a reality. Newspapers and magazines published photographs of Lilienthal gliding, favorably influencing public and scientific opinion about the possibility of flying machines becoming practical.
Lilienthal's work led to his development of the concept of the modern wing. His flight attempts in 1891 are seen as the beginning of human flight, and the "Lilienthal Normalsegelapparat" is considered to be the first airplane in series production, making the Maschinenfabrik Otto Lilienthal in Berlin the first airplane production company in the world. He is often called the "father of aviation" or "father of flight.” On 9 August 1896, his glider stalled, and he could not regain control. Falling from about 50 feet, he broke his neck and died the next day. His questions remain.
Using questions that invite people to imagine
The questions we ask influence the answers we get. A whole discipline, appreciative inquiry, was built around this fact. But there is something more to questions.
This relationship between the quality of questions and answers is true in scientific inquiry and, more importantly, daily life.
Sometimes, we can ask questions to help people imagine. My friend, Mary Anne Em Radmacher, when faced with an unmovable force, often asks a question like this one: “Is there an instance in which you could imagine ___(fill in the blank with your request)___?
For example, “Is there an instance in which you could imagine lowering the deposit necessary to rent this apartment?” or “Is there an instance in which you could imagine allowing me to interview you for my podcast?”
One of the best instances of this question evoking the imagination comes from the “Color of Fear” documentary featuring my friend, Victor Lee Lewis. In it, a white man who is resistant to the realities of the people of color in the room with him is asked a simple question: “What if…” Watch this clip (LINK), and you’ll see what I mean.
Here’s a partial transcript so you can see exactly what is happening:
Moderator: So what's keeping you from believing that that's happening to Victor? Just believing, not to know why that's happening to him. But what's keeping you from believing that that's happening—
What would it mean, David, then, if the life really was that harsh? What would that mean in your life, if it really was that harsh for—?
David:
Well, it would be a travesty of life. You have here something that shouldn't exist.
Moderator:
And so what if it does? What if the world were not as you thought, that it actually is happening to lots of human beings on this Earth? What if it actually were, and you didn't know about it? What would that mean to you?
David:
Well, that's very saddening. You don't want to believe that man can be so cruel to himself or to his own kind. I do not want to accept that it has to be that way, or maybe it is. And it must be because you express it, and the others in the group express that it is.
Victor:
From here, I can work with you.
David is invited to imagine what if. And it becomes a turning point for him and the men of color in the room.
There is no need for “proof,” “facts,” or “logic.” The question simply evokes his imagination into the world of “what if.” What if that were true? What would that mean in your life?
In a recent writing workshop, a participant said about their essay that they were afraid of drowning in the memories and the writing. I quietly asked them this: “If you were drowning, do you think there are people around you who would save you?” “Yes,” she said in response. “Yes, they would.”
Invoke a Clearness Committee
When we ask friends or family (or strangers on the internet machine) for help, people most often form a solution in their minds and then ask questions that validate what they believe to be true. In other words, their questions are solutions masquerading as questions. Most people do this often, both professionally and personally.
To avoid that, I invoke what the Quakers call a “Clearness Committee,” a group of people appointed to help someone find clarity around a leading. I use this in my online classes a lot, asking small groups to center around one member’s burning question, which that person explains to the group.
Then, the group members can only ask questions (not make statements) of the person presenting the problem or question. And those questions cannot be leading questions that are merely solutions in disguise, nor “yes” or “no” questions.
Instead, they must be honest questions to which the questioner does not know the answer — and questions that will lead the presenter into a deeper understanding or knowing about their dilemma. It is remarkable what can happen in this situation. Try only asking questions one day.
Practice asking generative questions
Sometimes a question is needed to open up the possibilities, not shut them down. Generative, not reductive. Sure, we know not to ask “yes” or “no” questions, but there is something beyond that that we need to learn. Here are some examples:
Not “What’s the worst that could happen” but “What’s the best that could happen?”
Not “How are you?” but “What are you most passionate about today?”
Not “What do you think about ______?” but “How does thinking about _____ feel to you?”
Not “Why do you feel that way?” (a question that requires someone to validate their feelings), but “How does this feel in your body” or “Have you ever had this feeling before—what was that situation like for you?” [Note: “Why” questions are often touted as high-level questions, but they often require someone to validate their perception or feeling and are often best avoided when there is another way to get there…]
Not “Have you thought about doing ______?” but “What if you could do something unexpected in response—what would that look like?”
Not “Can you do _____ for me?” but “Can you imagine an instance in which you would do _____ for me?”
Not “How are you going to do that?” but “What do you think this will look like when finished?” or “How will it feel to have finished this?”
Not “That’s not true,” but “What would it mean in your life if it were true?”
Not “How do you know that?” but “What personal experiences have you had that led you to believe that?”
Not “Why are you asking?” but “What are you trying to uncover?” or “What is the question behind that statement?”
Not “Why aren’t you getting this work done?” but “What is blocking you from getting this work done?”
Focus on helping people imagine themselves as an answer. Flip those questions, shake them up, and invoke imagination, not proof.
How does a bird fly like a machine?
I’ll see you next Friday from my orange desk. This week, ask more and different questions that invite people to imagine with you.
Love,
Patti
P.S. If you’d like to buy one of my books, hire me to speak at your conference, or come to my Life is a Verb Camp. I’d love to see you there.
Fantastic!