Peter Block. The Answer to How is Yes: Acting on What Matters. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. San Francisco. 2002.

Getting the question right may be the most important thing we can do.

Quick read with ponderous thoughts and explanatory detail.

What matters over what works. ...Others will change more readily from the example we set by our own transformation.

Yes Questions

Each replaces a how question

1. What refusal have I been postponing? (How do I...)
2. What commitment am I willing to make? (How long will it take)
3. What is the price I am willing to pay? (How much will it cost)
4. What is my contribution to the problem I am concerned with? (How do we get people onboard)
5. What is the crossroad at which I find myself at this point in my life, work, or both?
6. What do we want to create together?
7. What is the question that, if you had the answer, would set you free?

Freedom means we are accountable for the well-being of all that is around us.

Change comes from care and commitment. ...Real commitment is a choice I make regardless of what is offered in return.

Three necessary qualities

1. Recapture the idealism of youth
2. Sustain the touch of connection
3. Endure the depth of philosophy

Speed is indifferent to its destination.

Requirements

1. Claim full citizenship
2. Home school yourself
   • Following your heart's desires
   • Learning about ideas outside your field
   • Mentoring on your own
   • Making peers the point
   • Treating the workplace as classroom
3. Your boss doesn't have what you want
4. Give up your ambition
5. Care for the whole

Social Architecture

Design and bring into being organizations that serve both the marketplace and the soul of the people who work within them

Social Architect capacities

1. Convening
2. Naming the questions
3. Initiating new conversations for learning
4. Sticking with strategies of engagement and consent
5. Designing strategies that support local choice

In human problems, the question is more important than the answer.

Design elements to build a social system

1. What is the mission of the system? Who decides? Who are we really here to serve?

2. How do we construct the job of the leader? Who decides?

3. What measures have meaning to us? Can we choose these collectively and limit their number to five?

4. What learning and training is needed? Who decides? Can different levels learn together in order to help overcome the social distance between the levels?

5. What constitutes reasonable, transparent, just rewards? Who decides?

6. How do we improve quality and introduce change? Who makes the choices?

7. How do we stay connected with our marketplace and those we are here to serve? How does everyone get involved in doing this?

8. What is our belief system about people's motivation? How does this fit with the values we came here to live out?

The value of the question

1. Understand that the task is to shift demand for the right answer to the search for the right question.

2. Recognize that the struggle is the solution.

3. See the reality in the current situation.

4. Grieve for the costs of what exists now.

5. Gain control of the nature of the debate.

6. Treat the conversation as an action.

7. Raise the question of what do we want to create together, even for an established institution.