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July 10 - July 17, 2014
“Ask yourself an interesting enough question3 and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome—which I think is a more interesting place to be.”)
A journey of inquiry that (hopefully) culminates in change can be a long road, with pitfalls and detours and often nary an answer in sight. That’s why it can be helpful to approach inquiry systematically, as a step-by-step progression. 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 esteemed physicist Edward Witten10 told me that in his work he is always searching for “a question that is hard (and interesting) enough that it is worth answering and easy enough that one can actually answer it.”
one of the telltale signs of an innovative questioner: a refusal to accept the existing reality.
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no reason to ask; yet if you don’t ask, then you are relying on “expert” knowledge that is certainly limited, may be outdated, and could be altogether wrong.
if you never actually do anything about a problem yourself, then you’re not really questioning—you’re complaining.
Regina Dugan, a former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) director, has observed about problems in general, “We think someone else—someone smarter4 than us, someone more capable, with more resources—will solve that problem. But there isn’t anyone else.”
Good questioners tend to be aware of, and quite comfortable with, their own ignorance (Richard Saul Wurman,
“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.”
As Steve Quatrano of the Right Question Institute puts it, forming questions helps us “to organize our thinking around18 what we don’t know.”
innovation means trying to find and formulate new questions that can, over time, be answered.
How is my field/industry changing? • What trends are having the most impact on my field, and how is that likely to play out over the next few years? • Which of my existing skills are most useful and adaptable in this new environment—and what new ones do I need to add? • Should I diversify more—or focus on specializing in one area? • Should I be thinking more in terms of finding a job—or creating one?
“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.”
“You don’t learn unless you question.”
When we’re overloaded with information, “context becomes critical,” Brown says. “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.”
there’s never been a better time to be a questioner—because it is so much easier now to begin a journey of inquiry, with so many places you can turn for information, help, ideas, feedback, or even to find possible collaborators who might be interested in the same question.
Why does a particular situation exist? • Why does it present a problem or create a need or opportunity, and for whom? • Why has no one addressed this need or solved this problem before? • Why do you personally (or your company, or organization) want to invest more time thinking about, and formulating questions around, this problem?
if you are able to “find” a problem before others do, and then successfully answer the questions surrounding that problem, you can create a new venture, a new career, a new industry.
(Basic formula: Q (questioning) + A (action) = I (innovation).
this is the beauty of “process” in general: It may not provide any answers or solutions, but, as one design-thinker told me, having a process helps you to keep taking next steps—so that, as he put it, “even when you don’t know what41 you’re doing, you still know what to do.”
“If you give the mind time and space, it will do its own work on the problem, over time,” he said. “And it will usually come up with interesting possibilities to work with.”
Often the worst thing you can do with a difficult question is to try to answer it too quickly. When the mind is coming up with What If possibilities, these fresh, new ideas can take time to percolate and form.
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.
“the reason kids ask ‘why’ over and over again is often because we don’t understand their questions, or we’re just not listening. And by asking over and over, they’re saying to us, in effect, ‘You are not hearing me—you’re not understanding what I’m asking.’
“Children are the research and development division of the human species.” If they are permitted to do that research—to raise and explore their own questions, through various forms of experimentation, and without being burdened with instructions—they exhibit signs of more creativity and curiosity.
“My concern is with how students become critical thinkers and problem solvers, which is what a democratic society needs.”
Five learning skills, or “habits of mind,” were at the core of her school, and each was matched up with a corresponding question: Evidence: How do we know what’s true or false? What evidence counts? Viewpoint: How might this look if we stepped into other shoes, or looked at it from a different direction? Connection: Is there a pattern? Have we seen something like this before? Conjecture: What if it were different? Relevance: Why does this matter?
If you can’t imagine you could be wrong, what’s the point of democracy? And if you can’t imagine how or why others think differently, then how could you tolerate democracy?”
“Fear is the enemy of curiosity.
Rothstein and Santana then designed a program for K–12 classrooms, broken down into a series of steps: Teachers design a Question Focus (e.g., “Torture can be justified”). Students produce questions (no help from the teacher; no answering or debating the questions; write down every question; change any statements into questions). Students improve their questions (opening and closing them). Students prioritize their questions. They are typically instructed to come to agreement on three favorites. Students and teachers decide on next steps, for acting on the prioritized questions. Students
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In a world that expects us to move fast, to keep advancing (if only incrementally), to just “get it done,” who has time for asking why?
The pressure to keep moving forward—and the accompanying reluctance to step back and question—is not just a business phenomenon. As everyday life becomes more jam-packed with tasks, activities, diversions, and distractions, “stepping back and questioning” is unlikely to get a slot on the schedule. Which means some of the most important questions—about why we’re engaging in all those activities in the first place—never get raised.
“I position myself relentlessly as an idiot at IDEO,” Bennett observes. “And that’s not a negative, it’s a positive. Because being comfortable with not knowing—that’s the first part of being able to question.”
“Part of questioning is about exposing vulnerability—and being okay with vulnerability as a cultural currency.”
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
“see what’s always been there14 but has gone unnoticed.”
It’s one thing to see a problem and to question why the problem exists—and maybe even wonder whether there might be a better alternative. It’s another to keep asking those questions even after experts have told you, in effect, “You can’t change this situation; there are good reasons why things are the way they are.”
Why should we settle for what currently exists? And why should I believe you when you tell me something can’t be done?
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 somewhere—and that starting point often involves questioning the status quo.
The difference between just asking a question or pursuing it is the difference between flirting with an idea or living with it.
The What If stage is the blue-sky moment of questioning, when anything is possible. Those possibilities may not survive the more practical How stage; but it’s critical to innovation that there be a time for wild, improbable ideas to surface and to inspire.
“The creative act is no longer40 about building something out of nothing but rather building something new out of cultural products that already exist,” according to Wired magazine.
. According to Murray, “The nature of innovation [is that] we build new ideas out of existing ideas.”
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.
John Steinbeck line: “A difficult problem at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”)
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.
“Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once . . . Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works.”
Winston Churchill once said, “The trick is to go from one failure65 to another, with no loss of enthusiasm.”
questions, by their very nature, challenge people and invite them to engage with an idea or an issue—and could therefore do likewise in engaging employees with a company mission.
