A better world begins with a better question

Hi there! Welcome to the first Love Mondays edition, a weekly newsletter designed as a 3-minute hit to fire up the other 10,077 minutes of your week.

Imagine how quickly we could change the world with a culture of curiosity…

Growing up, I never realised that my insatiable curiosity grew from living in a household where answers weren’t forthcoming. The world was the way it was, and questioning that lacked discipline. I bit my tongue until it bled. One research study concluded that four-year-old girls embody the peak of curiosity, asking 390 questions a day – that’s one question every 116 seconds!

As we grow up, we outgrow this curiosity. Google tells us that the most asked question is ‘What to watch?’

Meh.

Perhaps the greatest contribution to a better world is to exercise curiosity around the questions we ask ourselves.

What is the most important question you are asking yourself right now?

(Write it down)

Consider: listening to the type of questions we are asking.

Practice: tracking the effect our questions have on others.

Decide to: ask more questions that require others to ask more questions.

How can the questions you ask empower others?

Bloom's Taxonomy

The most famous question taxonomy was designed by Benjamin Bloom and his associates in 1956. Called Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain, it comprises six levels of intellectual behavior. Starting from the bottom, each question level requires a greater amount of mental activity to formulate an answer than the previous level. At the peak, people are questioning the question. Something our age of fake news and democratic disengagement would benefit from.

We teach our kids there is no such thing as a dumb question. But as adults, we have learned to dumb down our curiosity to get through the week. Not this week!

Love your Mondays