STRATEGIC QUESTIONING AND THE SEARCH FOR INSIGHT™
Did you ever notice how hard it is to break through all your old assumptions about business, change, people, even yourself? How people's views of new ideas (especially your new ideas) are so full of skepticism and biases? We invite you to unfreeze your thinking process through Strategic Questioning and the Search for Insight™. With these tools you can break up the underlying assumptions and mindsets to make real progress. You'll learn to use strategic questions as an insightful learning tool, rather than as a blunt weapon.

The Search for Insight™ is SSNE's unique methodology for rapidly teaching strategic questioning while generating practical yet innovative solutions to our clients' real world problems. The Search for Insight™ enables your management team, key advisors or even your entire staff to learn to effectively apply strategic questioning in just a few hours. We then provide you with the follow-up content and processes you need to get answers that can drive your organization to excellence.

Joanna Macy, PhD, internationally famous systems dynamics expert and veteran workshop leader, said,
"Paul Lipke is as engaging and effective as any facilitator with whom I've worked. With clarity, high energy, and great economy of time, he taught our group of forty disparate individuals how to work collaboratively in applying his methods of Strategic Questioning. Under his guidance we learned fast, unleashing an abundance of enthusiasm, creativity, and unexpected wisdom. The skills we acquired will enrich our work in many fields. He set my mind on fire as he taught our group. He is one dynamite strategic questioner."

"It's a far superior strategy to get all the minds working on what needs to change, rather than to convince each person to do what we think is best." -Fran Peavey

For an outline of Strategic Questioning, please download the SSNE Strategic Questioning Overview (PDF - 160KB). Please send us your good strategic questions, and even a sentence or two on what happened when they were asked, to plipke@ssne.org. We'll post the best ones here, with or without attribution, as you prefer.

Sample strategic questions:

• What was a time when your team/organization adopted a new, slightly unusual idea and changed its course? What were the factors that contributed to that successful shift?
• What does your organization take, make and waste to deliver its products and services? How do these impacts relate to the critical issues in your region (e.g., air quality, traffic congestion, water, energy) and to principles of sustainability?
• How do these critical issues impact your organization, e.g, through your employees, raw materials, energy, transportation, product/packaging, etc.?
• How are you tracking and monitoring developments in these risk areas, and how are you using the data to inform the design and delivery of new products or services?