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Chuck Close have spoken of questioning’s inspirational power. (This great quote from Close was featured recently on the site BrainPickings: “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.”)
the ability to ask the right questions has enabled business leaders to adapt in a rapidly changing marketplace, Gregersen notes. Inquiring minds can identify new opportunities and fresh possibilities before competitors become aware of them. All of which means that, whereas in the past one needed to appear to have “all the answers” in order to rise in companies, today, at least in some enlightened segments of the business world, the corner office is there for the askers.
A 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.
The esteemed physicist Edward Witten10 told me that in his work he is always searching for “a question that is hard (and interesting) enough that it is worth answering and easy enough that one can actually answer it.”
questioning is more important today than it was yesterday—and will be even more important tomorrow—in helping us figure out
what matters, where opportunity lies, and how to get there. We’re all hungry for better answers. But first, we need to learn how to ask the right questions.
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no reason to ask; yet if you don’t ask, then you are relying on “expert” knowledge that is certainly limited, may be outdated, and could be altogether wrong.
independent inventor and inveterate questioner Mark Noonan,
observes that if you never actually do anything about
a problem yourself, then you’re not really questioning—you’re complaining. And that situation you’re complaining about may never change because, as Regina Dugan, a former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) director, has observed about problems in general, “We think someone else—someone smarter4 than us, someone more capable, with more resources—will solve that problem. But there isn’t anyone else.”
What can a question do?
The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer observed that
questions “are the engines of intellect5—cerebral machines that convert curiosity into controlled inquiry.”
The late Frances Peavey, a quirky,7 colorful social activist whose work revolved around what she called “strategic questioning” aimed at bridging cultural differences between people, once observed that a good question is like “a
lever used to pry open the stuck lid on a paint can.”
one of the primary drivers of questioning is an awareness of what we don’t know—which is a form of higher awareness that separates not only man from monkey but also the smart and curious person from the dullard who
doesn’t know or care. Good questioners tend to be aware of, and quite comfortable with, their own ignorance (Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of the TED Conferences, has been known to brag, “I know more about my ignorance9 than you know about yours”). But they constantly probe that vast ignorance using the question flashlight—or, if you prefer, they attack it with the question spade.
The author Stuart Firestein, in his10 fine book Ignorance: Ho...
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“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.”
Dan Rothstein, who along with his colleague Luz Santana established the Right Question Institute, a small and fascinating nonprofit group formed in order to try to advance the teaching of questioning skills. Rothstein believes that questions do something—he is not sure precisely what—that has an “unlocking” effect in people’s minds. “It’s an experience we’ve all had at one point or another,” 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.”
Rothstein has seen this phenomenon at work in classrooms where students (whether adults or children) are instructed to think and brainstorm using only questions. As they do this, Rothstein says, the floodgates of imagination seem to open up. The participants tend to become more engaged, more interested, in the subject at hand; the ideas begin to flow, in the form of questions.
Rothstein points out, however, that questions not only open up thinking—they also can direct and focus it.
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.
Cooperrider says that “organizations gravitate toward the questions they ask.” If the questions from leaders and managers focus more on Why are we falling behind competitors? and Who is to blame?, then the organization is more likely to end up with a culture of turf-guarding and finger-pointing. Conversely, if the questions asked tend to be more expansive and optimistic, then that will be reflected in the culture. This is true of more than companies, he maintains. Whether we’re talking about countries, communities, families, or individuals, “we all live in the world our questions create.”
One of the most important things questioning does is to enable people to think and act in the face of uncertainty. As Steve Quatrano of the Right Question Institute puts it, forming questions helps us “to organize our thinking around18 what we don’t know.”
Sebastian Thrun, the engineer/inventor19 behind Google’s experimental self-driving X car and the founder of
the online university Udacity, acknowledges the two-way relationship between technological change and questioning. The changes are fueled by the questions being asked—but those changes, in turn, fuel more questions. 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?
The same forces roiling businesses—rapid technological upheaval, leading to changes in how jobs are performed and what skills are required—are creating 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.
To keep up, today’s worker must constantly learn new skills by, for example, taking training courses. But as the Times article points out, these workers “are often left to figure out for themselves what new skills will ma...
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the Times columnist Thomas Friedman has written extensively23 about a new global economy that is ruthlessly demanding more
skills and more inventiveness from the workforce.
How can you know whether retraining is worthwhile, or which kinds of training, without first spending time on questions such as: • How is my field/industry changing? • What trends are having the most impact on my field, and how is that likely to play out over the next few years? • Which of my existing skills are most useful and adaptable in this new environment—and what new ones do I need to add? • Should I diversify more—or focus on specializing in one area? • Should I be thinking more in terms of finding a job—or creating one?
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.
“Right now, knowledge is a commodity,”25 says the Harvard education
expert Tony Wagner. “Known answers are everywhere, and easily accessible.” Because we’re drowning in all of this data, “the value of explicit information is dropping,”26 according to Wagner’s colleague at Harvard, the innovation professor Paul Bottino. The real value, Bottino added, is in “what you can do with that knowledge, in pursuit of a query.”
as we increasingly find ourselves surrounded by the new, the unfamiliar, and the unknown, we’re experiencing something not unlike early childhood. Everywhere we turn, there’s something to wonder and inquire about. 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.
Ito puts it quite simply: “You don’t learn unless you question.”
The problem is not just rapid change—it’s also the sheer volume of information rushing at us from all directions and many sources. Without a filtering device, we can’t separate what’s relevant or reliable from what’s not. When we’re overloaded with information, “context becomes critical,” Brown says. “What matters now is your ability to triangulate, to look at something from multiple sources, and construct your own warrants for what you choose to believe.”
as one design-thinker told me, having a process helps you to keep
taking next steps—so that, as he put it, “even when you don’t know what41 you’re doing, you still know what to do.”
According to Paul Harris, a Harvard child psychologist and author, research shows that a child asks about2 forty thousand questions between the ages of two and five.
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.
“What’s different about this school is you’re interested in what we don’t know, not just what we do know.”
Meier felt that instead of just pushing information at kids, schools needed to teach them how to make sense of what they were being told so they would know what to make of it and what to do with it.
