In her essay Important Questions to Ask Yourself, poet Jane Hirshfield tells a story about a man who travels far to ask a wise teacher a question. When he finally asks it, the teacher slaps him. The lesson, the disciples later explain, is simple and severe: never surrender a good question for a mere answer.
This is a useful lesson to apply to futures work, too. When people come together to talk about the future, they’re rarely just talking about strategy or trends. They’re often carrying grief, fear, confusion, anger, or a sense of things slipping out of reach. In those moments, answers feel comforting. They promise certainty. They offer the illusion of control.
But Hirshfield suggests something subtler, and perhaps also braver.
She writes that in times of darkness, a good question can become a kind of safety rope. If you’re asking a question, you are not wholly undone by events. You are still present. Still in relationship with what’s unfolding. Still oriented toward a future, even if you don’t know what it looks like.
This resonates deeply with how I understand futures facilitation.
The work is not to rush people toward solutions, visions, or declarations. It’s to help them stay with the questions that matter: the ones that open rather than close, that soften rather than harden, and that invite movement and action instead of inevitability and apathy.
Hirshfield describes questions as a way of “carabiner-ing yourself to intimacy.” I love that image. A good question clips us into relationship: with our own experience, with others, with uncertainty itself.
In futures work, the goal (for me) isn’t to eliminate not-knowing. It’s to build our capacity to be with it, without collapsing into cynicism or false certainty. Questions help us do that. They keep the future open. They prevent sleepwalking. They remind us that things could still be otherwise.
If you’re asking a question, you still believe in a future. And sometimes, that’s enough to keep going.