Kate Downing Khaled | Founder & CEO
It was nearing the end of our brainstorming session, and we had filled a whiteboard with questions that the Saint Paul Public Library (SPPL) team wanted to ask their community.
We were headed in the right direction, but I could sense that the questions we had generated didn’t totally embody the bold, equity-centered vision SPPL had for their new strategic plan.
When all of a sudden, Maureen had an epiphany.
“What do you want to borrow that you don’t want to buy?” she asked.
The room was stunned into the best kind of silence. Immediately, we knew that this question could help us unlock the best ways to revamp SPPL’s programming, without limiting the community’s imagination.
And no one but a library leader could have devised such a brilliant question.
The best engagement questions practice abundance.
And today, I’m going to tell you exactly how to create open-ended, future-focused questions that treat community members as geniuses, beyond just their current needs.
What and how you ask your community really matters.
The best kind of questions assumes the genius of the person being asked. Notice that Maureen’s question didn’t include a list of items for community members to pick from, nor did it attempt to qualify or explain what could or could not be loanable.
We also try to write questions to be universally answerable, which means that they can be phrased differently to meet different users where they’re at.
“What do you want to borrow that you don’t want to buy?” is a great example because it uses plain language. A teenager could understand it just as easily as a grandparent.
In fact, we actually planned a whole series of youth roundtable discussions based on this question! Ideally, your questions can generate new engagement opportunities that weren’t even on your radar.
So how do these questions come about? We first start with quantity over quality. In the past, we’ve gathered with client stakeholders and set a timer to challenge everyone to gather 30 questions in 10 minutes. You want your stack of post-it notes to far outnumber the number of minutes you provide!
This kind of freewheeling creativity can feel unusual to folks who spend most of their time working in offices, so I encourage appointing a team member to be a brainstorm facilitator.
This person’s role is to shape and push the brainstorming energy to the nth degree of imagination. That can look like asking clarifying questions, or adding imaginary constraints to the engagement scenarios to find unexpected ideas. For our library story, an example of a constraint would be: What if our questions can’t use the word “book?
Keep in mind — the best questions don’t usually emerge in the second or third round of brainstorming. It’s usually more like the 15th or 20th!
The more engaging and interesting your questions are, the more genius will come to life in your insights, and therefore your strategy.
