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I found few companies that actually encouraged questioning in any substantive way. There were no departments or training programs focused on questioning; no policies, guidelines, best practices. On the contrary, 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?
Yet, for some reason, questioning isn’t taught in most schools—nor is it rewarded (only memorized answers are).
well-meaning people are often trying to solve a problem by answering the wrong question.
E. E. Cummings, from whom I borrowed this book’s title, wrote, Always the beautiful answer / who asks a more beautiful question
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.
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,
Why–What If–How
I am not particularly qualified to discuss such questions, nor do they fit within the category of what I would call actionable questions.
In many cases, our Google queries are so unimaginative and predictable that Google can guess what we’re asking before we’re three words into typing it.
within their own subject areas, experts are apt to be poor questioners.
an expert is someone who has “stopped thinking because he ‘knows.’”
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.”
one of the keys to scientific discovery is the willingness of scientists to embrace ignorance—and to use questions as a means of navigating through it to new discoveries.
Being willing to question is one thing; questioning well and effectively is another.
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?
questions are rising in value while answers are declining. “Right now, knowledge is a commodity,”25 says the Harvard education expert Tony Wagner. “Known answers are everywhere, and easily accessible.” Because we’re drowning in all of this data, “the value of explicit information is dropping,”26 according to Wagner’s colleague at Harvard, the innovation professor Paul Bottino. The real value, Bottino added, is in “what you can do with that knowledge, in pursuit of a query.”
The glut of knowledge has another27 interesting effect, as noted by author Stuart Firestein: It makes us more ignorant. That is to say, as our collective knowledge grows—as there is more and more to know, more than we can possibly keep up with—the amount that the individual knows, in relation to the growing body of knowledge, is smaller.
When we’re overloaded with information, “context becomes critical,” Brown says. “What matters now is your ability to triangulate, to look at something from multiple sources, and construct your own warrants for what you choose to believe.”
What is the agenda behind this information? How current is it? How does it connect with other information I’m finding?
To navigate in today’s info-swamp,30 we must have, according to Bard College president Leon Botstein, “the ability to evaluate risk, recognize demagoguery, the ability to question not only other people’s views, but one’s own assumptions.”
Picasso was onto this truth fifty years ago when he commented, “Computers are useless—they only give31 you answers.”
A reporter doing an interview concludes33 by asking Einstein for his phone number, and Einstein reaches for a nearby phone book. While Einstein is looking up his own number in the book, the reporter asks why such a smart man can’t remember it. Einstein explains that there’s no reason to fill his mind with information that can so easily be looked up.
Often the worst thing you can do with a difficult question is to try to answer it too quickly. When the mind is coming up with What If possibilities, these fresh, new ideas can take time to percolate and form. They often result from connecting existing ideas in unusual and interesting ways.
The adult, in this case, becomes exasperated, insecure, aware of his own ignorance, and reminded of his insignificance—all because of that word why. As Louis C.K. makes clear, we may profess to admire kids’ curiosity, but at some point we just don’t welcome those questions anymore.
when kids were given actual explanations, they either agreed and were satisfied, or they asked a follow-up question; whereas if they didn’t get a good answer, they were more likely to be dissatisfied and to repeat the original question.
“the reason kids ask ‘why’ over and over again is often because we don’t understand their questions, or we’re just not listening. And by asking over and over, they’re saying to us, in effect, ‘You are not hearing me—you’re not understanding what I’m asking.
But many educators and learning experts contend that our current system of education does not encourage, teach, or in some cases even tolerate questioning. Harvard’s Tony Wagner says, “Somehow, we’ve defined the goal of schooling as enabling you to have more ‘right answers’ than the person next to you. And we penalize incorrect answers. And we do this at a pace—especially now, in this highly focused test-prep universe—where we don’t have time for extraneous questions.”
Under pressure to improve test scores, they’ve tried to instill businesslike efficiency into a process designed to impart as much information as possible to students, within a given time frame—leaving little or no time for student inquiry.
“It seems the main rule that19 traditional schools teach is how to sit in rows quietly, which is perfect training for grown-up work in a dull office or factory, but not so good for education.”)
a third-grade student at her Harlem school said to her, “What’s different about this school is you’re interested in what we don’t know, not just what we do know.”
Meier felt that instead of just pushing information at kids, schools needed to teach them how to make sense of what they were being told so they would know what to make of it and what to do with it. She said in an interview at the time, “My concern is with how students become critical thinkers and problem solvers, which is what a democratic society needs.”
Evidence: How do we know what’s true or false? What evidence counts? Viewpoint: How might this look if we stepped into other shoes, or looked at it from a different direction? Connection: Is there a pattern? Have we seen something like this before? Conjecture: What if it were different? Relevance: Why does this matter?
Meier started with two particular ways of thinking she wanted to emphasize—skepticism and empathy. “I believe you have to have an open-mindedness to the possibility that you’re wrong, or that anything may be wrong,”
If you can’t imagine you could be wrong, what’s the point of democracy? And if you can’t imagine how or why others think differently, then how could you tolerate democracy?”
Only in kindergarten, she told me, “do we put up with kids asking questions that are off-topic.”
when you give kids more freedom to pursue what they’re interested in, they become easier to control. The much harder thing is forcing them to sit still for five hours and pay attention to information they don’t care about.
Instead of telling them what matters, they need to decide what matters.”
if a student thinks of a question him/herself, it is likely to be of more interest than someone else’s question. But this issue of “Who gets to ask the questions in class?” touches on purpose, power, control, and, arguably, even race and social class.
Wolf’s research found that questions were often used by teachers primarily to check up on students, rather than to try to spark interest; such questions were apt to leave a student feeling “exposed” rather than inspired.
“If you come from the belief that teachers are meant to be authoritative, then teachers are going to tend to want to cut off questioning that might reveal what they don’t know.”
Teachers under pressure to cover more material, and particularly those in underfunded, overcrowded urban schools, can face formidable challenges in trying to manage large classrooms. The imperative to maintain order and “just get through the lesson” can be at odds with allowing kids to question.
children may be self-censoring their questions due to cultural pressures.
Would students who are battling against stereotypes be less inclined to interrupt lessons by asking questions, revealing to the rest of the class that they don’t know something? “Absolutely,”
“Fear is the enemy of curiosity.
“You’re inclined to play it safe,” Aronson says, rather than risk the possibility of confirming the stereotype.
students from families with higher incomes were more likely to be encouraged by their parents to ask questions at school, whereas children from modest backgrounds were encouraged by their parents to be more deferential to authority—and to try to figure things out for themselves, instead of asking for help.
“Questions are used a lot in the classroom but it’s mostly one-way,” says Rothstein. “It’s not about the student asking, it’s about the teacher prompting the student by using questions that the teacher has formulated.” By taking this approach, Rothstein says, teachers “have inadvertently contributed to the professionalization of asking questions—to the idea that only the people who know more are allowed to ask.”
this opening statement is known as a Q-focus because its purpose is to provide a focal point for generating questions from the students. Peet’s class was divided into small groups, and each group’s initial task was to come up with as many questions as possible, within a time limit, pertaining to that statement.
change open questions to closed ones, and vice versa—so that, for example, an open question that began as Why is torture effective? might be changed to a closed one: Is torture effective?
