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“the way you ask a question yields different results and can lead you in different directions.”
“prioritize” their questions: to figure out which three were the most important to move the discussion forward.
to question effectively, they must learn how to analyze their own questions and zero in on ones they would like to pursue further.
any nonquestion must be turned into a question)
You don’t have to know the answer to ask a question, so the smart kids don’t dominate.
when you ask your own question, you then feel like it’s your job to get the answer.”
those who don’t know how to ask the right questions are vulnerable to being denied that which they might need or are entitled to have.
Teachers design a Question Focus (e.g., “Torture can be justified”). Students produce questions (no help from the teacher; no answering or debating the questions; write down every question; change any statements into questions). Students improve their questions (opening and closing them). Students prioritize their questions. They are typically instructed to come to agreement on three favorites. Students and teachers decide on next steps, for acting on the prioritized questions. Students reflect on what they have learned.
three kinds of sophisticated thinking—divergent, convergent, and metacognitive.
everything is open to question, especially the things we thought we already knew.”
Teachers and professors, we think our authority rests on having answers.
(One college professor recently observed42 that he’d never gotten as many student questions as when he began teaching online.)
“The kids who actually drop out of school or who view that the real learning happens after school, they’re becoming part of this massive network of maker movements that is forming.”
WHAT IF you sleep with a question? (Will you wake with an answer?)
Expertise is helpful at certain points, not so helpful at others; wide-open, unfettered divergent thinking is critical at one stage, discipline and focus is called for at another. 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.
entertain a question that was highly impractical.
He told me he has concluded, based on extensive research, that the feeling of “knowing” is just that—a feeling, or a sensation. However, the feeling is so strong that it creates what Burton calls a “certainty epidemic”—wherein many people overestimate their knowledge, put too much faith in their “gut instinct,” and walk around convinced they have more answers than they actually do. If you feel this way, you’re less likely to ask questions.
we also get in the habit of not paying much attention to the world around us. Neurologists have found that our brains are hardwired to quickly categorize, filter, and even ignore some of the massive amounts of stimuli coming at us every moment.
in this info-rich environment, with trying to sort what’s new and important from what’s known or extraneous.
“the more we see, hear, touch, or smell something, the more hard-wired in our brain it becomes.”
being comfortable with not knowing—that’s the first part of being able to question.”
he is able to ask “incredibly naïve questions” without feeling the least self-conscious.
when Bennett was called in to speak at the parliament in Iceland during the country’s financial meltdown, “I asked stupid questions like ‘Where’s the money?’ Not because I was trying to be disrespectful but because no one seemed to be able to give a straight answer to this basic question.”
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.”
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.”
“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.
“The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert.” Such a mind, he added, is “open to all possibilities” and “can see things as they are.”
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
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.”
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.”
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.
“shifting our focus from objects or20 patterns in the foreground to those in the background.”
At the core of this idea is the fundamental question Why should we, as a society, continue to buy things that we really don’t need to own? (Consider, for example, that the average power24 drill in the United States is used a total of thirteen minutes in its lifetime.) As Gebbia notes, we’ve spent decades accumulating “stuff” in the modern consumer age. “What if we spent the next hundred years sharing more of that stuff? What if access trumped ownership?
“Don’t just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.”
even when people do ask questions, they’re often relying on those same unreliable gut instincts and biases.
it can be useful to step back and inquire, Why did I come up with that question?” Burton adds, “Every time you come up with a question, you should be wondering, What are the underlying assumptions of that question? Is there a different question I should be asking?”
note what happens when we transform this into a closed, yes-or-no question: Is my father-in-law difficult to get along with?
To do contextual inquiry well, you don’t need a team of trained researchers. What’s required is a willingness to go out into the world with a curious and open mind, to observe closely, and—perhaps most important, according to a number of the questioners I’ve interviewed—to listen. Listening informs questioning.
Einstein and others have referred to this as “combinatorial thinking”; in this book, I’ve been using the term connective inquiry to focus on the questioning aspect. Whatever one calls it, this mix-and-match mental process is at the root of creativity and innovation.
use a term that seems to have39 originated with the British designer John Thackara) smart recombinations
amusement park—and begin to think analogously: What if this amusement park could be like a movie, brought to life? “In doing this,” Murray explains, “Disney takes his original subject, an amusement park, and lays a metaphor on top of it and begins to see the whole thing through that ‘movie’ metaphor—so
the most creative ideas result from “long distance” connections
mental breakthroughs, the big insights that can solve problems or come up with highly creative new ideas, often involve those remote connections that happen in the right hemisphere.
If your conscious mind puts a big question out there, chances are good that your unconscious mind will go to work on it.
In particular, if your curiosity has been focused on a particular problem, and you’ve been doing deep thinking, contextual inquiry, questioning the problem from various perspectives and angles, asking your multiple Whys—it all becomes fodder for later insights and smart recombinations.
before undertaking conscious efforts to spark connective inquiry, bear in mind that it seems to thrive when we’re distracted or even unconscious. So the best thing may be to take your question for a walk. Or take it to the museum. Or, if you’re feeling lucky, take it to bed.
“When I used to take tests in college, I would be very anxious,” he told me. “So I came up with a process whereby I would always answer the more obvious questions first. Then, as my anxiety would lessen, I’d start to answer more of the questions that required real thinking.”
When you’re anxious, he learned later in his professional research, your brain tends to be less creative and imaginative. “You want to attend to the outside world, not the inside,” he said. “And you’re trying to get to answers that are the simplest. But when you’re relaxed, you go the other way—you’re able to go to the inside world.” In the more relaxed state, neural networks open up and connections of all kinds form more freely.
