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Clean Language Ice Breaker

16/09/16 08:36 Filed in: Clean Language

Clean Language is a framework to ask questions without pre-suppositions.

Because sometimes questions are far from 'clean', we might inadvertently disguise opinions inside questions, and therefore partly determine the response of the person being asked the question.

Clean Language questions do not carry assumptions, opinions or pre-suppositions, the questions often evoke answers that include metaphors, and exploring these symbols or metaphors with further clean questions can provide rich and expansive dialogue.

This week, I used clean language question as a warm up exercise, and asked a group of 15 participants, 'When you are at your best in workshops, you are like what'?

People wrote answers on gridcards, then each person shared what they had written and what it meant to them.

The exercise provided a participatory beginning the the workshop, and helped us all understand the conditions that helped us be at our best.