More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Somehow, we’ve defined the goal of schooling as enabling you to have more ‘right answers’ than the person next to you.
‘we don’t have time for questions—because that will take time away from the number of answers I have to cover.’”
We teach answers when kids need to know how to skk questions to get a job
“Our grandfathers and great grandfathers18 built schools to train people to have a lifetime of productive labor as part of the industrialized economy. And it worked.”
If schools were built on a factory model, were they actually designed to squelch questions?
What might the potential for humans be if we really encouraged that spirit of questioning in children, instead of closing it down?
students must develop the “habit” of learning and questioning, that knowledge cannot be force-fed to them.
“They’re always asking, Why should it be like that? It’s the way their brains were programmed early on.”)
question can be narrowed down in some cases, or expanded in others.
“convergent” part of questioning.
But Rothstein maintains that questioning is a more subtle and complex skill than many realize, involving three kinds of sophisticated thinking—divergent, convergent, and metacognitive.
Since questioning seems to drop off at around age five, the innate questioning skills we start out with have long been neglected by junior high and high school. By that time, “the question-asking muscle,” as Rothstein calls it, has atrophied and needs to be built up.
“For twenty years I’ve been teaching at the Harvard Business School,” professor Clayton Christensen told me. “And I love this place, but the intuition to ask questions, the curiosity, is much less than twenty years ago.” As to the cause: “If all you do as you’re growing up is watch stuff on a screen—or go to school, where they give you the answers—then you don’t develop the instinct for asking questions,” Christensen said. “They don’t know how to ask because it’s never been asked of them.”
‘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.”
“He had an ability to reframe things—to ask questions that got at something fundamental. Sometimes the questions almost seemed stupid; there’s the idea of ‘the holy fool’ who asks the questions no one else will, and that was part of what he was doing.”
everything is open to question, especially the things we thought we already knew.”
Importantly, the professor was also “willing to ask questions withou...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In a sense, we’re all “makers” now, or, at least, we would do well to think of ourselves that way.
why they couldn’t see the picture he had just taken without having to wait. Land found he had no good answer for her.
a game-changing question can come from anyone, even a naïve child. This underscores a point made earlier, that nonexperts or outsiders are often better at questioning than the experts.
How stage: getting his ideas down on paper, getting feedback on the idea, then beginning to create early, tangible versions of his camera-with-darkoom-inside; then testing those early versions, failing, revising, testing again.
Why, What If, and How stages.
Design thinking
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.
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.
This points to a second, different kind of back step—his distancing himself from his own assumptions and expertise. For a moment, he stopped knowing and began to wonder.
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
“If I just keep saying, ‘I don’t get it, can you tell me why once more?,’ it forces people to synthesize and simplify—to strip away the irrelevances and get to the core idea.”
Zen principle known as shoshin, or “beginner’s mind.”
“The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert.” Such a mind, he added, is “open to all possibilities” and “can see things as they are.”
a would-be innovator: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
“detached”—from everyday thoughts, distractions, preconceived notions, habitual behaviors, and even from oneself. “Basically, you begin to observe yourself as if you were a third party.” If you can achieve that sense of detachment, your thinking becomes more “flexible and fluid,” Komisar maintains, and “you find yourself in a better position to question everything.”
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.”
Ask non experts for input and feedback
think of themselves as “seven-year-olds, enjoying a day off from school”
“It means thinking of things that are usually assumed to be negative as positive, and vice versa. It can mean reversing assumptions about cause and effect, or what matters most versus least. It means not traveling through life on automatic pilot.”
we often fail to see all the possibilities available to us because we simply haven’t spent enough time looking.
‘There is always another square, another possibility, if you just keep looking for it.’”
Great questioners “keep looking”—at a situation or a problem, at the ways people around them behave, at their own behaviors. They study the small details; and they look for not only what’s there but what’s missing.
lots of people coming into town, not enough hotels.
Test assumptioms an ppetite for your idea where theres a big problem
They have a certain attitude about them: restless, rebellious, skeptical of convention and authority. As in: Why should we settle for what currently exists? And why should I believe you when you tell me something can’t be done?
“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.) Another common counterquestion that challengers can expect to be hit with is some version of Okay, genius, how would you do it better? An interesting assumption is built into this question: that if someone is going to challenge the existing ways, then he/she had better have an alternative ready. But it’s important to 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
...more
Assumptions and biases of our own may be embedded in the questions we ask. One of the ways to find out is to subject those questions to . . . questioning.
“Every time you come up with a question, you should be wondering, What are the underlying assumptions of that question? Is there a different question I should be asking?
They range from simple practices such as “the five whys” to more exhaustive methods such as contextual inquiry, wherein we take our questions out into the larger world to see how they survive contact with reality.
“It’s a technique that’s really designed to overcome the limits of human psychology,” Ries explained. By this he means that people are inclined to look for the easiest, most obvious explanation for a problem. On top of that, “we tend to personalize things that are really systemic.” It’s easier to just blame that poor assembly-line worker than to consider all the complex, interrelated factors that may be contributing to the problem.
“I’ll ask myself, As a doctor, what am I really good at and not so good at? Then
Ask 5 whys to create persona goals. Start by questioning behaviors.
broaden their questions in some instances, and narrow them in others.
it’s necessary to break it down into smaller, more actionable questions—as in, Before we try to do this thing worldwide, how might we make it work in our own backyard?
you can improve a question by opening and closing it. For instance, suppose one is grappling with the question Why is my father-in-law difficult to get along with? Like most Why, What If, and How questions, this question is open-ended because it has no one definitive answer. But note what happens when we transform this into a closed, yes-or-no question: Is my father-in-law difficult to get along with? Worded this way, the question almost forces one to confront the assumption within the original question—and to consider that it might not be valid
the best way to question a question is to take it out into the world with you—and see if the assumptions behind it hold up when exposed to real people and situations.
