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

by Warren Berger

“My concern is with how students become critical thinkers and problem solvers, which is what a democratic society needs.” Five learning skills, or “habits of mind,” were at the core of her school, and each was matched up with a corresponding question: Evidence: How do we know what’s true or false? What evidence counts? Viewpoint: How might this look if we stepped into other shoes, or looked at it from a different direction? Connection: Is there a pattern? Have we seen something like this before? Conjecture: What if it were different? Relevance: Why does this matter?

Many of the schools doing inquiry-based learning are still too new to judge whether they are turning out extra successful or productive adults (however one might measure that). But we do know that some of their core principles—the emphasis on letting students explore, direct their own learning, and work on projects instead of taking tests—can also be found at Montessori schools, which have been around long

enough to have a track record of adult success stories. 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 Mayer—now the head of Yahoo!25—has said that Brin’s and Page’s Montessori schooling, though long ago, remained a defining influence. “You can’t understand Google unless you know that Larry and Sergey were both

Montessori kids,” according to Mayer. “They’re always asking, Why should it be like that? It’s the way their br...

He said his parents taught him to question. “They would ask me questions, and they would get me to ask them questions—but then they would never answer the questions they guided me to,” Andraka told me. “They would instead have me go and explore through experiments or personal experience and make a hypothesis.”

When the Boston high school teacher33 Ling-Se Peet used the Right Question Institute’s “Question Formulation Technique” for the first time in her humanities class, she began by laying out a provocative premise to her twenty-five students: Torture can be justified.

In the parlance of Rothstein and Santana, this opening statement is known as a Q-focus because its purpose is to provide a focal point for generating questions from the students. Peet’s class was divided into small groups, and each group’s initial task was to come up with as many questions as possible, within a time limit, pertaining to that statement. After reviewing a set of rules (write each question down, don’t debate or try to answer questions, just keep trying to think of more questions), the students in each group began to come at that premise from a variety of angles. Some questions aimed at bringing clarity to the issue: How do you define torture? When is torture used? Some were offbeat yet intriguing: Can torture make

Then the students were directed to the second stage of the exercise: They were instructed to change open questions to closed ones, and vice versa—so that, for example, an open question that began as Why is torture effective? might be changed to a closed one: Is torture effective? The purpose of this part of the exercise, according to Rothstein, is to show that a question can be narrowed down in some cases, or expanded in others. As students do this, he says, they begin to see that “the way you ask a question yields different results and can lead you in different directions.” Next, the students were asked to “prioritize” their questions: to figure out which three were the most important to move the discussion forward. Rothstein and Santana stress the importance of this “convergent” part of questioning. They feel it’s not enough to encourage students to toss out questions endlessly; to question effectively, they must learn how to analyze their own questions and

zero in on ones they would like to pursue further.

gamelike rules (only questions allowed; any nonquestion must be turned into a question)

tendency to quickly become invested in the questions they’ve thought of on their own. “The ‘ownership’ part of this is very important,” he said. “We’ve had kids say that when you ask your own question, you then feel like it’s your job to get the answer.”

how to inquire about school decisions that most affected them—which meant probing the reasons behind the decisions, the process that led to those decisions, and

the role parents could play in that process.

a program for K–12 classrooms, broken down into a series of steps: 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.

In studying “master questioners,” Hal Gregersen inquired about their childhoods and found that most had “at least one adult in their lives who encouraged them to ask provocative questions.” The Nobel laureate scientist Isidor Isaac Rabi was one such child; when he came home from school, “while other mothers asked

their kids ‘Did you learn anything today?’ [my mother ] would say, ‘Izzy, did you ask a good question today?’” Clayton Christensen thinks parents can help their kids be more inquisitive by posing what if questions “that invite children to think deeply about the world around them.” But Christensen thinks it’s also important to encourage kids to solve problems in a hands-on way, via challenging household tasks and chores. That worked for IDEO cofounder David Kelley. His career as a problem-solving designer was forged in a childhood home where “if the washing machine broke, you went and tried to make a new part to fix

The Udacity courses are designed not just to broadcast lectures but to inject thoughtful questioning at critical junctures, to get students thinking about what they’re learning.

nonexperts or outsiders are often better at questioning than the experts. No one would argue that expert knowledge isn’t valuable—but

but when it’s time to question, it can get in the way.

those who would like to get better at asking Why have two options. You can conduct all business, including the business of everyday life, constantly accompanied by a curious and vocal three- or four-year-old, who will see what you miss. Or you can attempt to adjust the way you look at the world so that your perspective more closely aligns with that of a curious child. That second option is by no

means easy—it takes some effort to see things with a fresh eye. That’s only part of what’s required to ask powerful 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.

The pressure to keep moving forward—and the accompanying reluctance to step back and question—is not just a business phenomenon. As everyday life

becomes more jam-packed with tasks, activities, diversions, and distractions, “stepping back and questioning” is unlikely to get a slot on the schedule. Which means some of the most important questions—about why we’re engaging in all those activities in the first place—never get raised.

when we wish to move beyond that default setting—to consider new ideas and possibilities, to break from habitual thinking and expand upon our existing knowledge—it helps if we can let go of what we know, just temporarily. You have to be adventurous enough (and humble enough) to enter the “know nothing” zone of a constant questioner such as Paul Bennett.

“I position myself relentlessly as an idiot at IDEO,” Bennett observes. “And that’s not a negative, it’s a positive. Because being comfortable with not knowing—that’s the first part of being able to question.”

Having grown comfortable in that role, Bennett says, he is able to ask “incredibly naïve questions” without feeling the least self-conscious. For example, when Bennett was called in to speak at the parliament in Iceland during the country’s financial meltdown, “I asked stupid questions like ‘Where’s the money?’ Not because I was trying to be disrespectful but because no one seemed to be able to give a straight answer to this basic question.”

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 y...

and simplify—to strip away the irrelevances and get t...

it’s not uncommon for breakthrough ideas to come from people who are working outside their area of expertise because the novices are “able to see a problem with a fresh eye, forget about what’s easy or hard, and not worry about what other people in that field have done.”

In their seminars, they briefly show attendees the figure below:

How many squares did you see?”

“The squares were always there, but you didn’t find them until you looked for them,”

Srinivas told me he uses the exercise to illustrate that we often fail to see all the possibilities available to us because we simply haven’t spent enough time looking.

“Sometimes people feel like they have nowhere to go and they’ve run out of options, and my point is, ‘There is always another square, another possibility, if you just keep looking for it.’”

The five whys methodology originated27 in Japan and is credited to Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota Industries. For decades, the company used the practice of asking why five times in succession as a means of getting to the root of a particular manufacturing problem.

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. John Seely Brown has written, “In order for imagination to flourish,37 there must be an opportunity to see things as other than they currently are or appear to be. This begins with a simple question: What if? It is a process of introducing something strange and perhaps even demonstrably untrue into our current situation or perspective.”

the beauty of the What If stage of questioning is that it’s a time when off-the-wall ideas are welcome.

Where do those wild, speculative ideas come from? Obviously, if we knew the precise location of the source, and how to access it, then creativity wouldn’t be as mysterious and unpredictable as it is. But we do know that coming up with original ideas or insights—the kind of lightbulb moments that can lead to imaginative What If questions—often involves the ability to combine ideas and influences, to mix and remix things that might not ordinarily go together.

this mix-and-match mental process is at the root of creativity and innovation.

It can be a relief to know that, in coming up with fresh ideas, we don’t have to invent from scratch; we can draw upon what already exists and use that as raw material. The key may lie in connecting those bits and pieces in a clever, unusual, and useful way, resulting in (to use a term that seems to have39 originated with the British designer John Thackara) smart recombinations.

“The creative act is no longer40 about building something out of nothing but rather building something new out of cultural products that already exist,” according to Wired magazine.

Smart recombinations are inspired in all sorts of ways. Sometimes they are the result of cold calculation (How can we combine this moneymaking thing with that moneymaking thing to make even more money?); sometimes they’re a product of serendipity.

David Kord Murray, a former rocket scientist42 who worked on projects for NASA and later became the head of innovation at Intuit, made a study of connective creativity in his book Borrowing Brilliance. According to Murray, “The nature of innovation [is that] we build new ideas out of existing ideas.” Murray cites Einstein, Walt Disney, George Lucas, and Steve Jobs as prime examples of innovators who “defined problems, borrowed ideas, and then made new combinations.” They did it, Murray says, by combining things that didn’t seem to go together and by borrowing ideas “from faraway places.”

Innovators who are good at connecting are inclined to take something they’re working on—say, Walt Disney’s planning a new amusement park—and begin to think analogously: What if this amusement park could be like a movie, brought to life? “In doing this,” Murray explains, “Disney takes his original subject, an amusement park, and lays a metaphor on top of it and begins to see the whole thing through that ‘movie’ metaphor—so he creates it with storyboards, and the employees become cast members, and so on.” Creating theme parks now seems like an obvious combination—but it was a fresh, surprising, and compelling mixture when Disney introduced it.

research has found that we can’t necessarily control the brain’s search for remote connections—much of which happens in the unconscious mind—but we can provide impetus and help guide that search by focusing on a problem to be solved, a challenging question to be answered. “Having that goal or that question you’re working on is very important,”

If your conscious

mind puts a big question out there, chances are good that your unconscious min...

Moreover, if you have a curious mind—and if you actively ask questions and gather knowledge to sate that curiosity—this also can aid in connective inquiry by providing “a plethora of raw materials to be connected,” as Zhong puts it. In particular, if your curiosity has been focused on a particular problem, and you’ve been doing deep thinking, contextual inquiry, questioning the problem from various perspectives and angles, asking your multiple Whys—it all becomes fodder for later insights and smart recombinations.