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Afterwards: What makes a good question?
The first generation of narrative therapy—by which I refer roughly to the period
between 1985 and 2005—largely apprenticed itself to the practice of narrative
therapy by a very particular means, a means that is now virtually impossible to
recreate. This pedagogical tradition was known as an intensive. Most often these
intensives took place over the course of a week in Adelaide, Auckland, or
elsewhere around the world. What characterised them were live interviews and
the careful review of videotaped therapeutic conversations.
Michael found ways, especially through what later became known as outsider
witnessing practices, to engage and immerse participants in these conversations
as an antidote to the traditional tendency of professionals to sit in judgement of
those who sought consultation. We wanted people to enter the conversation
rather than stand outside of it. We wanted them, in a manner of speaking, to
travel alongside those whose lives had brought them to us.
What strikes me now, looking back, is that while we immersed ourselves in these
inquiries, relatively little explicit attention was given to the questions themselves.
We learned inquiry by participation, imitation, rehearsal, and apprenticeship. We
listened closely to one another9s questions, borrowed them, altered them,
rehearsed them in our imaginations, and gradually invented our own. Yet, I do not
recall much sustained consideration being given to the questions themselves. Or,
to put it differently in the terms of this paper: What makes a question good? And
perhaps equally importantly: What does a good question do?
The matter became personal for me following a reproach from a workshop
attendee many years ago. They expressed disappointment in my failure to explain
the intentions of my questions. I confess that, up until that very moment, I had
naively assumed that all one had to do was hear a question and, somehow, one
would simply take possession of it as one9s own. I took this critique seriously and
found myself reconsidering how one might learn and teach what I came to think
of as the craft and artistry of narrative inquiry.
What Is a Good Question—and What Does It Do? A Forty-Year Reflection on Inquiry in Narrative Therapy
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, August 2026 Release, p. 9-45.
www.journalcnt.com
