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

by Warren Berger

It also helps to have a wide base of knowledge on all sorts of things that might seem to be unrelated to the problem—the more eclectic your storehouse of information, the more possibilities for unexpected connections.

For a questioner, it’s important to spend time with challenging questions instead of trying to answer them right away. By “living with” a question, thinking about it and then stepping away from it, allowing it to marinate, you give your brain a chance to come up with the kinds of fresh insights and What If possibilities that can lead to breakthroughs.

something Google’s scientist-in-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.

If you’re looking to take a break and simultaneously stimulate connective inquiry, a visit to the museum might be just the ticket. It engages the imagination, yet leaves room for thinking; it offers up as inspiration the many creative connections and smart recombinations that others have produced in the past; and it exposes the visitor to so many ideas and influences that it provides abundant raw material for making new mental connections. (The designer George Lois, who claims some of his best ideas have come while meandering through the Metropolitan Museum, says, “Museums are the custodians of epiphanies.”)49

Bielenberg uses exercises in his workshop that require participants to make “random connections” between unrelated ideas, or even just words. Here’s a simple word exercise, and all you need is a dictionary: 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;

to get their creative juices flowing. It’s become so popular that you don’t even need a dictionary anymore—the Idea Generator app will randomly select and combine three words for you when you shake your smartphone.

In his workshop and with some of his clients, Bielenberg takes this random-combination exercise up a notch—for example, by asking a bank to consider

offbeat What If scenarios in which their business is combined with another, completely unrelated one, as in, What if your bank was run by the makers of Sesame Street...

Some years back I attended a workshop run by the creativity consultant Tom Monahan,53 who teaches an exercise he calls 180-degree thinking—which is “thinking wrong” with a different name. In his exercises, Monahan encourages participants to come up with ideas for things that don’t work—an oven that can’t cook, a car that doesn’t move.

you come up

with offbeat, alternate uses for the ov...

What If questions can be used to “invert” reality. If the current reality is that restaurants provide people with a menu upon arrival, the inverse hypothesis is What if a restaurant provided customers with a menu only when they leave?

Ries urges businesses to focus on developing what he calls “minimum viable products”—in effect, quick, imperfect test versions of ideas that can be put out into the marketplace in order to learn what works and what doesn’t.

Stanford University’s Bob Sutton says that67 when analyzing a misstep, in addition to asking what went wrong, you should also ask, In this failure, what went right? (Conversely, when you try out something and it seems to have succeeded, look for what went wrong or could have been better, Sutton says. The best learning comes from looking at successes and failures side by side.)

In analyzing a series of setbacks, a key question to ask is Am I failing differently each time? “If you keep making the

same68 mistakes again and again,” the IDEO founder David Kelley has observed, “you aren’t learning anything. If you keep making new and different mistakes, that means you...

When looking at a challenging problem or question, the more perspectives that can be brought to bear, the better. According to Scott Page, author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, we all get “stuck” when trying to answer tough questions, but “if we have people with diverse tools,71 they’ll get stuck in different places.” As you look for potential collaborators, aim for people with backgrounds, cultural experiences, and skill sets that differ from your own: diversity fuels creativity.

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, their position, or their brands. In order to innovate now, they have to ask more expansive questions.”

What Yamashita is talking about is an evolution in business questions themselves. The old, closed questions (How many? How much? How fast?) still matter on a practical level, but increasingly businesses must tackle more sophisticated open questions (Why? What if? How?) to thrive in an environment that demand...

for top3 business consultants such as Dev Patnaik of Jump Associates “questioning is now the number one thing I spend my time on with clients.”

Tony Wagner, the Harvard education expert who has studied the role of questioning in business, notes, “The pressure on short-term results tends5 to drive questioning out of the equation.”

You could ask, as Grove and Moore did, What if different leaders were brought in?, but Clay Christensen suggests a bolder version of this question: What if the company didn’t exist? That question allows you to take a clean-slate approach in thinking about the industry and your place in it.

That’s particularly useful “if, at any point in the future, you see the possibility that the core business might

slow down,” Christensen says. (While contemplating a world in which your company did not exist, another question worth considering is Who would miss us? The answer to that can help clarify who your most important customers are and what your real purpose is.)

PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel believes entrepreneurs can find ideas to pursue by asking themselves, What is something I believe that nearly no one agrees with me on?

The Right Question Institute—which specializes in teaching students to tackle problems by generating questions, not solutions—has found that groups of students (whether children or

adults) seem to think more freely and creatively using the “question-storming” method, in which the focus is on generating questions. The RQI’s Dan Rothstein believes that some of the peer pressure in conventional brainstorming is lessened in this format. Answers tend to be judged more harshly than questions. In the business world, Hal Gregersen has been studying the24 effectiveness of question-storming at major corporations and has found it to be far more effective than conventional brainstorming. “Regular brainstorming for ideas often hits a wall because we only have so many ideas,” Gregersen says. “Part of the reason we hit that wall is we’re asking the wrong questions.” When people in a

group are struggling with an issue and find “they’re getting nowhere, they’re stuck,” Gregersen says, “that’s the perfect point to...

Gregersen will typically advise group members to try to generate at least fifty questions about the problem that’s being “stormed.” As those questions are being written down for everyone to see, “other team members are paying attention and thinking of a better question.” It’s usually easier to come up with questions than ideas; we don’t have to divine a solution from the air or connect ideas in a fanta...

After observing about a hundred Q-storm sessions around the world, Gregersen has noted some patterns. “At around twenty-five questions, the group may stall briefly and say, ‘That’s enough questions.’ But if you push on beyond that point, some of ...

The RQI approach to question-storming focuses less on volume and moves more quickly to “improving” the questions generated by the group, by opening closed questions and closing open ones. The key is to converge around the best questions, as decided through group discussion. This gets to one of ...

the groups often don’t know how to winnow down to the best ideas. It can be easier to winnow down questions because the best questions are magnetic—they intrigue people, make them want to work more on those. RQI recommends coming out of a ses...

What would Neil Patrick Harris do?26 Andrew Rossi of the marketing firm M Booth has found that one of the best ways to stoke creativity during brainstorming sessions is to ask people in the group to think about the problem they’re trying to solve from an unusual perspective. So, for example, if a company is introducing a new toothpaste, they might ask: How would IKEA tackle a challenge like this? Another approach is to add in an odd constraint, such as What if your idea had to involve speed dating? Rossi’s group sometimes suggests adopting the perspective of a well-known artist or entertainer: What would Jay-Z do in this situation? How would J. K. Rowling think about this? What might Neil Patrick Harris do? (The latter has been described as “an actor, singer, dancer, producer, director, writer, child stardom survivor, evil genius, amateur puppeteer, and magic enthusiast”—so he might do just about anything.)

Patnaik notes that most business execs rose up through the ranks because “they were good at giving answers. But it means they’ve had little experience at formulating questions.” The questions they

are accustomed to asking are more practical and interrogative: How much is this going to cost us? Who’s responsible for this problem? How are the numbers looking? (Or, to cite one of Patnaik’s favorite dumb questions, What’s our version of the iPad?)

That kind of practical, give-me-the-facts questioning has its place. Such questions can help in running a business, b...

Ron Shaich of Panera observes, “When you’re leading a team, a start-up, or a public company, your primary occupation must be to discover the future. A compelling and even subversive question is an effective tool for navigating uncharted terrain.”

“One of the most important things to know about becoming more of a questioning leader is that the questions don’t all have to come from you,” says Patnaik. If others are given permission and encouraged to question, they can contribute a range of perspectives and help raise the kinds of Why and What If questions that might never occur to the person at the top. A great source of questioning input can and probably should come from outside the company—from those who have

enough distance to question the company as a naïve outsider.

The late, legendary business guru Peter Drucker33 was known for coming into companies with an outsider’s perspective, which enabled him to see problems and issues that insiders might have missed. Rick Wartzman, executive director of the Drucker Institute, says people often wonder how Drucker achieved his stature as “the man who invented management” and the go-to adviser for half a century for e...

Drucker once remarked

that his greatest strength was “to be ignorant and ask a few questions.” Often those questions were deceptively simple, as in Who is your customer? What business are you in? The clients who hired Drucker may have started out expecting the great consultant to offer brilliant solutions to all their problems. But as he told one client, “The answers have to be yours.”

Today, many consultants don’t follow Drucker’s model; they’re more apt to adopt the role of “experts” whose job is to provide answers. (And as author Dan Ariely noted34 in Harvard Business Review, company leaders often prefer being supplied with answers over questions...

need to keep thinking.”) But as Drucker knew, an outsider looking at your business will probably never understand it as well as you do. Hence, that outsider generally shouldn’t be telling you what to do. He/she should be helping you to see things from a different angle, challenge your own assumptions, reframe old problems, an...

What if a bookstore could be like summer camp?38 It’s no secret that local bookstores have faced a tough challenge in recent years. Independent booksellers such as Steve Bercu, of Austin, Texas-based BookPeople, find themselves asking fundamental questions such as What can we offer that Amazon can’t? Here’s one of Bercu’s answers: a summer camp for kids. It started when a BookPeople staffer wondered

if the store could create a real-life version of Camp Half Blood, featured in the popular Percy Jackson series of young-adult books. Bercu knew nothing about starting or running a camp, so he experimented—finding a space in a local park, and offering a mix of outdoor activities with lots of book talk. The program now is so popular that local parents line up for hours to get their kids into the camp before it sells out. And the goodwill and local publicity generated have helped Bercu register best-ever book sales back at the store.

How might we create a culture of inquiry? This is a critical question for business leaders to address, but first they might well ask, Do we really want a culture of inquiry?

for any company that needs to innovate or adapt to shifting market conditions, new competition, and other disruptive forces, a questioning culture is critical because it can help ensure that creativity and fresh, adaptive thinking flows