I try to use a similar method with all of my business communication, though systems like this work exponentially better when everyone in an organization is using them–meaning, everyone does it, and everyone understands it.

However, I think something is missing: a lot of the work I do requires what amounts to miniature RFIs. So one other category of email is “Request for Information.” Examples include:

“Who are the associates you would recommend to prepare and give the presentation to the board next month?”

“Which days are you available for the conversation with that potential partner?”

“When do you estimate the project will be finished?”

There should be an equally rigorous set of recommendations (and expectations) for response to questions like these. I think the onus is on the sender to set the parameters:

“I need to hear back by Friday.”

And then the onus is on the receiver to either respond with an answer by the set date or to reply immediately that the date won’t work:

“I won’t have the full project map from the contractors until Monday. Can you wait for a reply until then?’

This complicates things (it’s not a simple Yes/No, with an implied Yes) but it’s also reflective of a lot of everyday work.

What do you think?

This reminds me of the IBIS framework established by Jeff Conklin to address “wicked problems,” in which all chunks of a dialog are characterized into one of a few types: Questions, Ideas, Arguments (in support or opposition to the Ideas), etc.

Compendium is a tool for mapping these dialogs using IBIS. The result is mind-map-like illustrations of the flow of conversation. Fascinating stuff, if you ask me.
http://compendium.open.ac.uk/institute/about.htm

Best, Noah

“What is out there?”
“What is the meaning of life?”
“What comes next?”

Or are you talking about the questions we can’t ask yet because there are too many unknowns?

I think the tool in this post called “flanker” comes the closest to your idea of a lock-pick. The flanker is all about getting outside the frame of your question in an attempt to see it from another angle; what Edward De Bono calls lateral thinking.

It is not the form of the question, per se, so much as the act of questioning. Heidegger talked about this in terms of raising questions like “what is called thinking”? I guess what I mean is, how do we visualize a disposition to question? One idea is that of the old maps of explorers which identified the area beyond which existing knowledge ran out: this space was literally mapped out as terra incognita (land of the unknown). I am thinking of the type of questions (and questioning) that lead into the unknown, the darkness, the hidden, where we can never have the “right” question before hand. The question does not lead toward a destination or purpose, but away from one…