Most organisations begin by setting a vision, mission, strategy and goals. First, we decide what we want to achieve. Then, we work towards that.
This is not quite how the World Ethic Forum operates. We began, and we stayed, with a calling question.
Why questions, not answers?
A goal presumes that you already know, at least roughly, what needs to be done. You just need to get it done. When it comes to radically shared aliveness, or a culture of care and kinship, our starting point is that we don’t know for sure where to even begin. How could we begin with a goal?
What we do know is that we cannot do meaningful work on the ‘what’ without shifting the ‘how’, or we risk reproducing old dysfunctional patterns. A goal pulls you toward the ‘what’, the deliverable, the outcome. Meanwhile, the ‘how’ goes unexamined. Which is exactly what we want to avoid.
So, we decided to embrace an open-ended exploration full on. If you set a fixed target, you cut off the pathways you couldn’t foresee. A question keeps you in genuine not-knowing, which is where genuine transformation becomes possible. Working from questions, then, isn’t vagueness or avoidance. It’s a form of methodological rigour for what we do.
Not something we invented
Working with questions may be uncomfortable for those used to managerial or bureaucratic approaches, but it is common practice elsewhere. It echoes approaches like human-centred design, and entrepreneurial ways of solving open-ended problems. It is also central to participatory action research or PAR, in which the World Ethic Forum is engaged.
PAR refers to a continuous process of action, observation and reflection. It is itself a serious research practice of staying with inquiry rather than rushing to conclusions. What we have done is take it seriously enough to organise a seven-year inquiry around it.
Our calling Question
Our inquiry started with the following question: How do we come to a new responsibility and life-affirming relationship with ourselves, each other and the natural world?’
Like other inquiry-based approaches, we treat the question itself as alive and part of the inquiry itself. So, we tracked and embraced its evolution over time.
First, it morphed into ‘How can we cultivate radically shared aliveness together? How do we come to a new responsibility and life-affirming relationship with ourselves and the Earth, practising and translating it into meaningful actions in diverse cross-sectoral themes?’ Then into ‘How can we deepen and sustain a culture of care and kinship, grounded in radically shared aliveness, across our diverse fields of engagement, and in relation to the more than human world?’
At our latest 2026 gathering in Kenya, informed by the first five years of our inquiry, we reworked it again. It now stands as
‘What can bring forth a culture of care and kinship rooted in radically shared aliveness? And what collective practices and capacities bring forth our responsibility to make it happen?’
The successive rewordings indicate an evolution in our inquiry. The expression ‘culture of care and kinship’ settled. The word ‘responsibility’ faded, then came back. The grammar shifted from ‘how do we’ or ‘how can we’ to ‘what can bring forth’.
Questions for each year
Beneath the overarching question, since 2024, each in-person gathering has had its own calling question. They offer a narrower focus for that particular season of the inquiry, discerned together.
In 2026, it was “To respond from a place of intraconnectedness, what is essential for us as a Firekeeper Circle to acknowledge and assume agency for?”
In 2025, it was “What compost have we built, what needs care and wants to be seen and named in the circle, and what is now longing to emerge — asking us to listen, discern, and align our focus for the arc to come?”
In 2024, it was: “Dedicated to cultivating and fostering a culture of care and kinship grounded in radically shared aliveness: What practices and capacities can support us in converging across our diverse fields of engagements and thematic strands?”
Each of those questions sets a different mood for the gathering, and prompts a different type of attention. The 2025 question, for instance, is not primarily future focused. It does not ask what we should do. It is a stock-taking, it looks back to the compost we built, and from this, asks what wants to be seen, what is longing to emerge. That is an entirely different quality of attention: it assumes something is already at work and that our task is to notice it, rather than to decide and then execute. It also corresponded to 2025 being the midpoint of our initial arc of 7 years.
Taken as a sequence, these three questions show the evolution of our focus, and offer an alternative way of looking back at the flow of our inquiry. They move from convergence to noticing, and taking responsibility. This could be the movement that a culture of care and kinship requires: first, make time to converge across differences, notice inherited patterns, and heal wounds. And then, from this healthier soil, set a firm intention to act.
To you now…
So here is an invitation: what would change in your own work if – together with your team or peers – you held it as a question, nudging shared curiosity to go beyond what is already known, rather than a target? What would change in your work if you addressed it as a space not yet known to you, to become intimately familiar with?