On the Questions We’re Living In
I was mortified.
It was about an hour into my first day of training to become an ontological coach and we had just been asked to write a response to the prompt: ‘What questions are you living in?’
At first, I wasn’t sure what this meant. The words were familiar but the syntax wasn’t. How can you live in a question? My mind didn’t quite understand the assignment, but that didn’t stop my pen from scribbling furiously as a series of questions emerged from the deeper recesses of my psyche.
After 10 minutes or so, we formed trios to share a sample of our questions with each other. On my left, a man in his 20s shared a set of questions that were filled with ambition and drive. He had big dreams and was looking for ways to achieve them. On my right, a man in his 60s didn’t have any questions at all. He shared a series of statements — his pearls of wisdom, you might say. I felt mildly irritated by this and part of me wanted to tell him that maybe he hadn’t understood the assignment.
But something else was going on.
Looking down at my own questions, I was astonished at how different they were to what I’d just heard from the others. At 38 years of age, my questions were filled with self-doubt and anxiety. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just entered the biggest liminal space of my life — and my questions reflected the uncertainty and disorientation of my situation.
The specific question that had me feeling mortified was the one I had been circling for weeks, if not months, beforehand, and it was now staring back at me in black ink:
What if I’m a failure?
Over the next few days, the significance of these questions became clearer to me. I learned that our questions both reflect and shape our outlook on life, including:
our attention: what we notice and what we don’t,
our perception: how we interpret and assign meaning to what we observe,
our deepest concerns: what we care about, what’s important to us, what we’re seeking to protect or avoid,
our choices: what we thinkm we’re capable of changing and influencing in ourselves, others and our environment,
our actions: what we’ll actually do about it.
What I saw in my own questions was a lack of agency. I’d given up on myself before I’d even begun. And while I was embarrassed that two decades of personal development and years of prior coaching experience hadn’t inoculated me against feeling disempowered, I was relieved to discover that there might be an antidote to help me redirect my life in a more intentional way: changing my questions.
That was 10 years ago.
Since then, I’ve never forgotten the significance of that activity, and it came back to me recently when I attended a presentation on ‘AI and the Future of Being Human’ featuring Dr Peter Brace from Swinburne University.
Living on the cusp of two worlds — corporate and creative — I’m seeing two very different orientations towards the ‘AI revolution’ playing out around me and even in my own life. I’m not here to weigh in on which of them is ‘correct’ — what interests me more is how we are individually and collectively navigating the liminal space of one of the biggest transitions of our time. So while I found the presentation engaging and thought-provoking, I leaned in even harder during the Q&A session. This was my chance to observe liminality in situ in the form of the audience’s questions.
The first question surprised me:
‘Do you think things will just go back to the way they were?’
At an event that was pitched towards ‘curious sceptics and cautious optimists’, I suppose there had to be at least one person who wasn’t quite convinced that AI was more than just a passing fad. The premise of this question was that organisations might reverse their adoption of AI once they realised that the business case did not stack up. (The presenter’s answer to this question was an unequivocal ‘no’.)
‘What about the impact of AI on creative industries?’
This next question came from a woman whose voice was tinged with distress. The presenter offered her a pragmatic response, but this didn’t seem to satisfy her. She kept repeating her question in different ways. Listening to the question behind the question, it seemed to me that she wasn’t looking for a pragmatic answer but something more like reassurance or maybe even sympathy. As I heard the frustration rising in her voice, it occurred to me that she might be grieving.
Both of these questions are legitimate and both of them suggested to me that the people asking them were processing an ‘ending’ (to use the Bridges Transition Model language) — the end of how things used to be. In ontological terms, we might say that they were both ‘opposing facticity’ (resisting the way things are), albeit in different ways. Their questions had a way of keeping them tethered to the past as the rest of the world moved on.
The Q&A had moved on too.
Over the next 15 minutes or so, a wide-ranging discussion emerged about how AI development might continue to play out, including questions such as: How do we manage the impact of AI on human cognition and mental health? What about the impact on the environment? What does good governance look like? What kinds of ethical frameworks might be employed to regulate AI development?
And then some more integrative questions emerged, like: How do we balance safety and effectiveness? And my favourite question of the night, which I believe came from the presenter himself: What is progress? (And I might now add: How much is enough?)
These struck me as fundamentally liminal questions — questions that are exploring the tension between what was and what’s next. It was an enriching conversation.
Reflecting on the evening, what stood out to me (as it did 10 years ago) is:
how different our questions are, from one person to another, and what those questions might reveal about our observations, perceptions, concerns, choices and potential for action,
how important it is that we all use our agency to ask better questions and explore the possibilities together.
Times of transition demand leadership — otherwise we’re all hurtling towards an indiscriminate future that none of us asked for and no one consented to. But the paradox of transition is that leaders themselves don’t necessarily know what they’re leading others into. It’s like a forest of possibilities with no clear path forward.
Questions cut through the noise and redirect attention in a way that reaching for a false sense of certainty never will.
So why not run an audit on your own questions this week? Perhaps ask yourself what those questions reveal about your own orientation — whether it be to AI or something else that’s unfolding in your life. And then you might consider what some better questions might be.
This is the question I’ll be sitting with:
How can we help ourselves and others to metabolise what is perhaps the most exciting and terrifying change of our time?