A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

by Warren Berger

Many businesspeople seemed to be aware, on some level, of a link between questioning and innovation. They understood that great products, companies, even industries, often begin with a question. It’s well-known that Google, as described by its chairman, is a company that “runs on questions,”2 and that business stars such as the late Steve Jobs of Apple and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos made their mark by questioning everything.

many companies—whether consciously or not—have established cultures that tend to discourage inquiry in the form of someone’s asking, for example, Why are we doing this particular thing in this particular way?

On the big questions of finding meaning, fulfillment, and happiness, we’re deluged with answers—in the form of off-the-shelf advice, tips, strategies from experts and gurus. It shouldn’t be any wonder if those generic solutions don’t quite fit: To get to our answers, we must formulate and work through the questions ourselves. Yet who has the time or patience for it?

Always the beautiful answer / who asks a more beautiful question. Artists from Picasso to Chuck Close have spoken of questioning’s inspirational power. (This great quote from Close was featured recently on the site BrainPickings: “Ask yourself an interesting enough question3 and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome—which I think is a more interesting place to be.”)

In one of his more well-traveled quotes—which he may or may not have actually said—he reckoned that if he had an hour4 to solve a problem and his life depended on it, he’d spend the first fifty-five minutes making sure he was answering the right question.

The business world has a kind of love/hate relationship with questioning. The business-innovation guru Clayton Christensen6—himself a master questioner—observes that questioning is seen as “inefficient” by many business leaders, who are so anxious to act, to do, that they often feel they don’t have time to question just what it is they’re doing.

Inquiring minds can identify new opportunities and fresh possibilities before competitors become aware of them. All of which means that, whereas in the past one needed to appear to have “all the answers” in order to rise in companies, today, at least in some enlightened segments of the business world, the corner office is there for the askers.

questions challenge authority and disrupt established structures, processes, and systems, forcing people to have to at least think about doing something differently. To encourage or even allow questioning is to cede power—not something that is done lightly in hierarchical companies or in government organizations, or even in classrooms, where a teacher must be willing to give up control to allow for more questioning.

Anything that forces people to have to think is not an easy sell, which highlights the challenge of questioning in our everyday lives—and why we don’t do it as much as we might or should.

But when we want to shake things up and instigate change, it’s necessary to break free of familiar thought patterns and easy assumptions. We have to veer off the beaten neural path. And we do this, in large part, by questioning. With the constant change we face today, we may be forced to spend less time on autopilot, more time in questioning mode—attempting to adapt, looking to re-create careers, redefining old ideas about living, working, and retiring, reexamining priorities, seeking new ways to be creative, or to solve various problems in our own lives or the lives of others.

Based on their experience—while also borrowing ideas and influences from existing theories of creativity, design thinking, and problem solving—I devised a three-part Why–What If–How model for forming and tackling big, beautiful questions. It’s not a formula, per se—there is no formula for questioning. It’s more of a framework designed to help guide one through various stages of inquiry—because ambitious, catalytic questioning tends to follow a logical progression, one that often starts with stepping back and seeing things differently and ends with taking action on a particular question.

The best innovators are able to live with not having the answer right away because they’re focused on just trying to get to the next question.

if facts are entitled to an index, then why not questions?

A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something—and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.

Why are we here? How does one define “good”? Is there life after death?—all of those great questions that spark endless, impassioned debate. I am not particularly qualified to discuss such questions, nor do they fit within the category of what I would call actionable questions.

The focus here is on questions that can be acted upon, questions that can lead to tangible results and change.

he is always searching for “a question that is hard (and interesting) enough that it is worth answering and easy enough that one can actually answer it.”

While it could be said that ours is a Golden Age of Questioning—with all the online resources now available for getting instant answers, it’s reasonable to assume people are asking more questions than ever before—that distinction would be based purely on volume, not necessarily on the quality or thoughtfulness of the questions being asked.

What is the fresh idea that will help my business stand out? What if I come at my work or my art in a whole different way? How might I tackle a long-standing problem that has affected my community, my family? These are individualized, challenging, and potentially game-changing questions.

questioning is more important today than it was yesterday—and will be even more important tomorrow—in helping us figure out what matters, where opportunity lies, and how to get there. We’re all hungry for better answers. But first, we need to learn how to ask the right questions.

one of the telltale signs of an innovative questioner: a refusal to accept the existing reality.

One of the many interesting and appealing things about questioning is that it often has an inverse relationship to expertise—such that, within their own subject areas, experts are apt to be poor questioners. Frank Lloyd Wright put it well when he remarked that an expert is someone who has “stopped thinking because he ‘knows.’”2 If you “know,” there’s no reason to ask; yet if you don’t ask, then you are relying on “expert” knowledge that is certainly limited, may be outdated, and could be altogether wrong.

Noonan observes that if you never actually do anything about a problem yourself, then you’re not really questioning—you’re complaining.

“We think someone else—someone smarter4 than us, someone more capable, with more resources—will solve that problem. But there isn’t anyone else.”

Fischer’s “engine” is just one of many metaphors that have been used to try to describe the surprising power that questions have.

Questions are sometimes seen as spades that help to unearth buried truths; or flashlights that, in the words of Dan Rothstein of the Right Question Institute (RQI), “shine a light on where you need6 to go.”

Maybe we talk about what a question is like because it’s hard to wrap our minds around what it actually is. Many tend to think of it as a form of speech—but that would mean if you didn’t utter a question, it wouldn’t exist, and that’s not the case. A question can reside in the mind for a long time—maybe forever—without being spoken to anyone.

Good questioners tend to be aware of, and quite comfortable with, their own ignorance

“One good question can give rise to several layers of answers, can inspire decades-long searches for solutions, can generate whole new fields of inquiry, and can prompt changes in entrenched thinking,” Firestein writes. “Answers, on the other hand, often end the process.”

Rothstein believes that questions do something—he is not sure precisely what—that has an “unlocking” effect in people’s minds. “It’s an experience we’ve all had at one point or another,” Rothstein maintains. “Just asking or hearing a question phrased a certain way produces an almost palpable feeling of discovery and new understanding. Questions produce the lightbulb effect.”

“Since divergent thinking is about saying, ‘Hey, what if I think differently about this?’ it’s actually a form of asking questions.”

What we know about divergent thinking is that it mostly happens in the more creative right hemisphere of the brain; that it taps into imagination and often triggers random association of ideas (which is a primary source of creativity); and that it can be intellectually stimulating and rewarding.

questions not only open up thinking—they also can direct and focus it.

“People think of questioning as simple,” Rothstein says, but when done right, “it’s a very sophisticated, high-level form of thinking.”

“You don’t have to hold a position14 of authority to ask a powerful question,”

In some ways, it can be more difficult or risky for those in authority to question. In Hal Gregersen’s study of business leaders who question, he found that they exhibited an unusual “blend of humility and confidence”15—they were humble enough to acknowledge a lack of knowledge, and confident enough to admit this in front of others. The latter is no small thing given that, as...

Open questions—in particular, the kind of Why, What If, and How questions that can’t be answered with simple facts—generally tend to encourage creative thinking more than closed yes-or-no questions (though closed questions have their place, too, as we’ll see).

What may be even more important is the tone of questions. Confronted with a challenge or problem, one could respond with the question Oh my God, what are we going to do? Faced with the same situation, one might ask, What if this change represents an opportunity for us? How might we make the most of the situation?

Questions of the second type, with a more positive tone, will tend to...

“organizations gravitate toward the questions they ask.” If the questions from leaders and managers focus more on Why are we falling behind competitors? and Who is to blame?, then the organization is more likely to end up with a culture of turf-guarding and finger-pointing. Conversely, if the questions asked tend to be more expansive and optimistic, then that will be reflected in the culture. This is true of more than companies, he maintains. Whether we’re talking about countries, communities, families, or individuals, “we all live in the world our questions create.”

forming questions helps us “to organize our thinking around18 what we don’t know.”

Sebastian Thrun, the engineer/inventor19 behind Google’s experimental self-driving X car and the founder of the online university Udacity, acknowledges the two-way relationship between technological change and questioning. The changes are fueled by the questions being asked—but those changes, in turn, fuel more questions. That’s because with each new advance, Thrun said, one must pause to ask, Now that we know what we now know, what’s possible now?

Or what could change about the way that we have done things up till now?

innovation means trying to find and formulate new questions that can, over time, be answered. Those questions, once identified, often become the basis for starting a new venture.

Through the years, companies from Polaroid (Why do we have to wait for the picture?) to Pixar (Can animation be cuddly?21) have started with questions.

when it comes to questioning, companies are like people: They start out doing it, then gradually do it less and less. A hierarchy forms, a methodology is established, and rules are set; after that, what is there to question?

Such is the case in today’s business market, where the speed of, and need for, innovation has been ratcheted up—forcing some companies to ask bigger and more fundamental questions than they’ve asked in years about everything from the company’s identity, to its mission, to a reexamination of who the customer is and what the core competencies should be. Much of it boils down to a fundamental question that a lot of companies find themselves asking right now: With all that’s changing in the world and in our customers’ lives, what business are we really in?

“The need to constantly adapt is the new reality for many workers” was the theme of the piece headlined “The Age of Adaptation.” The story had a term for what is now required of many workers—serial mastery.

To keep up, today’s worker must constantly learn new skills by, for example, taking training courses. But as the Times article points out, these workers “are often left to figure out for themselves what new skills will make them more valuable, or just keep them from obsolescence.”

a new global economy that is ruthlessly demanding more skills and more inventiveness from the workforce.

A quick scan of the stories’ online comment sections reveals how people feel about all of this: worried and bewildered, but also, in some cases, angry and bitter. I went to school, got a degree, picked up a skill, gained expertise in my field—I established myself over the years. Why should I have to start over? Unfortunately, that’s a Why question that, however justified and reasonable it may seem, doesn’t lead anywhere. The rules Friedman is talking about have already changed; fair or not, like it or not. The challenge now is to figure out what these new conditions mean for each of us—what openings they create, and how best to exploit those openings and possibilities. A training program may be appropriate, but before taking any action, fundamental questioning is essential.