I usually read the ‘Stronger Team Blog’: I get very interesting ideas and I do agree with Blaine most of the times.
One of the last posts was about Asking the right question to facilitate teamwork: again very good stuff and there is something at the end I don’t agree.
Why questions – these examine the underlying rationale for actions, processes, or circumstances; useful for problem solving, planning and several other purposes [...]
In this post The why question a barrier to effective communication I explain how this kind of question automatically raise our barriers and usually doesn’t facilitate solution finding. That’s why I don’t like it.
I’d like your feedback (and for sure Blaine feedback) about this topic!
PierG
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November 7, 2006 at 6:16 am
Stronger Teams Blog
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February 16, 2007 at 7:38 pm
Terry
Asking why something happened or will happen reflects mechanistic reductionism: the idea that that all phenomena can be reduced aggregations of cause and effect relationships. By putting enough of these relationships together, we ought to be able to supply the cause for any effect. Two developments in modern science have invalidated this idea. One is the quantum theory. It descibes a world in which events do not have causes but rather occur by random chance. The other is chaos theory. We know from it that tiny changes in the initial state of a physical system can produce huge changes in its final state. The beating of a butterfly’s wings in San Francisco can have a major effect on the weather in Moscow weeks later. As we are unsure of the initial state of such a system, we are incapable of predicting its final state. Thus, while a cause and effect relationship may be present, we are incapable of knowing what this relationship is. While asking why questions seemed legitimate to people of 18th century, who thought the world a giant machine, it is illegitimate in the 21st, when we know better. Asking a why question is objectionable because it embeds the premise that there is a cause that can be known to the target of the why question and this premise is generally false.
May 23, 2007 at 7:19 am
When the Why? question is ok! « PierG (aka Piergiorgio Grossi)
[...] already written about how ineffective the Why? question can be, in a couple of previous posts (one and [...]
October 8, 2008 at 6:30 am
The Best Communication Tool (2) « PierG (aka Piergiorgio Grossi)
[...] careful of the why question: read here, here ad here for more [...]