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October 2 - October 2, 2017
Always the beautiful answer Who asks a more beautiful question. —E.E. Cummings
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, where a teacher must be willing to give up control to allow for more questioning.
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.
The focus here is on questions that can be acted upon, questions that can lead to tangible results and change.
the telltale signs of an innovative questioner: a refusal to accept the existing reality.
Why and What If inquiries weren’t particularly welcome in the realm of What Is.
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no reason to ask; yet if you don’t ask, then you are relying on “expert” knowledge that is certainly limited, may be outdated, and could be altogether wrong.
He took ownership of that question, Why can’t they make a better foot? To do this, he had to make a change of pronouns: Specifically, he had to replace they with I.
if you never actually do anything about a problem yourself, then you’re not really questioning—you’re complaining.
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.”
one of the primary drivers of questioning is an awareness of what we don’t know—which
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.”
to think and brainstorm using only questions.
think and brainstorm using only questions.
“In our culture, not to know16 is to be at fault, socially.”
What if this change represents an opportunity for us? How might we make the most of the situation?
“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.
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?
In a time when so much of what we know is subject to revision or obsolescence, the comfortable expert must go back to being a restless learner.
“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.
(neoteny being a biological term that describes the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood).
“You don’t learn unless you question.”
“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.” That can involve “asking all kinds of peripheral questions,” Brown notes, such as What is the agenda behind this information? How current is it? How does it connect with other information I’m finding?
Picasso was onto this truth fifty years ago when he commented, “Computers are useless—they only give31 you answers.”
the value of questions is going to keep rising as that of answers keeps falling.
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.
But if we zero in on a narrow kind of knowledge—stored facts or “answers”—then that kind of “knowing” might be better left to machines with more memory.
We get these breakthroughs, Pogue writes, “when someone looks at the way things36 have always been done and asks why?”
asking Why can be the first step to bringing about change in almost any context.
if you are able to “find” a problem before others do, and then successfully answer the questions surrounding that problem, you can create a new venture, a new career, a new industry.
Q (questioning) + A (action) = I (innovation). On the other hand, Q – A = P (philosophy).
Person encounters a situation that is less than ideal; asks Why. • Person begins to come up with ideas for possible improvements/solutions—with such ideas usually surfacing in the form of What If possibilities. • Person takes one of those possibilities and tries to implement it or make it real; this mostly involves figuring out How.
The Why/What If/How sequence represents a basic and logical progression, drawing, in part, on several existing models that break down the creative problem-solving process.
having a process helps you to keep taking next steps—so that, as he put it, “even when you don’t know what41 you’re doing, you still know what to do.”
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.
Not that it’s easy for a child to ask a question. Harris has described it as “a series of complex mental maneuvers.” It starts with knowing that you don’t know.
When innovators talk about the virtues of beginner’s mind or neoteny, to use the term favored by MIT Media Lab’s Joi Ito, one of the desirable things they’re referring to is that state where you see things without labels, without categorization. Because once things have been labeled and filed, they become known quantities—and we don’t think about them, may not even notice them.
‘we don’t have time for questions—because that will take time away from the number of answers I have to cover.’”
schools in many industrialized nations were not, for the most part, designed to produce innovative thinkers or questioners—their primary purpose was to produce workers.
To create good workers, education systems put a premium on compliancy and rote memorization of basic knowledge—excellent qualities in an industrial worker.
Both Wagner and Brown put “questioning” at the top of the list of key survival skills for the new marketplace. (As for skills not needed in this new environment? Ability to memorize and repeat back facts—because, as noted in the last chapter, new technology puts many of those facts at our fingertips, eliminating the need for memorization. Indeed, this prompts another of Godin’s provocative questions: Should we abandon the failed experiment of teaching facts?)
Five learning skills, or “habits of mind,” were at the core of her school, and each was matched up with a corresponding question: 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?
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?”
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.
What is a flame?29
What is time?
