From Parking Lot in the post About Seeing, Part 5:

A “what if” question is tasty, and demonstrates exactly an important power of “seeing:” once you see a desired future, you can’t put it back in the bottle. As Thomas King says about stories of transformation, you can do a lot of things, but you can’t say you didn’t hear it. Jonathan Schell, in The Unconquerable World, argues that this quality of real vision is what makes the democratic impulse so strong in people: once participatory democracy is unleashed on the world, it cannot be refuted. Taste freedom or inspiration once, and it’s hard to deny its full emergence.

“What if” questions bring the sophisticated process of seeing to a very practical point. I find that increasingly, my work is about helping people shift from one place to another. Any kind of transformation process requires this kind of forward viewing in order to provide some idea of where we are going. So I am finding “what if” questions, and the accompanying challenge to individuals - passion AND responsibility, remember - to see themselves in that new future to be useful in just about every context, be it planning, consultation, community building or organizational development.