Asking the right questions

In a time where more and more emphasis is put on information and information gathering, less attention is paid to the art of asking questions. This webpage of the Harvard Business Review speaks briefly on the fact that 4-year olds live by asking questions, but that adults lost this capacity - most likely because providing answers is seen as a more "grown-up" attitude. The authors focus on situations in businesses and offices. However, their concerns are, I think, highly relevant for the field of Bible Translation and biblical exegesis. The information that is made available to translation teams in the field is very much "answer"-based. But while we can make as much information available as we like, when we start with the wrong questions we are very likely to end up with the wrong answers.