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

by Warren Berger

“For any organization, it is galvanizing to have a strong purpose and values, no matter what they might be.” A good way to surface that is by looking back to when the business was founded and asking, What was that higher purpose at the outset? And how can we rally people around that today?

He urges clients to work on Whom must we fearlessly become? That can be a difficult challenge, he says, because it requires “envisioning a version of the company that does not exist yet.”

Purpose questions are important because if you can answer them, that frees up company leaders to pursue all kinds of far-reaching opportunities and questions, knowing all the while that they are on firm footing. “Products come and go, leaders come and go, trends come and go,” says Yamashita, “but through all of that, you need to know the answer to the question What is true about us, at our core?”

The digital revolution has forced many companies to rebuild and rethink, sometimes pushing them into unfamiliar territory. A company that has figured out the basic questions of identity and purpose is in a better position to handle unsettling new questions such as What business are we in now?

Early in its history, the microprocessor13 company Intel found itself facing a difficult decision. The company had started out making computer memory chips, and its success with that product established Intel. But as the memory-chip business began to slow down, Intel’s cofounders, Andrew Grove and Gordon Moore, had to decide whether to shift the company’s focus into more promising areas. Yet they were torn: Chips were central to their identity—and Intel wouldn’t have gotten to where it was without them. Then Grove posed an interesting question to his partner: If we were kicked out of the company, what do you think the new CEO would do? Grove and Moore reasoned that a new leader would feel no emotional attachment to the declining memory-chip business and would probably leave it behind. So they did likewise, shifting Intel’s focus to microprocessors—which set the stage for remarkable growth in the years to follow.

Company leaders naturally tend to focus on what they should start doing. Bergstrand notes that coming to terms with what you’re willing to eliminate is always harder. Yet if you can’t answer that question, he maintains, “it lessens your chances of being successful at what you want to do next—because you’ll be sucking up resources doing what’s no longer needed and taking those resources away from what should be a top priority.”

“Even asking the question about ‘what should we stop’ makes people inside a company uncomfortable,” Bergstrand says. For that reason, it may be necessary to adopt the What if the company didn’t exist? mind-set—so that you can then be willing to cut ties with old programs, products, and practices.

Various real-world constraints can also inhibit a company’s ability to adapt and innovate; for example, being overly concerned with practical issues such as costs and budgets tends to limit the scope of creative thinking. That’s why some business leaders (including Steve Jobs when he headed Apple) have been known to use What If hypothetical questioning to temporarily remove practical constraints. One such approach is to encourage teams working on projects to ask themselves, What if money were no object? How might we approach the project differently?

Conversely, using What If questions to impose constraints can also be effective. By challenging people to think about creating or achieving something within extreme limits—What if we could only charge ten bucks for our hundred-dollar service?—it forces a rethinking of real-world practicalities and assumptions.

Because of the Internet and social media, people know more about companies and brands than ever before. And they care more than ever about how companies are behaving, what a company’s values are, what that company stands for.

Younger workers, in particular, have shown they want to align themselves with companies that support principles and values similar to their own, and companies that are contributing to a greater good. “The modern worker is not the salary17 worker of old,” says Tim Ogilvie of the consulting firm Peer Insight. “Increasingly, they’re saying, ‘I want to do something I really believe in.’” So to the extent a company can stand for something more than just what it sells or creates, it can develop a deeper relationship with both consumers and employees.

companies can try to find their cause by asking, What does the world hunger for? This may require some contextual inquiry—venturing beyond the corporate bubble to spend time with the people who are your customers—to figure out what they care about or feel passionate about. The next step is to identify what may be standing in their way—an obstacle, a problem. To the extent you can alleviate that problem, your company can be seen as more than just a business out to make money.

A case in point is Panera Bread, the growing U.S.-based chain of bakery/restaurants. Panera CEO Ron Shaich recalls that18 as the company sought to find a more meaningful role in communities, it looked for a problem that matched up well with its capabilities and resources. At one point, Shaich had a conversation that questioned: What does the world need most . . . that we are uniquely able to provide? Shaich says he wrestled with that question for a while, then worked his way to an answer with the launch of Panera Cares—an initiative to open a number of pay-what-you-can...

Today, Dunn has moved on to a more healthful product, as the head of the carrot company Bolthouse Farms (which pioneered the marketing of “baby carrots” after a local grower, tired of throwing away misshapen or gnarly carrots, wondered, What if I peel off the skin and cut them into perfect mini-carrots?). At Bolthouse, Dunn has been promoting baby carrots as crunchy treats available in snack-packs—an endeavor to answer his new question, What if we marketed baby carrots like junk food?

“We started asking ourselves, What more can we do?” Shaich says. “I felt like, I want to put our bodies on the line.” What gradually became clear was that Panera could provide not just bread giveaways, but a more complete dining experience for those going hungry. That extra level of involvement—“putting bodies on the line,” to use Shaich’s words—made the effort bigger and more distinctive than a standard corporate charity program.

being true to a cause often requires making tough decisions and sacrificing at times. “When you come to the point where you can’t serve both the bottom line and the cause, one or the other must suffer,”

The company decided it was willing to risk losing sales in support of a larger cause and ran ads urging people not to buy its clothing (or at least, not to buy a new jacket if they didn’t actually need it). Says Patagonia’s Sheahan, “Those ads were just asking people to question their consumerism and maybe be a little more mindful about the stuff they’re purchasing.” Still, it was a high-risk message, though Sheahan says it actually helped the brand gain market share by attracting more customers—who presumably admired the stand Patagonia was taking with the ads.

Questioning also has an important role in everyday business matters such as product development. As Lean Startup’s Eric Ries points out, it is central to testing out new ideas to see what works.

Ries believes one of the most21 important questions businesses need to ask today is the one above. It’s somewhat counterintuitive for most managers—who tend to think in terms of “making products,” not “making experiments.” But as Ries points out, anytime you’re doing something new “it’s an experiment whether you admit it or not. Because it is not a fact that it’s going to work.”

So how do companies get better at experimenting? Ries says you start with the acknowledgment that “we are operating amid all this uncertainty—and that the purpose of building a product or doing any other activity is to create an experiment to reduce that uncertainty.” This means that instead of asking What will we do? or What will we build? the emphasis should be on What will we learn? “And then you work b...

“The most successful people are obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them,”

To enhance your prospects, “find your tennis ball—the thing that pulls you.” PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel believes entrepreneurs can find ideas to pursue by asking themselves, What is something I believe that nearly no one agrees with me on? If self-examination doesn’t work, try looking around: Brian Spaly, a serial entrepreneur in the apparel industry, advises, “Whenever you encounter a service or customer experience that frustrates you, ask, Is this a problem I could solve?”

The startup business coach Dave Kashen thinks the better question to ask about any new venture is, Will this make people’s lives meaningfully better?

Just this one change—before you get to any of the more complex Lean Startup methodology—can make a world of difference, Ries insists. For one thing, it can help unlock the creativity that’s already there in your company. “Most companies are full of ideas, but they don’t know how to go about finding out if those ideas work,” Ries says. “If you want to harvest all those ideas, allow employees to experiment more—so they can find out the answers to their questions themselves.”

That question is really asking, Where in the company is it safe to ask radical questions? “As an established business,” Ogilvie says, “you’ve got all these promises you’re keeping to your current customers—you have to stay focused on that. But that may not have a future.” So the question becomes “Where, within the company, can you explore heretical questions that could threaten the business as it is—without contaminating what you’re doing now?”