The Importance of Good Questions

 Rachel Donald is a climate change activist and podcaster/blogger who invited her subscribers over the New Year period to send her questions – with some impressive results, grouping them into a dozen - viz

- Is there a picture building in your head which brings together and synthesises these 

threads, or could start a conversation to do just that?
- What political ideology would you say you closest identify with?
- How can we quickly change the way everyone on the planet understands and engages 

with the causes and effects of climate change, so that we can have more concerted and 

faster progress to prepare for it's effects and stop it from becoming worse?
- Truly deeply madly, what do you, (you personally) - based on all the knowledge you have 

acquired through your interviews - think this world will look like in 2100?
- What role do you see for religious innovation/improvisation in our civilisations ongoing 

& unavoidable decline?
- People talk of the gut/brain axis, and the heart/brain axis. When you were moving 

towards Planet: Critical, what was your road between your gut, your heart, and your mind?
- How has what you have learned from Planet Critical changed you? Your mindset, priorities 

and how you live?
- Can climate action happen without the government?
- Do you think mainstream centrist politics will ever come round to the idea of degrowth 

or the steady-state economy?
- Can women save the world?
- What helps you stay steadfast and optimistic in the face of so much knowledge of how 

deeply tragic our situation is?
- Members of Novara Media say it is very important to them that they work in a team with 

editors. You seem to be all alone. How do you manage?

Good questions are a spur to creative thinking....they take us out of the groove in which we so often find ourselves. At the start of the new millennium I had a 3 year Civil Service project in Uzbekistan which involved training their civil servants. I used to start each session by inviting the participants to pose questions about the subject of the "lecture" which I would use to give off-the-cuff responses. I then wrote the presentation up afterwards in the light of what I had found myself saying in these exchanges with the “students”. The results were quite fascinating – at least for me!

One of the books I admit to dipping into from time to time is Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic which poses, for each day of the calendar, such questions of ourselves. And it’s a discipline I recommend to others. Indeed I recently wondered why we don’t ask ourselves more interesting questions

The great practitioners of asking great questions were, of course, Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and Irish psychiatrist Anthony Clare whose interviews can actually still be heard on this BBC podcast.

There are, of course, others who have gained reputations for interviewing such as Lynn Barber (otherwise known as Demon Barber) one of whose efforts (on JG Ballard) can be read here