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Why–What If–How
One of the many interesting and appealing things about questioning is that it often has an inverse relationship to expertise—such that, within their own subject areas, experts are apt to be poor questioners. Frank Lloyd Wright put it well when he remarked that an expert is someone who has “stopped thinking because he ‘knows.’”
the Right Question Institute (RQI), “shine a light on where you need6 to go.”
“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.”
Open questions—in particular, the kind of Why, What If, and How questions that can’t be answered with simple facts—generally tend to encourage creative thinking more than closed yes-or-no questions (though closed questions have their place, too, as we’ll see).
The story had a term for what is now required of many workers—serial mastery.
what we know is subject to revision or obsolescence, the comfortable expert must go back to being a restless learner.
“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.” That can involve “asking all kinds of peripheral questions,”
For the most part, it is better suited to responding to questions—not so good at asking
One such education critic, the author Sugata Mitra, made just this point35 at a TED Conference by tossing out the provocative question Is “knowing” obsolete? Of
go looking for problems, according to the business consultant Min Basadur38—who teaches problem-finding skills to executives at top companies—it’s one of the most
(Basic formula: Q (questioning) + A (action) = I (innovation). On the other hand, Q – A = P (philosophy). In
Why/What If/How sequence
questions, especially those that linger too long? Often the worst thing you can do with a difficult question is to try to answer it too quickly.
What If possibilities, these fresh, new ideas can take time to percolate and form. They often result from connecting existing ideas in unusual and interesting ways. Einstein was an early believer in this form of “combinatorial thinking”; today it is widely accepted as one of the primary sources of creativity. Since this type of thinking involves both connections and questions, I think of it as connective inquiry.
book Trusting What You’re Told. “Without
Deborah Meier
And this one, which I particularly like: What might the potential for humans be if we really encouraged that spirit of questioning in children, instead of closing it down? I asked Meier about that
skepticism and empathy.
The much harder thing is forcing them to sit still for five hours and pay attention to information they don’t care about.
Beautiful Question website
the Montessori Mafia.24 Their
Dan Meyer, a high school math teacher26 in New York, tells a story in a popular TEDx talk about
Instead of asking the question himself, he allowed students to think of it on their own—at which point it became their question.
if a student thinks of a question him/herself, it is likely to be of more interest than someone
York and he started off by organizing a contest to see who could best explain What is a flame? The kicker: Kids age nine to twelve would serve as the judges. More than eight hundred scientists or science buffs took up the challenge; the winner, physicist Benjamin Ames,
winning answers at centerforcommunicatingscience.org.)
“Fear is the enemy of curiosity. Unfortunately, if you’re in that situation, you may feel pressure to look a certain way to others.”
students from families with higher incomes were more likely to be encouraged by their parents to ask questions at school, whereas children from modest backgrounds were encouraged by their parents to be more deferential to authority—and to try to figure things
“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,”
Institute’s “Question Formulation Technique” for the first
“the way you ask a question yields different results and can lead you in different directions.”
This was a lightbulb moment for the two of them: What if we could find a way to help parents ask better questions at school meetings?
Rothstein maintains that questioning is a more subtle and complex skill than many realize, involving three kinds of sophisticated thinking—divergent, convergent, and metacognitive.
‘Izzy, did you ask a good question today?’”
that nonexperts or outsiders are often better at questioning than the experts.
the author of the book On Being Certain, contends
a blog titled The Curiosity Chronicles.
“Don’t just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.”
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.)
ask Why and What If questions even if we don’t yet know the How. Getting to a better alternative may be a long process, but it has to start somewhere—and that starting point often involves questioning the status quo.
such as “the five whys” to more
point, you may end up, like Louis C.K. in his “Why?” comedy bit, lost in cosmic questions
Search why comedy
that you can improve a question by opening and closing it. For instance, suppose one
incomplete information or faulty assumptions, often because those formulating the questions are too far removed from the problem they’re
Blog on 5 whys and books for young kkids
from inside the bubble of the company, or in artificial settings such as focus groups.
Paul Bennett says that one of the keys to being a good questioner is to stop reflexively asking so many thoughtless questions and pay attention—eventually, a truly interesting question may come to mind.
Westergren was reading a magazine article about the folk musician Aimee Mann—a talented artist with a modest following who, in Westergren’s
Bedsheet with partition for kids
Einstein and others have referred to this as “combinatorial thinking”; in this book, I’ve
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.
