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October 2 - October 2, 2017
“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.”
Ling-Se Peet used the Right Question Institute’s “Question Formulation Technique” for the first time in her humanities class, she began by laying out a provocative premise to her twenty-five students: Torture can be justified.
when you ask your own question, you then feel like it’s your job to get the answer.”
Rothstein and Santana then designed a program for K–12 classrooms, broken down into a series of steps:
“willing to ask questions without knowing the answer. Teachers and professors, we think our authority rests on having answers. But students find it really liberating to have a teacher say, ‘I don’t know the answer—so let’s figure this out together.’”
If What If is about imagining and How is about doing, the initial Why stage has to do with seeing and understanding.
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.
To question well—in particular, to ask fundamental Why questions—we don’t necessarily have to be on vacation, accompanied by a precocious three-year-old. But at least temporarily, it’s necessary to stop doing and stop knowing in order to start asking.
workplace. A good way to become unpopular in a business meeting is to ask, “Why are we doing this?”—even though the question may be entirely justified.
If asking Why requires stepping back from “doing,” it also demands a step back from “knowing.”
Because being comfortable with not knowing—that’s the first part of being able to question.”
“Part of questioning is about exposing vulnerability—and being okay with vulnerability as a cultural currency.”
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?”
(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?”
Why should we settle for what currently exists? And why should I believe you when you tell me something can’t be done?
it’s important to ask Why and What If questions even if we don’t yet know the How. Getting to a better alternative may be a long process, but it has to start somewhere—and that starting point often involves questioning the status quo.
In the philanthropic world, as well as in business, medicine, and science, there are many stories like the car-parts-incubator story—in which the wrong question is asked, based on incomplete information or faulty assumptions, often because those formulating the questions are too far removed from the problem they’re trying to solve.
Contextual inquiry is about asking questions up close and in context, relying on observation, listening, and empathy to guide us toward a more intelligent, and therefore more effective, question.
Listening informs questioning.
Why is this my problem? And if it’s not my problem, why should it be?
“The creative act is no longer40 about building something out of nothing but rather building something new out of cultural products that already exist,”
So even though it can initially be beneficial to approach a problem with a beginner’s mind, as you progress to imagining What If solutions, it’s useful to have some acquired knowledge on the problem—preferably gathered from diverse viewpoints.
When you’re anxious, he learned later in his professional research, your brain tends to be less creative and imaginative.
sleeping can help people to perform better at solving difficult problems requiring a creative solution.
“Museums are the custodians of epiphanies.”)
make “random connections” between unrelated ideas, or even just words. Here’s a simple word exercise, and all you need is a dictionary: Choose a high number and a low number (say 342 and 5); go to page 342 in the dictionary and find the fifth word. Try to come up with ideas based around that word; take the word apart and rearrange letters to find other words; then repeat the process to come up with a second word, and see if you can form an interesting combination with those two words; you can even advance to a three-word combination if you like.
come up with ideas for things that don’t work—an oven that can’t cook, a car that doesn’t move. It sounds crazy, but when you do the exercise, interesting things can emerge; you come up with offbeat, alternate uses for the oven or the car.
The How stage of questioning is where the rubber meets the road or, in Nanda’s case, the clock hits the floor. It’s the point at which things come together and then, more often than not, fall apart, repeatedly. Reality intrudes and nothing goes quite as planned.
That tendency toward overthinking and excessively preparing, rather than quickly trying out ideas to get feedback and to see what works and doesn’t, is a behavior that becomes ingrained over time.
when analyzing a misstep, in addition to asking what went wrong, you should also ask, In this failure, what went right? (Conversely, when you try out something and it seems to have succeeded, look for what went wrong or could have been better, Sutton says. The best learning comes from looking at successes and failures side by side.)
If you keep making new and different mistakes, that means you are doing new things and learning new things.”
that “drawing on other people’s experience and resources” is often far better than going it alone.
As you look for potential collaborators, aim for people with backgrounds, cultural experiences, and skill sets that differ from your own: diversity fuels creativity.
“it is naïve now to think that anything, any problem we might be looking at, is impossible to solve.”
if you could take a product that was expensive, complex, and exclusive and make it affordable and accessible, you could open up a mass market and change the game—toppling the established leaders.
“The pressure on short-term results tends5 to drive questioning out of the equation.”
“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?”
When companies are facing disruptive change (and these days, what company isn’t?), old habits and traditions can sometimes get in the way of progress.
shift the nature of brainstorming so that it’s about generating questions instead of ideas.
“At around twenty-five questions, the group may stall briefly and say, ‘That’s enough questions.’ But if you push on beyond that point, some of the best questions come as you get to fifty or even seventy-five.”
How might we? Brown observes that within the phrase, each of those three words plays a role in spurring creative problem solving: “The how part assumes there are solutions out there—it provides creative confidence. Might says we can put ideas out there that might work or might not—either way, it’s okay. And the we part says we’re going to do it together and build on each other’s ideas.”
it doesn’t work as well with problems that are too broad (How might we solve world hunger?) or too narrow (How might we increase profits by 5 percent next quarter?). Figuring out the right HMW questions to ask is a process,
“The most important thing business leaders must do today is to be the ‘chief question-asker’ for their organization,”
“The first thing most leaders need to realize is, they’re really bad at asking questions.” That shouldn’t be surprising. Patnaik notes that most business execs rose up through the ranks because “they were good at giving answers. But it means they’ve had little experience at formulating questions.” The questions they are accustomed to asking are more practical and interrogative: How much is this going to cost us? Who’s responsible for this problem? How are the numbers looking? (Or, to cite one of Patnaik’s favorite dumb questions, What’s our version of the iPad?)
Because change is now a constant, the willingness to be comfortable with, and even to embrace, ambiguity is critical for today’s leaders. The consultant Bryan Franklin has observed that effective30 leaders today may not appear to be entirely decisive because they are forced to reconcile conflicting forces and paradoxes in the current marketplace. Such leaders often find themselves “standing at the intersection between seemingly contradictory truths”: How do you balance growth with social responsibility? How do you enrich your offering while streamlining production? And so forth.
A great source of questioning input can and probably should come from outside the company—from those who have enough distance to question the company as a naïve outsider.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing36 now and then to hang a question mark on the things you take for granted.”
“I’d rather have mission statements that start by asking How might we?” says the consultant Min Basadur. “You don’t want the mission statement to make it sound like you’re already there. If we say, ‘How might we be recognized as the best car-parts manufacturer?’ it says, ‘We’re always trying and we’re willing to open our minds to new ways of accomplishing this.’”
“Figuring out what you want to accomplish is a continual search—and questions are the means to the search.”
Questioning within a business environment can also create a perceived threat to authority. Those with expertise may resent having their learned views questioned by nonexperts.
