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April 28, 2023
Always the beautiful answer Who asks a more beautiful question. —E.E. Cummings
“Ask yourself an interesting enough question3 and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome—which I think is a more interesting place to be.”)
Einstein saw curiosity as something “holy.”
“We come out of the womb questioning,” noted the small-schools-movement pioneer Deborah Meier.
observes that 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. And
questions challenge authority and disrupt established structures, processes, and systems, forcing people to have to at least think about doing something differently.
Clearly, it is easier (and more “efficient,” as a nonquestioning business executive might say) to go about our daily affairs without questioning everything.
“We’ve transitioned into always transitioning,”9 according to the author and futurist John Seely Brown.
In such times, the ability to ask big, meaningful, beautiful questions—and, just as important, to know what to do with those questions once they’ve been raised—can be the first steps in moving beyond old habits and behaviors as we embrace the new.
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.
questions that Google cannot easily anticipate or properly answer for you—questions that require a different kind of search.
one of the telltale signs of an innovative questioner: a refusal to accept the existing reality.
basic, fundamental questions can make people impatient and even uncomfortable.
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no reason to ask; yet if you don’t ask, then you are relying on “expert” knowledge that is certainly limited, may be outdated, and could be altogether wrong.
Noonan observes that if you never actually do anything about a problem yourself, then you’re not really questioning—you’re complaining.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer observed that questions “are the engines of intellect5—cerebral machines that convert curiosity into controlled inquiry.”
or flashlights that, in the words of Dan Rothstein of the Right Question Institute (RQI), “shine a light on where you need6 to go.”
A question can reside in the mind for a long time—maybe forever—without being spoken to anyone.
embrace ignorance—and
“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.”
Rothstein maintains. “Just asking or hearing a question phrased a certain way produces an almost palpable feeling of discovery and new understanding. Questions produce the lightbulb effect.”
In Hal Gregersen’s study of business leaders who question, he found that they exhibited an unusual “blend of humility and confidence”15—they were humble enough to acknowledge a lack of knowledge, and confident enough to admit this in front of others.
“we all live in the world our questions create.”
That’s because with each new advance, Thrun said, one must pause to ask, Now that we know what we now know, what’s possible now?
what the New York Times recently characterized22 as a perfect storm in which no one, whether blue-collar or white-collar and whatever level of expertise, can afford to stand pat. “The need to constantly adapt is the new reality for many workers” was the theme of the piece headlined “The Age of Adaptation.” The story had a term for what is now required of many workers—serial mastery.
lifelong adaptation.
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.
This impacts purposes as well
MIT’s Joi Ito says that as we try to come to terms with a new reality that requires us to be lifelong learners (instead of just early-life learners), we must try to maintain or rekindle the curiosity, sense of wonder, inclination to try new things, and ability to adapt and absorb that served us so well in childhood. We must become, in a word, neotenous (neoteny being a biological term that describes the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood). To do so, we must rediscover the tool that kids use so well in those early years: the question. Ito puts it quite simply: “You don’t learn
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As John Seely Brown notes, a questioner can thrive in these times of exponential change. “If you don’t have that disposition to question,” Brown says, “you’re going to fear change. But if you’re comfortable questioning, experimenting, connecting things—then change is something that becomes an adventure.
As Gopnik puts it, “Children are the research and development division of the human species.” If they are permitted to do that research—to raise and explore their own questions, through various forms of experimentation, and without being burdened with instructions—they exhibit signs of more creativity and curiosity. Gopnik
message was that in this class ‘we don’t have time for questions—because that will take time away from the number of answers I have to cover.’”
traditional schools teach is how to sit in rows quietly, which is perfect training for grown-up work in a dull office or factory, but not so good for education.”)
it makes sense that we would want to trade in the factory/obedience model of schooling for more of a questioning model. But as the world changed and the workplace changed with it, the old educational model hasn’t evolved
The answer to that, again, is not simple, but among those who’ve studied the needs of the evolving workplace from an educational standpoint—and two people at the forefront are Tony Wagner and John Seely Brown—the consensus seems to be that this new world demands citizens who are self-learners; who are creative and resourceful; who can adjust and adapt to constant change. 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?
“My concern is with how students become critical thinkers and problem solvers, which is what a democratic society needs.”
And what a track record Montessori has. Today, so many former students of this private-school system (which only teaches as high as eighth grade) are now running major companies in the tech sector that these alumni have become known as the Montessori Mafia.24 Their ranks include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and the cofounders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. (The former Google executive Marissa
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.
The social critic Neil Postman wondered37 about this more than two decades ago, when he wrote about the importance of questioning in education and posed this query of his own: “Is it not curious, then, that the most significant intellectual skill available to human beings is not taught in schools?
involving three kinds of sophisticated thinking—divergent, convergent, and metacognitive.
Sometimes the questions almost seemed stupid; there’s the idea of ‘the holy fool’ who asks the questions no one else will,
“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.’”
Thrun is trying to do with Udacity is to bring the Socratic method to online teaching.
project-based, peer-to-peer learning, which tends to happen as novice “makers” in the group question the more experienced ones.
librarian playing more of the role of the teacher of inquiry-based learning,”
they’re learning to create, experiment, build, question, and learn.
So it may turn out that in a world of exponential change, “these are the kids who will have the skills to rise to the top.”
Why . . . WHY do we have to wait for the picture? WHY does stepping back help us move forward? WHY did George Carlin see things the rest of us missed? WHY should you be stuck without a bed if I’ve got an extra air mattress? WHY must we “question the question”? What if . . . WHAT IF we could map the DNA of music? WHAT IF your brain is a forest, thick with trees? (And what if the branches touch?) WHAT IF you sleep with a question? (Will you wake with an answer?) WHAT IF your ideas are wrong and your socks don’t match? How . . . HOW can we give form to our questions? HOW do you build a tower that
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you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it . . . if you think of, detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream even if the end is a long way off, for there are about five thousand steps to be taken before we realize it; and start making the first ten, and stay making twenty after, it is amazing how quickly you get through those five thousand steps.”
Each stage of the problem solving process has distinct challenges and issues—requiring a different mind-set, along with different types of questions. 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
