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

by Warren Berger

And I never considered the critical role questioning plays in enabling people to innovate, solve problems, and move ahead in their careers and lives.

Much the same could be said about schools. Here again, as I talked to educators, I found a genuine interest in the subject—many teachers acknowledge it’s critically important that students be able to formulate and ask good questions. Some of them also realize that this skill is apt to be even more important in the future, as complexity increases and change accelerates. Yet, for some reason, questioning isn’t taught in most schools—nor is it rewarded (only memorized answers are).

The focus here is on questions that can be acted upon, questions that can lead to tangible results and change.

What he hadn’t thought of at that time—it would become clear to him later, as he got to know more about the field of prosthetics—was that some problems do not have governments or large corporations rushing to solve them.

As an outsider in that domain, Phillips was actually in the best position to ask questions. 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.

Noonan observes that if you never actually do anything about a problem yourself, then you’re not really questioning—you’re complaining.

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.

Dan Rothstein,

Luz Santana

“Just asking or hearing a question phrased a certain way produces an almost palpable feeling of discovery and new understanding. Questions produce the lightbulb effect.”

Henry Dunant

The latter is no small thing given that, as author Sir Ken Robinson has observed, “In our culture, not to know16 is to be at fault, socially.”

This is true of more than companies, he maintains. Whether we’re talking about countries, communities, families, or individuals, “we all live in the world our questions create.”

Steve Quatrano

Gretchen Rubin showed how a simple37 Why question could be applied to one’s everyday life—and be the spark that leads to dramatic change. One rainy day, looking out the window of a New York City bus, Rubin pondered, Why am I not happy with my life as it is? This question got her thinking about the nature of happiness, then researching that, then applying what she learned to her own life—and, importantly, to the lives of others. Thus was born her immensely successful multimedia venture known as The Happiness Project.

Meier’s question-driven schools struggled after she left, and there were few imitators—until recently. Today, around the world, a growing number of schools are embracing some of the principles Meier was trying to teach: that students must develop the “habit” of learning and questioning, that knowledge cannot be force-fed to them. But such schools still represent just23 a “drop in the bucket” in terms of the overall education system, notes Nikhil Goyal, New York–based author of a book on modernizing schools.

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 brains were programmed early on.”)

Would students who are battling against stereotypes be less inclined to interrupt lessons by asking questions, revealing to the rest of the class that they don’t know something? “Absolutely,” Aronson said. “Fear is the enemy of curiosity. Unfortunately, if you’re in that situation, you may feel pressure to look a certain way to others.” That can cause students to act as if they already know or just don’t care. “You’re inclined to play it safe,” Aronson says, rather than risk the possibility of confirming the stereotype.

“Working-class children instead worried about making teachers angry if they asked for help at the wrong time or in the wrong way, and also felt others would judge them as not smart if they asked for help.” These differences, Calarco found, stemmed directly from what “children learn from their parents at home.”

The question process Rothstein and Santana developed was years in the making. It didn’t start out being for kids in school—it was originally intended to help adults use questioning more effectively in their dealings with government bureaucrats, doctors, landlords, and school officials.

What I’m seeing is a failure among these students to ask big questions about values and meaning and purpose. What we really need is for these kids—our future leaders—to learn how to ask those kinds of questions and not just technocratic ones.”

Is it possible the kind of Socratic teaching that Deresiewicz’s professor did could make a comeback in the online world? That’s what Sebastian Thrun is hoping. Thrun, known for developing Google’s self-driving car and other tech breakthroughs, says he was never comfortable asking disruptive questions in his native Germany but found a much more receptive environment in Silicon Valley.

This Why–What If–How progression—which can be identified in many stories of innovative breakthroughs—is clearly evident in the Polaroid example.

If What If is about imagining and How is about doing, the initial Why stage has to do with seeing and understanding.

A good way to become unpopular in a business meeting is to ask, “Why are we doing this?”—even though the question may be entirely justified. It often takes a thick-skinned outsider to be willing to even try.

I mentioned previously that Joichi Ito, director of the prestigious MIT Media Lab—which has had a hand in creating everything from the Kindle electronic reader to futuristic cars that can fold in half—favors the term neoteny to describe the phenomenon of maintaining childlike mental attributes as an adult. Ito says one can train oneself to think this way.

The idea that would eventually become Airbnb was challenging a basic assumption: that you needed established, reputable hotels to provide accommodation for out-of-town visitors. Those paying close attention might have noticed that just a few years prior to this, lots of people held similar assumptions about cars—you could buy them, you could rent them, but there was no practical way to share them. Then an entrepreneur named Robin Chase asked, Why not?—and subsequently introduced Zipcar.

Long before he delved deep into the forest of neuron trees and their dendrite branches, Dr. Heilman, while still a student, made a firsthand discovery about creativity and brain function. “When I used to take tests in college, I would be very anxious,” he told me. “So I came up with a process whereby I would always answer the more obvious questions first. Then, as my anxiety would lessen, I’d start to answer more of the questions that required real thinking.”