A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

by Warren Berger

if you never actually do anything about a problem yourself, then you’re not really questioning—you’re complaining.

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.

Just asking Why without taking any action may be a source of stimulating thought or conversation, but it is not likely to produce change. (Basic formula: Q (questioning) + A (action) = I (innovation). On the other hand, Q – A = P (philosophy).

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.

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.

As a number of education critics have pointed out, 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.

“the way you ask a question yields different results and can lead you in different directions.”

questioning is a more subtle and complex skill than many realize, involving three kinds of sophisticated thinking—divergent, convergent, and metacognitive. Some of it comes naturally to kids, but some must be learned and practiced. Since questioning seems to drop off at around age five, the innate questioning skills we start out with have long been neglected by junior high and high school. By that time, “the question-asking muscle,” as Rothstein calls it, has atrophied and needs to be built up.

“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.”

What makes you think you know more than the experts? (The answer is that you don’t know more, you know less—which sometimes is a good thing.)