I have always loved the ‘why’ question, so I was quite confronted one day when an NLP colleague asked – “is that useful for you?” Since then I have spent a lot of time exploring the nature of the questions we ask and have realised that “why did this happen?” sends us back into the past to look for underlying causes in order to understand. This is a different direction to the question “how can we work together to make this happen?” which aims us toward the future into which we want to succeed.

Last month I was running a workshop for a group where the “why” word was quite attractive to them, so I had to think about the directon in which that word was aiming before I trotted out my usualy maxim “avoid using ‘why’, it only encourages people to go back into their past to find justification“.

This group was different. They were actually pointing their “why” in the direction of the future – they wanted to know “why” the initiative / project / task was important to aim for, which was their way of asking “what will this do for me and the team?”

It just goes to remind me that you don’t know what question they heard you ask, until you hear their answer.

Want to learn about more future-directed questions?

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