Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1432

Ruth Reichl on Challenging Career Moves

The renowned author and former editor of Gourmet talks about the magazine’s closure and her recent transition to fiction writing. She is featured in the Life’s Work section of the forthcoming June issue.

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Visualizing Zero: How to Show Something with Nothing

In its most revealing form, data visualization makes the “invisible” visible. It enables people to move beyond just looking at data towards actually seeing the shapes and magnitudes of its physical properties to inform and enlighten.

Discernibility is a prominent guiding decision: making the size of values as readable as possible, the distinction between categories as identifiable as possible, and the nature of relationships between entities as evident as possible.

Yet, what if there is no size? What if there are no amounts for a category? What if no relationships exist?

Welcome to the design of nothing, a delicate and often neglected aspect of data visualization concerned with showing the absence of data, representing zero, and utilizing the property of emptiness. How do we make these slippery attributes of nothingness visible?

Showing the absence of data: Though analysts and designers naturally seek to work with data that is complete, missing data can be just as revealing as the data itself. Here are two projects that make the “nothing” of missing data into something.

Firstly, in the ‘State of the Polar Bear’, by Periscopic, we see an attempt to convey the change in the population and habitat of the Polar bear around the Arctic.

Aside from the sadly apparent areas of population decline, a key observation from this project is the ‘data deficiency’ status for a large section of the displayed region, mostly part of Russia. As the project’s author, Kim Rees, explains, these areas without any data were not excluded, just greyed out: “It was a political statement to Russia to release the data they have about polar bears”. The absence of data does not hinder the project, it adds a whole new dimension to it.

In the ‘Billionaires’ visualization, by Bloomberg Visual Data, we see a number of generic blank faces included among the illustrations of the top 200 billionaires.

Those blanked out faces represent the reclusive and elusive, the ones for whom only a college yearbook photograph exists in the public domain. There’s something compelling about those who manage to preserve such anonymity, and the inclusion of their absence adds intrigue to the visualization.

Representing zero: When it comes to the challenge of representing zeros we are not talking about the absence of data but rather the absence of amount. In the below snippet from a graphic titled ‘The Uniform Distribution’, created by Dark Horse Analytics, we see the number of MLB players who wear each different numbered jersey.

What is striking about this chart is the complete absence of players who wear the number 42. This isn’t a gap in the data but simply illustrates the significance of the retiring of the #42 shirt in 1997 to honor Jackie Robinson. The retirement of Mariano Rivera in 2013, the last player allowed to wear the #42, secured the zero value in the chart above.

Another example of portraying zero comes from the famous dot-point map created by John Snow to plot the deaths from the outbreak of cholera in London in 1854. One of the most striking findings from the map is the lack of deaths registered at the brewery, despite its proximity to the proposed source of the disease.

On investigation it was discovered that the brewery workers drank the beer they were making, rather than the water originating from the pump on Broad Street.

In both these examples, zero needs to be given a home, as it is a crucial element of the story. The absence of an amount in each case is evident through contrast with non-zero values, though to identify these as zeroes and not gaps in data does require some domain knowledge for interpretation.

Utilizing emptiness: The final aspect of designing nothing concerns the deliberate deployment of blank space. Through utilising emptiness we can create quite striking displays of data and help increase readability.

In the example below, taken from the front page of the Independent newspaper, the large area of empty space on the right hand side provides context for the interpretation of the few countries that voted ‘No’ for an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East.

The relative scales of each side are driven home by the generous use of white space, made all the more eye-grabbing by the fact that it is so seldom used on a newspaper’s front page.

The design of nothing may sound like an oxymoron but it is anything but. Though visualizations most often focus on significant quantities and relationships, their absence is sometimes equally as interesting. For visualization design, there is always something in nothing.

Persuading with Data

An HBR Insight Center




Data Doesn’t Speak for Itself
Data Goes Best With a Good Story (and Vice Versa)
Presentation Tools That Go Beyond “Next Slide Please”
The Right Colors Make Data Easier To Read

Sometimes Colleagues Are the Best Coaches

By the age of thirty, our personalities have stabilized and behavior change becomes relatively difficult. It’s especially hard for senior executives, who have got where they are thanks to the way they behave. Although others may think their behavior is dysfunctional, they see no compelling reason to change and place any blame for failure on others. Even if they are willing to make an effort to change, they don’t really know how and need help to do so.

That’s why executives often engage the services of a coach. But coaching is a bit like therapy; it takes time for the results to be seen, and in that time there’s a lot of value that gets destroyed by an executive’s dysfunctional behavior. A more immediate solution, I believe, is to be found in a group coaching intervention, because an experienced coach can use the group context to leverage powerful (conscious and unconscious) psychological dynamics to trigger change almost immediately, like understanding, catharsis, and peer support.

Let me give you an example. Faced with rapid evolution in their industry, the executive team of a large energy company had decided to transform their solid but complacent organization into a high-tech, sustainability-oriented firm, a key element of which was the completion of a multibillion dollar offshore energy project. To help with the transition, and in particular with the project, the company hired two new executives. Jim, a brilliant professor of engineering, came on as the new Chief Knowledge Officer and John, an experienced petroleum executive identified by a major shareholder, became Vice President of Technology, Products, and Services.

But within just a few months of their joining, war had broken out between the new arrivals and other executives.

The company was heavily committed to its offshore energy project, making it necessary to meet specific deadlines — and pressures were mounting. Yet the team was unable to move forward and was bogged down in turf fights for resources. Open, constructive communication was missing. They distrusted each other. And everyone was falling short of performance targets.

On the advice of the strategy consultants he had engaged, the CEO decided to bring the team together for what he called a high performance intervention. The ostensible objective would be to reflect on interpersonal relationships, work practices, leadership styles, and the organizational culture, guided by an experienced group coach. The underlying agenda, however, was to create alignment and make the team more effective in implementing its strategy.

The coach began with a short lecture about high performance organizations and effective leadership. She then asked each member of the executive committee to draw a self-portrait, a picture of how they saw themselves. Despite initial grumbling and skepticism, the executives soon became quite immersed in the task. When all the self-portraits were completed and displayed on the wall, the group coach asked each member of the executive team including the CEO to talk to the group about his drawing.

Through the narrative of the self-portrait (combined with the sharing by each person of two 360-degree feedback reports), the group  members discovered surprising things about each other. In Jim’s case, for example, they learned that his grandfather had been a brilliant academic but his father had followed a different drum, his life marked not by success but by failure and the disappointment of one job after another.

Jim had spent a great deal of time with his grandfather, who found in him the enthusiasm and curiosity that his own son seemed to lack. Jim’s identity as an academic had as a result become very important to him. In his present role, he felt that his creativity might be stifled, so he did whatever he could to protect what he called the “spark,” keeping his fellow executive team members at a distance. He had an underlying fear that he would become like his father, wasting away his talents.

Now, looking at the information from the 360-degree feedback reports, and listening to the challenging but supportive comments from the group, he came to realize that other people found this behavior obstructive, aggravating existing problems with the team and the company.

The exercise forced each of the executives, like Jim, to face the fact that they were part of a larger system and that their present actions reinforced already prevalent silo behavior, prevented alignment, and hampered execution. Having accepted this, they were then able think constructively and with the support of the other members of the group to find ways to modify or accommodate the problematic behaviors. Jim, for example, promised to be present at meetings where his expertise was really needed and to be more responsive to email. He also decided to hire an assistant who would help him to be better organized. The members of the team, on their part, agreed not to harass him with minor issues and respect his need for reflection time.

Through that single intervention, the executive team started to act, for the first time, like a real team. That spirit immediately made its presence felt in their work on the offshore project. At a follow-up session three months later, they all reported feeling a greater openness among themselves, marked by real dialogue and the exchange of ideas. They felt they could safely speak their minds, reveal vulnerabilities, and trust one another. This in turn facilitated stronger alignment about the direction the company should be taking. They found it easier to communicate consistently to their employees where they, as a team, were going. Finally, decisions were now being implemented and the company was seeing progress and moving forward.

The broader lesson from this story is that top-level interventions of this sort can make a huge difference to the implementation of a strategy or change initiative. The strategy consulting firm that advised the CEO in the story above recognizes that the strategies that it helps clients develop are all too often derailed by the inability of top executives to work well together. And this is precisely why the firm now makes group coaching for the executive teams it advises a regular component in its assignments.

 

Keeping Tabs on the Competition as a Start-Up

Big companies have it easy when it comes to gathering and utilizing competitive intelligence. They have a defined brand and a fairly clear picture of market penetration, differentiators, and existing products and services.

Start-ups, especially high-tech ones, typically don’t have the same luxury. But competitive intelligence – data gleaned from mostly public sources and analyzed for patterns, trends, and positioning – is important for investors and shareholders, customers, and employees (from business development to product to customer service). It tells investors why you might succeed in this particular market or in creating a new one – and who could come nipping at your heels. It can also help you outflank savvy competitors and acquire more market share. Failing to utilize it can be highly detrimental for budding businesses. So where do the underdogs begin?

Start by creating a competitive intel repository and committing to its maintenance. This can be embedded in a company’s culture during its infancy (though it’s never too late if a business is already well underway). It can be as simple as a shared file on Google Docs or Sharepoint, or a company-developed wiki. House all your information there as a living document, and over time, trends and patterns will become apparent. To make this data useful, designate someone at the company to take control of competitive intelligence. If you make competitive intelligence everyone’s responsibility, it will be forgotten. Wise companies appoint a centralized curator of competitive intel, who updates the repository and keeps everyone else informed.

Start-ups must also know what to put on their competitive intelligence radars. Here’s how to size up the competition:

Be skeptical of company websites. It’s a common mistake to look at a competitor’s website, see the same buzzwords, and assume the business is already doing what you’re working toward. But understand that a competitor’s site may not reflect what they actually do, what they intend to do, or what they’re capable of doing. Take the information with a grain of salt and dig deeper.

Identify investors and boards. Board members typically align with the VCs that funded the company (though not always), and prominent investors often have reputations that precede them – some only do angel investing, some prefer early to mid-stage companies, and others only hitch their wagons to a late-stage star. Their profiles may be a reliable indicator of where a company is in its cycle – and how seriously you should take them. It also helps to see if a company has disclosed how much funding it raised.

Know who their employees are. Sources like LinkedIn make it easy to understand the composition of a rival. The number of employees can imply the likelihood of profitability, indicate cash utilization, or give a sense of allocated capital. You can see ages, experience levels, educational backgrounds, and so on. The ratio of current to former employees is also telling – evidence of high turnover may reveal something about a company’s management style or stability.

Note the geography. Identify where clusters of employees are located. Does the company have a 15-person workforce in as many locations? That could signify a virtual setup or a lack of maturity. Do you see a company’s sales and customer service folks in the Midwest, while its engineers are clustered in Silicon Valley? Do they have a team overseas, say, in India? These data points can help you assess competitors’ maturity, speed, agility, and burn.

Use social media. You may get a fingertip sense of market penetration by checking out an opponent’s social media channels. Learn how they’re positioning themselves on Twitter and if they’re blogging on LinkedIn. A large follower base shows people are taking notice of them – but even a small number of followers can be revealing once you dig into the composition. Are influential journalists and bloggers part of their following?

Don’t forget traditional media. If a start-up makes the news, it’s doing something intriguing. Stories may give a sense of a company’s strength – if a new product has a lot of buzz, if it has the ability to rapidly transform itself in response to market feedback. Listening to the spokesperson gives you insight into how they’re positioning. What are the talking points they use? What seems to be the primary focus?

Study the leadership team. Where did those leaders go to school? Where else have they worked? Does the CEO have experience starting companies? Have multiple team members worked together before? Most start-ups fail, but if a team has experience working together and creating a product, that maturity can take it further.

Start-ups can – and should – mine competitive intelligence to refine their understanding of the market and customers, consider new product directions, and outmaneuver potential rivals.

Analysts’ Formerly Dim View of CSR Brightens Over Time

Back in the 1990s, stock analysts tended to produce pessimistic recommendations for companies with high expenditures on corporate social responsibility, but over the subsequent decade-plus, they came to view these firms optimistically, according to Ioannis Ioannou of London Business School and George Serafeim of Harvard Business School. Analysts formerly saw CSR as a detriment to profitability—something whose main purpose was to make executives feel good about themselves—but they came to view CSR as essential to corporate standing and to perceive that it may generate financial value in the long run, the authors say.

How We Built a New Company Culture

Too often, any thought of changing a culture, never mind rebuilding it, seems like a Sisyphean task; the weight of the status quo ultimately rolls back and crushes such efforts.

I learned this while leading a turnaround of NPS Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company that now specializes in creating treatments for rare diseases. To save the 20-year-old company, I had to get it operating like a start-up. In the process, I came up with six rules that could also help others change their cultures.

First, let me give you a little background. NPS had hit a rough patch in 2006. Our lead drug, upon which the future of the company then hinged, failed to get the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval. With the company in jeopardy, a deep retrenchment followed, including cuts that reduced the workforce by 80%. Not surprising, those who remained were distressed and anxious.

I took over as CEO in 2008 and immediately realized that NPS had to become a different company. My first priority was to execute a new strategy that focused the company on rare diseases by repurposing assets in our pipeline. We could no longer afford to pursue remedies for prevalent big diseases. Accordingly, I transformed the business model − from that of a fully integrated pharmaceutical company into a company that retained key technical expertise (e.g., medical development experts, regulatory affairs and technical operations leadership, quality assurance/control); the project-management function; and contracted, or outsourced, all other operational activities.

The new NPS needed an entrepreneurial, creative, and cooperative culture. I  had to guarantee that people worked together with the utmost efficiency. Reflecting on my 25 years of experience at large pharmaceutical companies and private equity firms, I thought of the environments I had enjoyed and wrote down the basic values that were important to me and, I believed, would be crucial to turning around NPS: integrity, respect, excellence, personal ownership, teamwork, and fun.

These core values were instrumental in reviving the company. We’re now growing: We have an approved product (Gattex) for treating adults with short-bowel syndrome who are dependent on parenteral nutrition, a second product under FDA review, and are expanding internationally.

Of course, anyone can write down words, call them values, and incur no change. Something has to be done to turn them into an actual culture. I believe that these rules − which I applied at NPS − can work at other companies, too.

Define the values in simple, sixth-grade language. Words mean different things to different people. Therefore, it is important that the words used to define the values be simple, clear, and easily understood by the constituents and are not jargon. This leaves no room for creative (mis)interpretation of the values and avoids using words that have different meanings or can’t be translated in other languages.

Don’t post plaques on the wall declaring the values. Mounting your values on a wall can trivialize them and give the false impression that they have been already achieved by decree. Values have to be internalized and lived and cannot be an object on a wall. Building a culture with values that everyone embraces requires leading by example, interpersonal communication, and permanent attention.

Teach people what the values mean. This must come from the top. My senior executives and I made our values the language of leadership. They were embedded in how we worked and communicated at every level. Credibility is truly at the core of building a values-driven culture.

Recruit people who naturally are inclined to live your values. This does not mean recruiting clones! It simply means populating the workforce with individuals who naturally embrace the values and become role models. Cultural fit is as significant as technical ability. Again, a company’s culture is a choice, and different people find their fulfillment in different cultures. Just make sure you identify and retain those individuals who will flourish in yours. We integrate the assessment of candidates’ values in our interview process, check references accordingly, and rely significantly on referrals.

Make values a primary filter for performance evaluations. There is no stronger lever for promoting a culture than tying adherence to its values to individual compensation. At NPS, the values evaluation and rating has a direct and significant impact on salary increases and both short- and long-term incentives. While recruitment errors happen, the performance evaluation highlights those shortcomings and gives the manager and the employee a chance to correct the situation. If the improvement plan fails to generate results, swift separation from the company is necessary. Even individuals on NPS’s leadership team who didn’t embrace our values had to go.

Your values must be non-negotiable. Over and over again, I have seen managers tolerate unacceptable behaviors because they believed the individuals’ technical expertise was vital. This shortsightedness is a recipe for disaster. One person’s expertise is not a good trade for negativity, loss of credibility, and the metastases of other unacceptable behaviors throughout the organization. The moment you make one exception, you’re doomed.

The 7 Stages of Business Travel Stress

How stressful is business travel? Very. Especially if you’re a female vice president. We know this because Michael Segalla and Dominique Rouziès of HEC Paris teamed up with Catalin Ciobanu and Vincent Lebunetel of Carlson Wagonlit Travel to survey thousands of business travelers about the stress they felt at every stage of a trip.

When mapped on the timeline of a standard business trip, the data offer a view into who’s stressed out by what. VPs hate expense reports. Senior executives have a surprisingly high fear of flying. And, yes, women are far more stressed by business travel than men.

Click here or on the image below to interact with their timeline and learn more about their travel stress findings.

How Innovation Ecosystems Turn Outsiders into Collaborators

Running a truly innovative company means constantly improving your innovation culture and process. Running a successful innovation ecosystem, however, demands more. Successful innovation ecosystems make people outside the company measurably smarter, richer, and more innovative. Biologically speaking, innovation ecosystems invest in symbiosis, not parasitism. Growth isn’t zero-sum.

Jeff Bezos knows. So do Larry Page and new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Mark Zuckerberg, Reed Hastings, Marissa Mayer, and Haier CEO Zhang Ruimin similarly grasp the strategic, operational, and cultural distinction. They’re leaders and entrepreneurs who are publicly committed to creating better ecosystems, not just better products.

While successful innovators reap new profits from new products and services, successful innovation ecosystems cultivate profitability by encouraging others to create valuable new offerings. Their financial futures depend on how innovative they make their customers, clients, channels, and partners. Truly effective ecosystems manage to turn outsiders into de facto collaborators. Enabling external innovation becomes as important as improving one’s own. In fact, successful innovation ecosystems create virtuous cycles of external creativity, which drives internal adaptation. In turn, internal innovation enables and inspires external investment.

Ecosystem innovators like Bezos and Hastings are constantly asking, “Who are we making richer? Who are we making more innovative? Who’s on both those lists?” The answers say everything about the future they’re trying to create.

This is beautifully highlighted by Flipboard cofounder and CEO Mike McCue’s recent comment about how empowering users to create their own “virtual magazines” redefined the reader experience. “It was totally transformative,” he observed. “There are over 7 million magazines that people made in the nine or 10 months since we launched it. It’s awesome.” These customers are now creating virtual magazines, not just reading them. And Flipboard is learning and adapting thanks to their expressive ingenuity.

This is the real IP — not “Intellectual Property” but “Innovation Partnerships.” Look at Amazon Web Services, GitHub, Toyota and YouTube’s investments in suppliers, and Apple’s App Store. Or consider Netflix’s efforts to procure binge-able viewing: With Netflix’s new commissions of series like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, creative people are now producing for a Netflix audience the way they once did for syndication, cable, and HBO. The common denominator for all these companies isn’t simply an exchange of value, but offering new opportunities for collaboration. Success comes from exploring how to make one’s partners more valuable innovators.

Dramatically boosting an innovation ecosystem isn’t inherently expensive; a new API, a simulation tool, a training methodology, or slightly greater access to customer data are frequently all that’s necessary to seed mutual growth opportunities. But just as management isn’t leadership, innovation process improvement isn’t innovation ecosystem stewardship. Fostering an innovation ecosystem does require a culture and competence of stewardship — making the kinds of investments and improvements that aren’t just opportunistic, but reflect and respect the core values you want to endure.

How does your organization invite innovation partnerships? How do you recognize and reward innovation partners? (Of course, your answers matter less than their answers.) Similarly, how is your innovation ecosystem making participatory innovation possible?

It’s tempting, often irresistibly so, for stewards of innovation ecosystems to want to compete against customers, channels, and suppliers when lush new savannas of profitability and growth materialize. The strategic challenge becomes resisting the urge to gobble up that opportunity, and instead identifying the partnerships that would expand it even more. Indeed, innovation ecosystems triumph over innovative companies if and when the benefits of mutual value creation outweigh the costs. That, in no small part, is why Google acquired Nest and why its ecosystem is broader and deeper than Microsoft’s or Yahoo’s. In other words, if you’re not making your innovation partners richer in some measurable way, you’re simply running an innovation factory, not an ecosystem.

Again, the Googles, the Amazons, the Toyotas, and the LinkedIns know this. But does your organization mind and measure who it’s making richer and more innovative? If it doesn’t, it may not be your innovation ecosystem for long.

Data Alone Won’t Get You a Standing Ovation

A few years ago, Dr. Brené Brown delivered a presentation on “The power of vulnerability” at TEDx Houston. As a professor at the University of Houston, Brown studies vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame. It’s a pretty big subject area to squeeze into 18 minutes, yet Brown did it so well that her presentation has been viewed 15 million times and has turned Brown into a New York Times bestselling author.

She began her presentation with a short anecdote:  A couple of years ago, an event planner called me because I was going to do a speaking event. She said, “I’m really struggling with how to write about you on the little flier.” And I thought, “Well, what’s the struggle?” And she said, “Well, I saw you speak, and I’m going to call you a researcher but I’m afraid if I call you a researcher, no one will come because they’ll think you’re boring and irrelevant.” And I was like, “Okay.” And she said, “But the thing I liked about your talk is you’re a storyteller. So I think what I’ll do is just call you a storyteller.”

Brown said the “insecure” part of her was hesitant to adopt the title because she was a serious academic researcher. However, she eventually warmed to the idea. “I thought, you know, I am a storyteller. I’m a qualitative researcher. I collect stories; that’s what I do. Maybe stories are just data with a soul. And maybe I’m just a storyteller.”

As Brown suggests, we’re all storytellers. In a business presentation, you’re telling the story behind your campaign, company, or product. In a job interview, you’re telling the story behind your personal brand. In a marketing pitch, you’re telling the story about your idea.

In my work as a communication coach for executives at the world’s leading brands I’m often faced with a mountain of data that the speaker wants to get across. My job is to help the person tell the story behind the data—to reveal the soul behind the numbers. Drawing on this experience, as well as my recent research into the most succcessful TED talks and the neuroscience behind audience response, I’ve concluded that that data has the most impact when it’s wrapped in a story.

Consider the following examples:

In December 2010, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg took to the TED stage to talk about “Why we have too few women leaders.” Just before the presentation, she told a friend about an incident she’d had with her daughter as she was leaving for the conference. The little girl was pulling at her leg and crying, “Mommy don’t go!” The friend suggested she share that story with her audience too. Sandberg’s plan had been to give a talk “chock full of data and no personal stories” but she agreed to change course. She described the encounter with her daughter, and told other personal stories about how difficult it was for her to raise a family and have a career, as well as offering statistics. The data reinforced Sandberg’s theme, but it was her stories that launched the Lean In movement.

At TED 2013, U2 front man Bono delivered a presentation on global efforts to reduce childhood mortality. “For kids under five, child mortality is down by 2.85 million deaths a year. That’s a rate of 7,256 children’s lives saved each day,” Bono said. Most presenters would have stopped there. But the rock star went one step further, adding soul to the data by putting a face to the numbers. He told the story of Michael and Benedicta, who “are alive today, thanks in large part to their nurse, Dr. Patricia Asamoah, and the Global Fund”, and showed two slides: the first, a close-up picture of the two smiling children; the second, a photo of Dr. Asamoah conducting her work in a small African village. Data proved Bono’s point; stories brought it home.

Recently, I prepared the executives of a large flash memory company for their annual presentation to investors. Analysts are a tough audience. They want technical information and growth forecasts; few, if any, will tell you they want to hear stories. Yet that’s exactly resonates with them. One senior vice-president wanted to start his talk with some statistics that weren’t entirely new to the roomful of analysts:  high-capacity storage card sales growth. We decided to instead kick off on a more emotional note:  He explained that he’s a digital photography enthusiast, with a collection of 80,000 digital photos; then he showed pictures of his high-school-age girls playing sports and said that he wouldn’t trust those memories to anything but the cards his company manufactures. By their very nature, financial presentations must include charts, graphs, and tables, but that doesn’t mean you can’t grab your audience’s attention with a story before you present your data.

Remember:  Data won’t get you standing ovation; stories will. Stories inform, illuminate, and inspire. Tell more of them.

Persuading with Data

An HBR Insight Center




Data Goes Best With a Good Story (and Vice Versa)
Presentation Tools That Go Beyond “Next Slide Please”
The Right Colors Make Data Easier To Read
Why You Have to Generate Your Own Data

Become a Company That Questions Everything

Imagine you’re a bright, inquisitive person working for a company with long-established policies and work processes in place (or maybe you don’t have to). Now let’s say you’ve noticed one of those processes is not as efficient or effective as it might be, which leads you to reasonably ask: Why are we doing it this way? Is there a better approach?

What happens next in this scenario could be a good indicator of whether your company has a culture of inquiry or one of acceptance and conformity. If it’s the former, that question you raised will be carefully considered and may trigger ongoing discussion — and possibly action — by the company’s managers and leaders. You might be praised and even rewarded, just for asking it.

If, on the other hand, yours is a company that doesn’t value or appreciate questioning, you might hear something like: “This is the way we’ve been doing things for 20 years — who are you to second-guess us?” Or the always-popular, “Around here, we expect people to bring us answers, not questions.”

In my research on business and questioning, I found that many more companies seem to fall into the second camp. And it’s easy to understand why. The consultant Dev Patnaik of Jump Associates points out that many of today’s larger, well-established companies “were designed on a military model” with a hierarchical structure and top-down management. Within that structure, questioning by employees can be perceived as a challenge to authority.

Questioning is also seen by many business leaders as “inefficient,” according to the author and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. As Christensen notes, these leaders are often so anxious to “get things done” they have little patience for questions that may slow down meetings, challenge accepted practices, and force managers to spend time explaining and defending their approaches.

So why open the floodgates? For companies seeking to innovate, adapt to change, and maintain an edge in fast-moving, competitive markets, a questioning culture can help ensure that creativity and adaptive thinking flows throughout the organization. “One of the ways successful companies consistently create separation from the competitive pack is by critically examining and improving the business model from end to end,” says Chris Shimojima, the CEO of Provide Commerce. “This requires a leadership team and work force that is always trying to ask the questions that can light up the big honking issues.”

How can a company create an environment where people are more inclined to question? And is it possible to encourage the “right kind” of questions — the ones most likely to lead to productive results? Based on studying a number of companies that have done seem to be doing a good job at creating a culture of inquiry, here are four key observations:

A culture of inquiry starts at the top — with leaders who question. Today’s business leaders should take on the role of “being ‘chief question-asker’ for their organization,” says Patnaik. That’s not easy because, as Patnaik notes, many business executives rose through the ranks because “they were good at giving answers, not at formulating questions.” A leader who questions well won’t just ask highly-practical, interrogative queries (How much is it going to cost us? Who’s responsible for this problem?), but will also ask more open, exploratory questions — the kind that can help anticipate what’s coming and where new opportunities lie, enabling the company to move in new directions.

Leaders should use questioning to solicit input from people throughout the company, using surveys and other tools to ask employees, “‘We’re thinking of doing this — what do you think we should do?,’” suggests Dave Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey. At the same time, leadership should be willing to answer tough questions — from all levels and departments. Google offers a good example with its wide-open (and sometimes chaotic) weekly “TGIF” sessions: all employees are invited to submit questions to the company’s top executives, and the ones voted up by the rest of the company — often the toughest, most controversial questions — are then fielded on the spot by the bosses. It sets the tone that anyone can ask anything of anyone else.

Questioning should be rewarded (or at least, not punished). To encourage company-wide questioning, The Lean Startup’s Eric Ries says, “It’s not about slogans or putting up posters on the wall — it’s about the systems and the incentives you create to promote the behavior.” Ries points out that at most companies, “the resources flow to the person with the most confident, best plan. Or the person with no failures on their record.” He says companies should direct more budgetary resources to those who are exploring unanswered questions, conducting promising experiments, and taking intelligent risks.

It’s also critical for company leaders to be on the lookout for ways in which questioning gets punished — perhaps unintentionally. The business writer Dale Dauten has described a common situation in which people who inquire about a problem at their workplace — involving, say, something the company is not doing as well as it might — are then told, “You found the problem; now it’s your job to fix it.” That’s a surefire way to get people to stop finding problems and asking questions, because most are not seeking to add to their workload (and besides, the question they’ve identified may be too big for them to answer on their own). The better approach is to ask the problem-finder if and how much they’d want to be involved in working on that issue — with the understanding that they’ll be given time and support as needed, and that, even if they never find an answer to the question, they’ve earned credit just by asking it.

Give people the time and space to question deeply. People may need to “step back” from day-to-day tasks in order to tackle deeper questions and problems. The various, well-publicized personal time policies adopted at companies such as Google, 3M, and W.L. Gore, allowing people to devote 10-20% of their time to “passion projects,” have yielded innovative, marketable ideas — but to get to those breakthroughs, people need room to pursue ambitious questions that may not be part of their everyday work. They may also need freedom to allow their curiosity to wander outside the corporate bubble, via field trips, time spent on customer frontlines, and other excursions. IDEO’s chief executive Tim Brown points out that a lot of breakthrough questioning happens as people “venture out into the world to observe and listen.” On-the-ground insights can spark the “why“ and “what if“ questions that eventually lead to innovation.

Provide the tools to question well. Questioning is a skill and a way of thinking; it is our ability to “organize our thinking around what we don’t know,” according to the Right Question Institute, a nonprofit foundation that studies and teaches questioning. To sharpen this skill, companies can employ group exercises, such as those developed by RQI, that allow participants to practice question formulation and teach them how to analyze and improve their own questions. There are other questioning techniques that can be taught, ranging from the “5 Whys” to the “How might we” group-questioning approach employed by Google, IDEO, and other innovation-driven companies.

For those managers worried about being flooded with “stupid questions,” the solution is to guide employees — through training and exercises — toward more informed, potentially productive questions. Steelcase’s former CEO Jim Hackett points out that the goal should be to encourage the formulation of questions rooted in deep critical thinking about the particular challenges and issues of the company, its customers, its industry.

But even while trying to encourage smarter questions, companies should be careful about discouraging fundamental, seemingly naïve questions — which can be a valuable tool for challenging the most basic assumptions about why and how your company does what it does.