Powerful Questions and Powerful Requests

Finally, the last in my series of visual notes from Agile 2009. Not my best, but I wanted to share my thoughts about the session.

Lyssa Adkins and Tobias Mayer gave a practical and experiential session at the end of Agile 2009. Lyssa has written more about this on her blog. The original name for the session was Human-Centred coaching.

One useful trick (unrelated to the topic) is to raise one’s hand and wait for everyone else to raise their hands as a soft and effective way to get people’s attention.

Powerful Questions

• Are open rather than closed
• Draw out hidden information
• Lead people to new perspectives
• Driven by curiousity
• Give people time to respond

To get good at them you can write some new ones on cards every week and use them where they make sense. The book Co-Active Coaching has a section that discusses powerful questions. It is partly related to the NLP practice of using the Meta-Model to ask questions to reveal hidden assumptions.

Powerful requests

Some tips are written in light blue above.  This is similar to the core protocol Ask for Help.

Related posts:

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