In September, Editor in Chief Michelle Russell talks with author Warren Berger about what he calls  “beautiful questions” — big ambitious questions that can be acted on – and how they can transform business.

When Convene talked with Lisa Bodell in November 2013, the CEO and founder of the global innovation training company future think also was thinking about the power of the right questions — Bodell calls them “Killer Queries.”

“In our quest to always have the right answers, many of us have forgotten how to ask really smart questions,” Bodell said, “the kind that inspire you to truly think, address the elephant in the room, or even make people a little uncomfortable. Killer Queries should be open-ended, provocative, even outrageous, and they can target any aspect of your business.”

Bodell provided examples of the kinds of questions that meeting professionals should be asking as they design their events:

1. If we couldn’t do anything that we normally do when it comes to creating an event, what would we do?

2. What are all the assumptions you have around what must happen in a meeting? What if the opposite were true — what kind of meeting might result?

3. If you had unlimited funds to create the award-winning meeting of all time, what would you spend the money on?

4. You can only focus on one thing for your next meeting to make it a success — what is it? Why?