Warren Berger's Blog, page 15
March 16, 2011
Writing about questions
My last book, Glimmer, was about how designers and other innovators think—how they come up with brilliant new ideas that can change the way we live. One of the things I learned while studying some of the world's leading innovators is that they tend to be masters at the art and science of asking questions. They have a knack for looking at the world around them—at the existing reality that everyone else usually just accepts—and asking: What if we did this? Or tried that?
Interestingly, we all start out as super-questioners—no one asks more questions than your average 5-year-old. But the habit of asking questions is trained out of us by the educational system. And then, as we make our way into the business world, we find that too often the emphasis is on short-term answers rather than exploring more far-reaching, potentially game-changing ideas. Research shows that many people in business are actually afraid to question the way things are done because they fear it will make them seem incompetent.
But this is not just a business-related issue: In our lives, in general, there's a tendency to move along on auto-pilot when we really ought to be in the habit of regularly stepping back and questioning everything—about our career choices, about our attitudes and beliefs, about the ways we choose to live. Questioning is good for us. It can help to open up new possibilities in our lives. It's a first step in solving problems. It makes us more successful as leaders. People who ask a lot of questions tend to be more engaged in their lives, more fulfilled, and happier.
So why don't we ask more questions?
With this blog, I'm going to explore that and other questions, such as:
How do we develop and foster the habit of questioning?
How do we go about formulating better questions (or what might be thought of as "beautiful questions")?
And what happens after an important and "beautiful" question has been raised—what can we learn about the journey that starts with asking "why" or "what if" and eventually leads us to discovery, change, and progress?
Those are some big questions, I know. It's going to take a good deal of inquiry on my part—with help from inquisitive, interested people like you—to arrive at a better understanding of this important and intriguing subject. Please share any thoughts, anecdotes, ideas (and of course, questions) here in the comments. And be sure to subscribe to this blog and/or the comments if you want to be part of the ongoing conversation.
Why do kids ask so many questions? But more importantly: Why do they stop?
A while back I was discussing the subject of "questioning" with Richard Saul Wurman, the original creator of the TED Conference and a man who's pretty much obsessed with questions.
He immediately focused on the educational system. "In school, we're rewarded for having the answer, not for asking a good question," Wurman pointed out. Which may explain why kids—who start off asking endless "why" and "what if" questions—gradually ask fewer and fewer of them as they progress through grade school.
This also came up in a recent Newsweek story, "The Creativity Crisis," about signs of declining creativity among our school children. Interesting fact cited in the article: Preschool kids ask their parents an average of 100 questions a day. By middle school, they've basically stopped asking questions. Around this time, the article points out, student motivation and engagement plummets. Which raises an interesting question: Have the kids stopped asking questions because they've lost interest? Or have they lost interest because the rote answers-driven school system doesn't allow them to ask enough questions?
There's a lot to explore here and I'm just getting started on it. I know that there are many teachers, and progressive schools, and programs within schools, that are much more geared to allowing kids to question and experiment. I plan to take a closer look at some of those efforts and ask whether they should be embraced more widely. Meanwhile, if you have thoughts, ideas, anecdotes (and of course, questions) about the role of questioning within our educational system, please share. Oh, and just for fun, here's a wonderful video riff by comedian Louis C.K. all about kids and questions.
Go to the 7 minute mark to get to the bit about questions (if you can't abide 4-letter words, you may want to skip it):
Are questioners more successful than the rest of us?
Years of research on some 3,000 creative executives conducted by Professor Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of the INSEAD business school, culminated in the report "The Innovators' DNA," with intriguing findings that there were several personal attributes that linked all of these Steve Jobs–types. Perhaps more than anything else, what stands out is their curiosity and willingness to question—"The same kind of inquisitiveness you see in small children," according to Gregersen. This correlates with my own informal research for my book Glimmer. I found that many of the most successful innovators, entrepreneurs, and world-changing designers were people who weren't afraid to question everything. See this Harvard Business Review interview with Dyer and Gregersen for more background on the study.
The Fast Company essay that kicked off this project
Just as a reference, I thought I'd post my Fast Company essay "Big Innovations Question the Status Quo. How Do You Ask the Right Questions?" which briefly spells out my views on the value of questioning in the business world. Already I've been getting some great feedback on the topic, from people of many disciplines and backgrounds.
You can read the essay on the FastCoDesign site, and enjoy the Horia Varian illustration and the comments posted there, or you can find the entire essay below.
Many disruptive innovations pose simple questions about the status quo. So how do you ask the right questions?
What if someone sold socks that didn't match? In his new book Disrupt, Luke Williams, a veteran of frog design, talks about how that offbeat question was the impetus for the launch of Little Miss Matched, a company whose purposely mismatched socks proved surprisingly popular with young girls. It's one of a number of examples Williams cites of new business innovations that began with what he calls "a disruptive hypothesis." Another better-known one is Netflix, whose business model provided an answer to the question, What if a video rental company didn't charge late fees?
Breakthroughs are often born with someone asking "What if…?"
It's interesting that when you deconstruct stories of innovation, you find that many of them start with a question–often one that could be considered provocative, naïve, or maybe even a little crazy. In my own research into the design world, I found that breakthroughs ranging from the OXO potato peeler to the Cheetah prosthetic foot could be traced back to someone, somewhere, asking "What if…?"
Likewise, a number of today's hottest tech startups came into being as an attempt to answer ambitious questions like, What if we could somehow crowdsource everything a city has to offer? (Foursquare) or, What if we could get any question immediately answered by the world's smartest people? (Quora).
On one level, this doesn't come as too much of a surprise: It's fairly well understood that one must question assumptions and challenge conventional wisdom in order to innovate. No less an authority than Einstein has told us, It's all about the questions, stupid. (Okay, I'm paraphrasing Einstein there, but he actually did once say that if he only had an hour to solve a problem and his life depended on it, he'd devote the first 55 minutes to figuring out the right question to answer.)
Why are so many of us reluctant to question?
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But this raises an interesting you-know-what: If we can see that questions are linked to innovation and problem-solving, why are so many of us reluctant to ask them? A recent University of Michigan study found that people in business are generally loathe to raise questions—primarily because they fear that anyone who asks fundamental questions will be perceived as incompetent or uninformed. And if anything, this problem seems to worsen over time as people gain more experience and expertise in their fields. After all, experts know they're supposed to supply answers, not more questions.
To be fair, this is not just a business-world failing. When I discussed the subject of "questioning" a while back with Richard Saul Wurman, the original creator of the TED Conference and a man who's pretty much obsessed with questions, he immediately focused on the educational system. "In school, we're rewarded for having the answer, not for asking a good question," Wurman pointed out. Which may explain why kids–who start off asking endless "why" and "what if" questions–gradually ask fewer and fewer of them as they progress through grade school. And, Wurman observed, the questions they do ask tend to become "smaller and more proscribed."
Questioners must look at an existing reality from multiple views.
As for the ones who don't stop asking questions? They're more apt to become our top innovators and business leaders. A study of some 3,000 creative executives, conducted by researchers at Brigham Young University and the INSEAD business school, found that what linked all of these Steve Jobs-types, perhaps more than anything else, was their curiosity and willingness to question–"the same kind of inquisitiveness you see in small children," according to Hal Gregersen, one of the authors of the study.
Of course, it's not just a matter of being willing to question–it's also important to know how to question. Innovation is driven by questions that are original, bold, counterintuitive, and perceptive. Some of the designers I've talked to about questioning–people like Wurman, Stefan Sagmeister, Yves Behar, and others–have observed that coming up with the right question, the one that casts a familiar challenge in a new light, is an art and science in itself. It demands that the questioner be able to look at an existing reality from multiple viewpoints, including, perhaps most importantly, that of the "naïve outsider."
In this era of Google, Ask.com, and now Quora, we've come to expect quick answers to whatever questions pop into our heads. But the best innovators know that when it comes to answering profound, game-changing questions, a much more exhaustive kind of "search" is required. The question must be lived with; over time it may be expanded, then honed and refined. It is apt to launch the questioner on a journey of inquiry that may involve in-depth observation, combinatory and lateral thinking, experimentation, and prototyping (after all a prototype, to quote IDEO's Diego Rodriguez, is itself "a question, embodied").
In my next post, I'll explore some more thoughts from top innovators on the art of asking questions, while also further examining the path that leads from question to breakthrough. In the meantime, I'm collecting "beautiful questions" and stories about the power of questions to trigger innovation and change; leave comments below.
