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But in searching for common denominators among these brilliant change-makers, one thing I kept finding was that many of them were exceptionally good at asking questions.
They understood that great products, companies, even industries, often begin with a question.
Though he wondered about a great many things, Einstein was deliberate in choosing which questions to tackle:
he reckoned that if he had an hour4 to solve a problem and his life depended on it, he’d spend the first fifty-five minutes making sure he was answering the right question.
Inquiring minds can identify new opportunities and fresh possibilities before competitors become aware of them.
If we know (or at least strongly suspect) that questioning is a starting point for innovation, then why doesn’t business embrace it?
Clearly, it is easier (and more “efficient,” as a nonquestioning business executive might say) to go about our daily affairs without questioning everything. It’s natural and quite sensible to behave this way. The neurologist John Kounios observes8 that the brain finds ways to “reduce our mental workload,”
We have to veer off the beaten neural path. And we do this, in large part, by questioning.
Based on their experience—while also borrowing ideas and influences from existing theories of creativity, design thinking, and problem solving—I devised a three-part Why–What If–How model for forming and tackling big, beautiful questions.
The best innovators are able to live with not having the answer right away because they’re focused on just trying to get to the next question.
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 focus here is on questions that can be acted upon, questions that can lead to tangible results and change.
one of the telltale signs of an innovative questioner: a refusal to accept the existing reality.
Why should I settle for
“what was possible” at the time.
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.’”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.
Specifically, he had to replace they with I.
Noonan observes that if you never actually do anything about a problem yourself, then you’re not really questioning—you’re complaining.
“We think someone else—someone smarter4 than us, someone more capable, with more resources—will solve that problem. But there isn’t anyone else.”
He began to understand how and why prosthetic limbs were designed the way they were.
To innovate you need to begin with understanding why things are the way they are now.
questions “are the engines of intellect5—cerebral machines that convert curiosity into controlled inquiry.”
A question can reside in the mind for a long time—maybe forever—without being spoken to anyone.
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.
“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.”
brainstorm using only questions.
lively and imaginative questioning can have in business settings: Such questions can be “fundamentally subversive, disruptive, and playful” and seem to “switch people into the mode required to create anything new.”
Creative sessions creare questions not solutions
“convergent” (focused) thinking as they get at the core of a difficult problem and reach consensus on how to proceed.
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.
if the questions asked tend to be more expansive and optimistic, then that will be reflected in the culture.
As Steve Quatrano of the Right Question Institute puts it, forming questions helps us “to organize our thinking around18 what we don’t know.”
one must pause to ask, Now that we know what we now know, what’s possible now?
the comfortable expert must go back to being a restless learner.
If we think of “questions” and “answers” as stocks on the market, then we could say that, in this current environment, questions are rising in value while answers are declining. “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.”
We must become, in a word, neotenous (neoteny being a biological term that describes the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood).
And as I do that, I eventually realize that the lenses I’m looking through to see the world around me are wrong—and that I have to construct a whole new frame of reference.”
“the ability to evaluate risk, recognize demagoguery, the ability to question not only other people’s views, but one’s own assumptions.”
“Computers are useless—they only give31 you answers.”
Einstein explains that there’s no reason to fill his mind with information that can so easily be looked up.
“questioning, experimenting, connecting things.”
confronting, formulating, and framing the initial question that articulates the challenge at hand, and trying to gain some understanding of context.
We get these breakthroughs, Pogue writes, “when someone looks at the way things36 have always been done and asks why?”
Person encounters a situation that is less than ideal; asks Why. • Person begins to come up with ideas for possible improvements/solutions—with such ideas usually surfacing in the form of What If possibilities. • Person takes one of those possibilities and tries to implement it or make it real; this mostly involves figuring out How.
What sets apart the innovative questioners is their ability—mostly born out of persistence and determination—to give form to their ideas and make them real.
categorizing what they experience around them, labeling it, putting it in the proper file drawers of the brain.
one of the desirable things they’re referring to is that state where you see things without labels, without categorization.
Because once things have been labeled and filed, they become known quantities—and we don’t think about them, may not even notice them.
turn over rocks and mash things together;
as kids stop questioning, they simultaneously become less engaged in school.
Do kids stop questioning because they’ve lost interest in school, or do they lose interest in school because their natural curiosity (and propensity to question) is somehow tamped down?
