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

by Warren Berger

What can the people thinking about social problems or making social policy learn from the people who are actually affected by those problems?

“He had an ability to reframe things—to ask questions that got at something fundamental. Sometimes the questions almost seemed stupid; there’s the idea of ‘the holy fool’ who asks the questions no one else will, and that was part of what he was doing.” In doing this, Deresiewicz has written, his professor “was showing us that everything is open to question, especially the things we thought we already knew.”

young people may be honing better new-economy skills outside the classroom than in it; they’re learning to create, experiment, build, question, and learn. So it may turn out that in a world of exponential change, “these are the kids who will have the skills to rise to the top.”

In a sense, we’re all “makers” now, or, at least, we would do well to think of ourselves that way. Whether or not we were ever properly taught how to question, we can develop the skill now, on our own, in our own spaces. One way to start is by looking at how other practiced questioners do it—focusing, in particular, on how they employ fundamental Why, What If, and How questions to solve problems and create change.

“If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it . . . if you think of, detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream even if the end is a long way off, for there are about five thousand steps to be taken before we realize it; and start making the first ten, and stay making twenty after, it is amazing how quickly you get through those five thousand steps.”

The Polaroid story is a favorite of innovators and questioners because it shows a number of interesting things about the dynamics of questioning. To begin with, it demonstrates that a game-changing question can come from anyone, even a naïve child. This underscores a point made earlier, that nonexperts or outsiders are often better at questioning than the experts. No one would argue that expert knowledge isn’t valuable—but when it’s time to question, it can get in the way.

The Polaroid tale also nicely illustrates the sequential inquiry process that can be triggered by a certain kind of catalytic question. This Why–What If–How progression—which can be identified in many stories of innovative breakthroughs—is clearly evident in the Polaroid example.

Why does it have to be that way? This led to a blizzard of What If hypothetical queries as Land worked through many smaller questions in service of a larger one: What if you could have a darkroom inside a camera? He connected ideas and pieces of knowledge from his work in chemistry, optics, and engineering—the author Bonanos observes that everything Land knew seemed to come together. But all of that clever connective inquiry would have come to nothing if Land hadn’t eventually proceeded to the How stage: getting his ideas down on paper, getting feedback on the idea, then beginning to create early, tangible versions of his camera-with-darkoom-inside; then testing those early versions, failing, revising, testing again.

the logic in this sequence reflects how people tend to approach and work through problems—progressing from becoming aware of and understanding the problem, to thinking of possible solutions, to trying to enact those solutions.

Each stage of the problem solving process has distinct challenges and issues—requiring a different mind-set, along with different types of questions.

By thinking of questioning and problem solving in a more structured way, we can remind ourselves to shift approaches, change tools, and adjust our questions according to which stage we’re entering.

You can conduct all business, including the business of everyday life, constantly accompanied by a curious and vocal three- or four-year-old, who will see what you miss. Or you can attempt to adjust the way you look at the world so that your perspective more closely aligns with that of a curious child. That second option is by no means easy—it takes some effort to see things with a fresh eye.

That’s only part of what’s required to ask powerful Why questions. To do so, we must: • Step back. • Notice what others miss. • Challenge assumptions (including our own). • Gain a deeper understanding of the situation or problem at hand, through contextual inquiry. • Question the questions we’re asking. • Take ownership of a particular question.

The “doing” part would seem to be more in our control to stop than the “knowing”—yet it might be even harder. In a world that expects us to move fast, to keep advancing (if only incrementally), to just “get it done,” who has time for asking why?

The group needed to be challenged to “step back” by someone like Lois—who had a healthy enough ego to withstand being the lone questioner in the room.

The pressure to keep moving forward—and the accompanying reluctance to step back and question—is not just a business phenomenon. As everyday life becomes more jam-packed with tasks, activities, diversions, and distractions, “stepping back and questioning” is unlikely to get a slot on the schedule. Which means some of the most important questions—about why we’re engaging in all those activities in the first place—never get raised.

Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, says that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for people to find time “to step back and ask a large question like, ‘What do I want from life, anyway?’” Rubin says that for a long time, she was caught up in this same cycle herself. “I was so focused on my daily to-do list that I didn’t spend any time thinking about whether I was actually happy or how I could be happier.”

So perhaps the first rule of asking why is that there must be a pause, a space, an interruption in the meeting, a halt of “progress,” a quiet moment looking out the window on the bus. Often, these are the only times when there is time to question.

Whether in life or in work, people become experts within their own domains—generally confident that they already know what they need to know to do well in their jobs and lives. Having this sense of knowing can make us less curious and less open to new ideas and possibilities. To make matters worse, we don’t “know” as much we might think we do.

“Our brains have evolved to dump most of what we see, quickly categorize the rest, and file it away in our long term memory using our brain’s equivalent of the Dewey Decimal system.”

when we wish to move beyond that default setting—to consider new ideas and possibilities, to break from habitual thinking and expand upon our existing knowledge—it helps if we can let go of what we know, just temporarily.

A globe-trotter, he is constantly observing and wondering why, for instance, people in certain parts of China hang their dried fish on the line right next to their washed clothes. Bennett shares many of his observations and questions in a blog titled The Curiosity Chronicles.

“I position myself relentlessly as an idiot at IDEO,” Bennett observes. “And that’s not a negative, it’s a positive. Because being comfortable with not knowing—that’s the first part of being able to question.”

Part of the value in asking naïve questions, Bennett says, is that it forces people to explain things simply, which can help bring clarity to an otherwise complex issue. “If I just keep saying, ‘I don’t get it, can you tell me why once more?,’ it forces people to synthesize and simplify—to strip away the irrelevances and get to the core idea.” Sometimes, he says, his naïveté gives others permission to step back and rethink in ways they might not normally be comfortable doing.

“In those cultures, people sometimes welcome outsiders coming in and asking basic questions because they may be wondering about these things themselves—but they don’t want to ask because they can’t afford to look foolish or disrespectful.”

Bennett says that within IDEO, the company recognizes it’s important to create an environment where it’s safe to ask “stupid” questions. “You need to have a culture that engenders trust,” he says. “Part of questioning is about exposing vulnerability—and being okay with vulnerability as a cultural currency.” So at the firm, no question is too basic to ask; and co-workers are encouraged to support and build upon others’ questions, rather than dismissing them or giving pat answers. Bennett says, “We allow people to fall backwards and be caught by one another.”

In Silicon Valley, IDEO and other innovation-driven firms go out of their way to protect and encourage naïve questioning because they know, from experience, that it can lead to valuable insights that result in breakthrough ideas and successful products.

This would seem an unlikely place for slowing down, stepping back, and asking fundamental questions. Yet a number of the best minds in the tech sector have embraced this approach, led in recent years by the late cofounder of Apple, Steve Jobs,7 who was a proponent and practitioner of the Zen principle known as shoshin, or “beginner’s mind.”

Jobs was determined to reimagine and re-create the ways we integrate technology into our everyday lives. This required asking fundamental questions (Jobs was known to be a dogged questioner of everything from current market practices to the ideas of his employees, many of whom were subject to deconstructive interrogation). One of his tools in challenging conventional wisdom was a bit of ancient wisdom, brought to8 Northern California in the 1960s by a Japanese Zen master named Shunryu Suzuki. Author of the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Suzuki immigrated to the area and taught there until his death in 1971. In his book, Suzuki wr...

Beginner’s mind, along with other Zen principles of deep thinking, mindfulness, listening, and questioning, gradually caught on with others in Silicon Valley, beyond Jobs and Apple.

Kaye is aware that some of these people may be motivated by the notion that a “question-everything” Zen mind-set could be used to help spark new ideas and innovations (one recent book coined the term Zennovation to describe the merging of Zen principles and innovation strategies).

you can extract practical lessons from beginner’s mind, whether or not you choose to go “full Zen.”

the key to adopting this manner of observing and questioning is to make an effort to become, in his word, “detached”—from everyday thoughts, distractions, preconceived notions, habitual behaviors, and even from oneself. “Basically, you begin to observe yourself as if you were a third party.” If you can achieve that sense of detachment, your thinking becomes more “flexible and fluid,” Komisar maintains, and “you find yourself in a better position to question everything.”

when approaching any new situation or subject, to think of his mind as “an empty bucket.” The job is to slowly and methodically fill that bucket, Wurman says, and you begin by asking the most basic of questions.

I call this process filling the vessel.

Beginner’s mind is akin to adopting a more childlike mind-set. That’s not as fanciful as it might sound. I mentioned previously that Joichi Ito, director of the prestigious MIT Media Lab—which has had a hand in creating everything from the Kindle electronic reader to futuristic cars that can fold in half—favors the term neoteny to describe the phenomenon of maintaining childlike mental attributes as an adult. Ito says one can train oneself to think this way.

The lab is also designed so that people from different disciplines work together, which means “we are often looking at a problem11 we’re not an expert in,” says Tod Machover, a cutting-edge musical composer and MIT professor who, in his experimental work at the lab, helped create the popular interactive video game Guitar Hero. Machover says it’s not uncommon for breakthrough ideas to come from people who are working outside their area of expertise because the novices are “able to see a problem with a fresh eye, forget about what’s easy or hard, and not worry about what other people in that field have done.”

Zabelina believes that “mind-sets are flexible. It is possible to tap into the more open way of thinking of a child.” All that’s needed, it seems, is to be given permission (by others or by ourselves) to take that step back in time.

When we do step back, what do we then see? We’re seeing essentially the same realities and situations. But with more distance, a bigger picture comes into view. We may now be able to see the overall context; we might notice the patterns and relationships between things we’d previously thought of as separate. This can change everything. Upon stepping back and reexamining something you’ve been looking at the same way for years, you might suddenly feel as if you’re seeing it for the first time.

If you’ve ever experienced this, it feels a bit like déjà vu in reverse. With déjà vu, you go somewhere you’ve never before been yet it seems oddly familiar; conversely, when you look at something familiar and suddenly see it fresh, this is a case of vuja de, to use a quirky term13

if we train ourselves to look at the world around us through a vuja de lens, it can open up a range of new possibilities—fresh questions to ask, ideas to pursue, challenges to tackle, all previously unnoticed because they were camouflaged in overly familiar surroundings. Adopting this view, business leaders and managers are more apt to notice inconsistencies and outdated methods—as well as dormant opportunities. Someone working on social issues or even personal ones is likely to notice more and to ask fundamental questions about what he or she notices.

It can mean reversing assumptions about cause and effect, or what matters most versus least. It means not traveling through life on automatic pilot.”

As with beginner’s mind, Sutton’s vuja de idea has resonated in various corners of the innovation sector, having been picked up by, among others, IDEO, whose general manager, Tom Kelley, has written that vuja de provides the ability to “see what’s always been there14 but has gone unnoticed.”

In the midst of his act, Carlin paused, as if he’d just had an epiphany—then announced to the audience that he’d experienced vuja de, which, as he explained, was “the strange feeling that, somehow, none of this has ever happened before.”

the vuja de way of looking at the world—of observing mundane, everyday things as if one were witnessing something strange and fascinating—is exactly the way Carlin went through his life and got his material. “When the familiar becomes this sort of alien world and you can see it fresh, then it’s like you’ve gone into a whole other section of the file folder in your brain,” she said. “And now you have access to this other perspective that most people don’t have.”

When we’ve lost our keys and are searching for them, he wondered, why do we keep looking in the same few places, over and over?

Srinivas told me he uses the exercise to illustrate that we often fail to see all the possibilities available to us because we simply haven’t spent enough time looking. He said the exercise particularly resonates with people who are in a difficult situation: “Sometimes people feel like they have nowhere to go and they’ve run out of options, and my point is, ‘There is always another square, another possibility, if you just keep looking for it.’”

Great questioners “keep looking”—at a situation or a problem, at the ways people around them behave, at their own behaviors. They study the small details; and they look for not only what’s there but what’s missing. They step back, view things sideways, squint if necessary. In Sutton’s writings on vuja de and how to see the familiar, he advises “shifting our focus from objects or20 patterns in the foreground to those in the background.”

Einstein talked about looking for the needle in the haystack and finding it—at which point most people stop looking. The secret, he said, is to keep looking, in search of an even better needle.

Whether or not Airbnb, joined by others, will be able to successfully lead that ambitious “sharing economy” movement is an open question, and one that—even more than the earlier questions about whether people would be willing to share homes and beds—aggressively challenges assumptions about how our economy works, the extent to which people are willing to change ingrained behavior, and whether sharing even makes sense as a viable business model.

Clearly, though, the success Gebbia and Chesky have already achieved is rooted in their willing-ness to challenge assumptions and to believe that everything is subject to change—regardless of what conventional wisdom holds.