Asking the questions

No, not a a post about facilitation tactics, just some notes on questions in different contexts: business, football and life hacks. Like these job interview questions from readers of The Economist. Some of these are truly anodyne, but some are interesting. And it gives you some insight into what an elite level job interview looks like (washing dishes at the CEO’s cabin?). I’m slightly disappointed there weren’t 42 questions. I’ve gifted you the link. Read it to find out why.

World Cup qualification all but wrapped up yesterday for most of the remaining spots in the 2026 Men’s World Cup. There was drama all around but perhaps the most incredible match of the night happened in Edinburgh where Scotland qualified for the first time since 1974 in a match for the ages. In our region, North and Central America and the Caribbean, there was late drama as Curaçao qualified for their first World Cup after Jamaica hit the woodwork 3 times and was denied a 95th minute from a VAR review. With 155,000 people, If Curacao was a city in Metropolitan Vancouver, it would be the fifth or sixth biggest municipality in our region. They are the smallest country ever to qualify for a World Cup, in a year in which 47 other countries will also take part. I hope they get to play Cabo Verde for some kind of small island trophy.

Canada, for the record, played their last game of 2025 and broke a three game goalless streak with a sometimes-feisty, sometimes-anemic performance agains Venezuela. Becasue we qualify by being co-hosts, we have had a dearth of competitive fixtures since a disappointing quarter final loss in the Gold Cup in the summer, where we also drew with Curaçao. Impressive friendlies against Wales and Romania in September failed to build momentum. Last night’s win was good, but with only two windows in March and June, we have only 4 warm up matches to prepare for the World Cup.

I like soulcruzer. I found him on Mastodon, and his approach to life is to use his brain and his sense of ritual and magic to hack reality. Here are a few of his Chaos Magik practices. Have a read. Some of these are really fun little games and rituals you can play using the tools of obliquity and complex cognition.

Yesterday Rowen Simonsen and I filmed a little conversation about AI in facilitation practice and perhaps inspired a bit by soulcruzer’s reality hacking, I suggested that AI, specifically LLMs can be a fabulous obliquity engine to help individuals and groups crack their pattern entrainment, much the way we can use art, poetry and music to create surprising associations in our mind. Use LLMs to stimulate your brain’s own meaning-making capabilities. Perhaps we can use LLMs as a way to introduce obliquity into deliberations (give me ten questions about this subject that might be asked by a river watching us work). This is the kind of thing that LLM AI might be best for in the world of sense-making and dialogue: generating nonsense that stimulates human brains to make unlikely connections. We could also use card decks, I Ching divination, coin flips and the like to introduce randomness that forces brains to get to work. Like all “oracles” though, if you believe that the tool has an answer informed by some kind of intelligence, you are more culpable for hallucinations that your LLM partner. Oracles are best used to force your own eyes to see what is really going on with you. The interview is part of a series that are being used for Beehive Productions’ current course on Hosting at the Edge of our Humanity.