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

by Warren Berger

Good questioners tend to be aware of, and quite comfortable with, their own ignorance

one of the keys to scientific discovery is the willingness of scientists to embrace ignorance—and

Cooperrider says that “organizations gravitate toward the questions they ask.”

Now that we know what we now know, what’s possible now?

The story had a term for what is now required of many workers—serial mastery. To keep up, today’s worker must constantly learn new skills by, for example, taking training courses. But as the Times article points out, these workers “are often left to figure out for themselves what new skills will make them more valuable, or just keep them from obsolescence.”

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?

• 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.

This suggests there may be a relationship—which many teachers could tell you without needing to conduct a formal study—between students asking questions and their being engaged and interested in learning. Admittedly, there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation here: 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?

But many educators and learning experts contend that our current system of education does not encourage, teach, or in some cases even tolerate questioning. Harvard’s Tony Wagner says, “Somehow, we’ve defined the goal of schooling as enabling you to have more ‘right answers’ than the person next to you. And we penalize incorrect answers. And we do this at a pace—especially now, in this highly focused test-prep universe—where we don’t have time for extraneous questions.”

When teachers are under this kind of pressure to follow mandated guidelines, it can cause them to be less receptive to students’ ideas or inquiries—as one researcher demonstrated in a fascinating study.

Engel concluded that “teachers are very susceptible to external influences; their understanding of the goal of teaching directly affects how they respond when children spontaneously investigate.”

What are schools for? (That question could also be phrased as Why are we sending kids to school in the first place?)

Both Wagner and Brown put “questioning” at the top of the list of key survival skills for the new marketplace.

Should we abandon the failed experiment of teaching facts?)

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?

Meier started with two particular ways of thinking she wanted to emphasize—skepticism and empathy. “I believe you have to have an open-mindedness to the possibility that you’re wrong, or that anything may be wrong,” she said.

“outside the classroom children tend to observe things more keenly and ask more questions.”

“We had one of those world maps with the U.S. right in the middle—remember those? And one of the students looked at it and said, How come the East Indies are in the west? And that question got me thinking about the impact of what you put in the center, and what it does to everything else. And it became part of our curriculum. It had so many implications for how you see yourself.”

Some did not know what to make of the unorthodox lessons and the kids’ autonomy; an environment such as the one Meier created suggested to some a lack of discipline and structure.

students must develop the “habit” of learning and questioning, that knowledge cannot be force-fed to them.

if a student thinks of a question him/herself, it is likely to be of more interest than someone else’s question.

that questions were often used by teachers primarily to check up on students, rather than to try to spark interest; such questions were apt to leave a student feeling “exposed” rather than inspired.

“Yes, we want a Silicon Valley,” she said, “but do we really want three hundred million people who actually think for themselves?”

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 out for themselves, instead of asking for help.

But I don’t ask questions like ‘What would happen if this happens?’ I do that on my own—I do all of my exploring outside of school. Because in school it’s not allowed and that just . . . really sucks.”

teachers “have inadvertently contributed to the professionalization of asking questions—to the idea that only the people who know more are allowed to ask.”

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 reflect on what they have learned.

If asking Why requires stepping back from “doing,” it also demands a step back from “knowing.” Whether in life or in work, people become experts within their own domains—generally confident that they already know what they need to know to do well in their jobs and lives. Having this sense of knowing can make us less curious and less open to new ideas and possibilities.

We make that judgment about what’s “known” based on everything we’ve experienced already—and as O’Neill notes, “the more we see, hear, touch, or smell something, the more hard-wired in our brain it becomes.” We routinely “default to the set of knowledge and experience each one of us has.” This works well under most circumstances, but 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

These days, Gebbia and Chesky are asking a whole new set of questions about whether it’s feasible to create a “sharing economy.” At the core of this idea is the fundamental question Why should we, as a society, continue to buy things that we really don’t need to own? (Consider, for example, that the average power24 drill in the United States is used a total of thirteen minutes in its lifetime.) As Gebbia notes, we’ve spent decades accumulating “stuff” in the modern consumer age. “What if we spent the next hundred years sharing more of that stuff? What if access trumped ownership?”

I think of this brand of questioning as a subcategory of Why questions that could be considered “challenger questions.” 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?

practice of asking why five times in succession as a means of getting to the root of a particular manufacturing problem. When, for example, a faulty car part came out of a factory, asking why the first time would yield the most obvious answer—say, that someone on the assembly line had made a mistake. By then asking why that mistake occurred, an underlying cause might surface—such as insufficient training on a task. Asking why again, the company might discover the training program was underfunded; and asking why about that could lead back to fundamental company priorities about where money should be spent and what was most important in the end.

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?

A growing body of research describes what happens when we allow the unconscious mind to work on a problem.

Similar research exists on daydreaming and its value in producing original, creative ideas. And everyone knows about the clichéd (but only because it’s true) idea-in-the-shower moment. The same neurological forces seem to be at work in all of these instances. The sleeping or relaxed brain cuts off distractions and turns inward, as the right hemisphere becomes more active, leading to periods of greater connectivity.

The mind is inclined to try to solve problems by doing the same things over and over, following familiar and well-worn neural paths.

The idea, then, is to force your brain off those predictable paths by purposely “thinking wrong”—coming up with ideas that seem to make no sense, mixing and matching things that don’t normally go together. Proponents of this approach say it has a jarring effect on creative thinking; in neurological terms, when you force yourself to confront contrary thoughts or upside-down ideas, you “jiggle the synapses” in the brain,

“The industrial economy was all about4 knowing the answer and expressing confidence,” Ries said. “If you did your homework, you were supposed to know. If you had unanswered questions, that meant you did a bad job and wouldn’t get rewarded.”

There are different ways of thinking about purpose. A furniture retailer might choose to think its purpose is to sell people furniture. But it could also approach the business in a very different way. Its higher purpose might be that the company brings a sense of style into the lives of those on a budget; or that it enables people to express their creativity through home furnishings.

Whom must we fearlessly become? That can be a difficult challenge, he says, because it requires “envisioning a version of the company that does not exist yet.”

They can’t rest on what they’ve already done, or what they know. The need to bring a “beginner’s mind” to business may make it necessary to—if only temporarily—set aside all history, and all notions of what has worked in the past, in order to ask questions from a fresh perspective.

If we were kicked out of the company, what do you think the new CEO would do?

What should we stop doing? Company leaders naturally tend to focus on what they should start doing. Bergstrand notes that coming to terms with what you’re willing to eliminate is always harder.

shift the nature of brainstorming so that it’s about generating questions instead of ideas.

groups of students (whether children or adults) seem to think more freely and creatively using the “question-storming” method, in which the focus is on generating questions.

a specific form of questioning using three words—How might we? It’s a simple25 way of ensuring that would-be innovators are asking the right questions and using the best wording.

“The how part assumes there are solutions out there—it provides creative confidence. Might says we can put ideas out there that might work or might not—either way, it’s okay. And the we part says we’re going to do it together and build on each other’s ideas.”

removing unnecessary features by continually asking, Do we really need this? and What can we take away?