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, his students explain later, is simple: never surrender a good question for a mere answer.
I think about this often when I’m facilitating futures work.
In rooms full of uncertainty, people want answers. They want clarity, direction, a plan. That’s understandable: answers feel stabilising. They promise control. They help us move on. But in futures work, moving on too quickly is often the problem.
Good futures questions take time to work on us. They loosen assumptions. They surface tensions. They make space for perspectives that don’t fit neatly together yet. When we rush to answers, we collapse that space, and with it, the possibility of learning something genuinely new.
As a futures facilitator, part of my role is to protect good questions.
That means holding the room open when things feel unresolved. It means resisting the urge to tidy up ambiguity. It means noticing when a group is reaching for certainty as a form of comfort rather than insight.
This isn’t about being anti-action or endlessly theoretical. It’s about timing. When the right question is alive in a group, it does important work beneath the surface, shaping how people listen, what they notice, and which futures they can even imagine.
Answers have their place. But in futures facilitation, the quality of the process often depends on whether we can stay with the question long enough for it to change us. Never surrender a good question too early. It might be doing more work than we realise.