There’s nothing quite so wonderful as a great question. Some of the greatest questions I’ve heard are those that speak to the ‘horns of a dilemma’, asking how one thing and its seeming opposite might both be possible. Great questions are mental yeast, departure points for thinking – and they sometimes hold the seeds of their answer.
My mom, who began work as a school librarian, said that she never heard a kid ask so many questions as I did around the age of five. I clearly still love questions, and am in good company. Survey Monkey CEO Zander Lurie, in a recent Harvest Business Review article, describes how the company created a culture of curiosity and made it their rallying cry. They worked to enhance curiosity, for example creating forums for asking great questions: “We want people to ask big questions – and we want to celebrate them when they do (…) curiosity can be like a muscle: It’s strength will erode if it isn’t used enough”.
In that spirit, here are some of the big questions I’m wrestling with this year. None are new, and many don’t have answers. What do you think of them? Where do you think I could take these reflections? What are you wrestling with that we could think about together? (see comment box below).
- What is the relationship between personal and societal transformation?
- What are the limits to growth and what mechanisms support balance/equilibrium in nature?
- How do meta-narratives in society affect our mental models, from taxation (what we owe to society) to immigration and community (and ‘us versus them’ dynamics) to climate change?
- How does polarization happen in societies, and how can we counter it?
- What are the most effective ways to significantly counter and slow climate change? Clearly many many things at once, but given a choice between planting trees or cover crops, electrifying cars or investing in women’s health/education, what are the trade-offs?
- What is the relationship/parallel between healthy soils and healthy human microbiomes?
- How can we influence the high-level goals of a system to keep populations in balance and evolving, instead of each population aiming to reproduce without limit and control the resource base?
- How can we help people connect to nature in a profound way, given increasingly urbanized societies?
What questions are you wrestling with? If you have some great resources to suggest that are shedding light on them, feel free to share in the comments section…