Open Question Approach
Facilitation process based on articulation of open questions.
http://www.community-intelligence.com/blogs/public/2006/08/connectivity_ramp_ci_and_jaron_1.html
Description
"The first practice a community must engage is taking control of the questions they are asking and answering.
Once you have the question, you need to create an environment and agreements for everyone to be heard and honored.
This is a rough outline of the technology for accessing collective intelligence known as the Open Question Approach (tm). The way the people at Open Question Consulting teach groups to access their pooled capacity for vision building and problem solving is precisely as I outlined above.
The mind is a question answering machine. If you don't give it a question to work on, it's got a steady bank of default questions of its own to answer. The problem with the default questions is that they quite often are not in service to what you really want to have happen.
Deliberately crafted and articulated open questions, on the other hand, attract intelligence in the area you wish to work on.
Everyone's mind is engaged in answering questions, whether or not the questions they are working on are consciously known. In fact, many people are being driven by the very same questions with no thought they are sharing a creative intent across thousands of miles and involving millions of people. "How can I keep myself (my family) safe from a growing vulnerability to harm?" That shared question has people around the world acting in alignment and accord with one another, people who might otherwise have little in common.
Whoever controls the shared questions controls the minds of the people.
The popular news is an answer to questions chosen far off-screen, questions which form and shape the "story" the news pretends to tell objectively. I suggest one such widely shared question is "What do I need to be afraid of?" That question generates and delivers an endless chain of answers to people's living rooms every day.
"How can we include, integrate and appreciate every member of our community with no one left out?" is another question which very many people hold buried deep within their beings. Imagine the nightly news if that were the question being answered! More people are beginning to ask that question--deliberately." (http://www.community-intelligence.com/blogs/public/2006/08/connectivity_ramp_ci_and_jaron_1.html)