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questions. For some of them, their greatest
E. E. Cummings, from whom I borrowed this book’s title, wrote, Always the beautiful answer / who asks a more beautiful question
The best innovators are able to live with not having the answer right away because they’re focused on just trying to get to the next question.
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.
one of the telltale signs of an innovative questioner: a refusal to accept
the existing reality.
One of the many interesting and appealing things about questioning is that it often has an inverse relationship to expertise—such
if you never actually do anything about a problem yourself, then you’re not really questioning—you’re complaining. And
the comfortable expert must go back to being a restless learner. Are questions becoming more valuable than answers?
“Known answers are everywhere, and easily accessible.” Because we’re drowning in all of this data,
The glut of knowledge has another27 interesting effect, as noted by author Stuart Firestein: It makes us more ignorant.
This all comprises the first stage of innovative questioning—first confronting, formulating, and framing the initial question that articulates the challenge at hand, and trying to gain some understanding of context. I think of this as the Why stage, though not every question asked at this juncture has to begin with the word why. Still, this is the point at which one is apt to inquire: • Why does a particular situation exist? • Why does it present a problem or create a need or opportunity, and for whom? • Why has no one addressed this need or solved this problem before? •
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We get these breakthroughs, Pogue writes, “when someone looks at the way things36 have always been done and asks why?”
Sometimes questioners go out looking for their Why—searching for a question they can work on and answer.
(Basic formula: 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.
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. Einstein was an early believer in this form of “combinatorial thinking”; today it is widely accepted as one of the primary sources of creativity. Since this type of thinking involves both connections and questions, I think of it as connective inquiry.
Why with a series of What If questions of his own.
it demonstrates that a game-changing question can come from anyone,
This Why–What If–How progression—which
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.
first rule of asking why is that there must be a pause, a space, an interruption in the meeting, a halt of “progress,” a quiet moment looking out the window on the bus.
Part of the value in asking naïve questions, Bennett says, is that 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
and biases of our own may be embedded in the questions
should be wondering, What are the underlying assumptions of that question? Is there a different question I should be asking?”
say, that someone on the assembly line had made a mistake. By then asking why that mistake occurred, an underlying cause might surface—such as insufficient training on a task. Asking why again, the company might discover the training program was underfunded; and asking why about that could lead back to fundamental company priorities about where money should be spent and what was most important in the end.
Why do you exercise? Because it’s healthy. Why is it healthy? Because it raises my heart rate. Why is that important? So that I burn more calories. Why do you want to do that? To lose weight. Why are you trying to lose weight? I feel social pressure to look fit.
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.
If the word why has a penetrative power, enabling the questioner to get past assumptions and dig deep into problems, the words what if have a more expansive effect—allowing us to think without limits or constraints, firing the imagination.
Not all connections are equal, in terms of yielding creative insights. More obvious mental connections and associations44—as when we associate a table and a chair—are more commonplace and tend to occur in the brain’s left hemisphere, notes the neurology professor John Kounios of Drexel University. But remote associations—“like when we think of ‘table’ and the idea of ‘under the table’”—require more of a neural reach. The brain’s right hemisphere, made up of cells
it all becomes fodder for later insights and smart recombinations.
residence Ray Kurzweil47 revealed in an interview. He said that when he is working on a difficult problem, he sets aside time, right before going to bed, to review all the pertinent issues and challenges. Then he goes to sleep and allows his unconscious mind to go to work. A growing body of research describes
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.
Divergent, anything-goes thinking must begin to converge around what’s doable. For this to happen, What If questions must give way to How questions.
Why what if How
The most basic way to give form to an idea is to put it on paper (Nanda created rough sketches of what a Clocky might look like before she started building). Depending on the idea, putting it in writing—a summary, a proposal—may be sufficient, but keep in mind that visuals have great power. “If you want everyone to have59 the same mental model of a problem, the fastest way to do it is with a picture,” according to the visualization expert David Sibbet.
The rapid test-and-learn approach has caught
look
noted in his writing, many people are drawn to an existing idea they can
join in on and help to improve or advance, rather than starting from scratch on their own.
While the How stage is positioned here as a third and final stage of innovative questioning, there really is no final stage—because the questions don’t end, even when you arrive at a solution.
he was particularly focused on helping land-mine survivors. So he began, some years ago, cycling through new Why and What If questions on a new and affordable prosthetic, and he was deep into the How stage of this line of questioning at the time of this writing.
Christensen wondered, in particular, why the established business leaders weren’t able to respond to these challenges. “For me, it always starts with a question,” Christensen told me. “I knew the failure could not be attributed to managers’ being stupid.
So I framed the question as Why are the smartest people in the world having this problem? Just thinking of it that way made me look in different places.”
Why isn’t this working anymore? What if the business market is now upside-down—and the bottom has risen to the top? And if that’s the case . . . How should my business respond to this new reality? How do we rewrite the old theories?
Christensen feels that business leaders, for the most part, still aren’t asking enough questions, and especially the right kinds of questions.
Why
what if
hows
who
when
the unintended consequence of that entire efficiency era is that people diminished their questions to very small-minded ones. In this quest for incremental improvement, it became all about asking, How can we save a little bit of money, make it a little more efficient, where can we cut costs?” But Yamashita says the era of “small-minded questions” is ending. “Company leaders are realizing that if they’re only asking the small questions, it’s not going to advance their agenda,
