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October 2 - October 2, 2017
The company was set up with no titles—ten thousand employees and not one manager. When people are first hired at Gore, they often start out wondering, Who’s my boss? Eventually, they realize there is no boss. The corporate structure is built around what Gore calls the Lattice, an elaborate networking system within the company that connects every employee to every other employee. When a new hire joins the company, their first relationship is with a sponsor (or mentor), “who will lend their credibility and their lattice to the new person, until that person has built up their own lattice,”
To create a learning culture, Google uses the “company as university” metaphor.
What should be encouraged, Hackett says, are “good questions”—meaning questions rooted in deep critical thinking about the particular challenges and issues the company faces.
Looking back on your career, twenty or thirty years from now, what do you want to say you’ve accomplished? “You’d be amazed how many people I meet who don’t have the answer to the question,”
“a great man is a sentence”—meaning that a leader with a clear and strong purpose could be summed up in a single line (e.g., “Abraham Lincoln preserved the union and freed the slaves”). Pink believes this concept can be useful to anyone, not just presidents. Your sentence might be, “He raised four kids who became happy, healthy adults,” or “She invented a device that made people’s lives easier.” If your sentence is a goal not yet achieved, then you also must ask: How might I live up to my own sentence?
What if we find we have no good answers to the important questions we raise? Fearing that, many figure it’s better not to invite that additional uncertainty and doubt into their lives.
“If you ask people for advice,” Hulthin says, “they’ll tell you what they would do.”
This illusion that an “answer” is out there if we can just find it extends to everything from the dream job to larger concepts such as “happiness” or “purpose.”
Part of being able to tackle complex and difficult questions is accepting that there is nothing wrong with not knowing. People who are good at questioning are comfortable with uncertainty.
questioning might be considered a form of slow thinking, we have to get away from the fast thinking that is required in everyday life—especially in the current fast-moving, info-overloaded environment.
Where is my tortoise enclosure? When is my tech Shabbat?
The main premise of appreciative inquiry is that positive questions, focusing on strengths and assets, tend to yield more effective results than negative questions focusing on problems or deficits.
Simply by asking, at the end of each day, What am I grateful for? and writing down the answers in a “gratitude journal,” people tend to be “happier, more optimistic, more successful, more likely to achieve their goals,”
people who value and appreciate the basics—family and friends, a sense of belonging to a community, the simple pleasure that comes with engaging in a hobby or learning something new—tend to be a lot happier.
Why do I seem to “shine” when doing certain things? (What is it about those activities/places that brings out the best in me?) What if I could find a way to incorporate these interests/activities, or some aspect of them, into my life more? And maybe even into my work? How might I go about doing that?
“When we hit failure, I start41 to laugh. It’s almost like checking off a box—great, we got that out of the way. Now we’re that much closer.”
failure in any endeavor is rarely total. There is a way back from almost anything, and once you acknowledge that, you can proceed with more confidence.
“Instead of thinking about what you would do if you knew you wouldn’t fail,” Guillebeau writes, “maybe a better question is . . . What’s truly worth doing, whether you fail or succeed?”
When people are looking at issues from very different perspectives, it becomes problematic if one side tries to impose an answer on the other. Conversation either becomes argument or shuts down altogether.
If we don’t agree on an answer yet, can we at least come to terms on a question?
Finding common ground with anyone is the key to connecting.
Don’t be put off by learning how much you don’t know. That darkness was always out there, surrounding you; you just had no idea how vast it was until you began probing with your question flashlight. Questioners learn to love that great unknown—it’s the land of opportunity, in terms of creativity and innovation.
What if we cultivated ignorance instead63 of fearing it?
