Conversation Questions

A couple days ago I posted Reduce Searching Start Talking and I just saw a very interesting post by Nancy Dixon - What Do We Get From Conversation That We Can't Get Any Other Way? The list of what you can get through conversation:

• Answers
• Meta Knowledge
• Problem Reformulation
• Validation
• Legitimizing

Then she tells us ...

The greatest benefit of conversation is that it produces five categories of responses, not just the answer. We get so much more from conversation, e.g. an unexpected insight, a sense of affirmation that inspires us to new heights or, equally useful, having to confront a realization that we've been trying to avoid; deepening the relationship with a colleague or the introduction to a collaborator we would never have discovered on our own; and on and on.

The multiplicity of benefits addresses the very real problem of not knowing what we don’t know. A problem that is so frequent when the issues we are addressing are ambiguous and complex.

Ambiguous and complex - pretty much defines concept work.

Search's Limit

The limit of search and need for conversation is a common topic here and as part of Work Literacy. In Value from Social Media, I looked at a scenario where I'm evaluating a particular solution for my company / organization. Through Google, I find a lot of information. But in many cases, I will still be left feeling uncomfortable ...

• What’s really going to happen?
• Did I miss something important?
• How important are the various issues?
• Is my answer reasonable?

These are the questions that represent search's limit. It's difficult to use search to address:

• Experience - What have been the experiences of other organizations (not the canned case studies) when they’ve used this solution.
• Boundaries / Existence - I’ve got a particular issue and I’m not sure if answers to that issue exist out there, I’ve not found it in my searching.
• Confirmation - I’m beginning to have an answer, but I’d like to get confirmation of the answer based on my particular situation based on experience.
• Importance - Some of the issues I see, I’m not sure how important they are in practice, should I be concerned.

However, each of these can be directly addressed through conversation.

Conversation Questions

With Nancy's categories and looking the the limit of search, it suggests to me that there is opportunity to better define the conversation questions that are important for concept work. I'm not quite sure that I quite know what these are, but it feels like there are a set of questions that we should commonly ask as part of these conversations that are central to our work.

In other words, I believe there are likely patterns for good questions to be asking to help address the limits of search and ensure that we surface each of the categories that Nancy defines:

• Answers
• Meta Knowledge
• Problem Reformulation
• Validation
• Legitimizing

This is a topic that I intend to revisit. I certainly would welcome any thoughts or pointers around it.