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June 15 - June 27, 2019
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.
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
“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,”
“Answers, on the other hand, often end...
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What business are we in now—and is there still a job for me?
Charging From "Why are company falling back competitors ?"
One of the most important things questioning does is
enable people to think and act in the face of uncertainty.
Now that we know what we now know, what’s possible now
Why should I have to pay these fees? (He has admitted that another question on his mind at the time was How am I going explain this charge to my wife?
Metaphor is funny
With all that’s changing in the world and in our customers’ lives, what business are we really in?
Question is enough to be Create vision and mission tasks.
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?
Question to adapt future
But if we can’t compete with technology when it comes to storing answers, questioning—that uniquely human capacity—is our ace in the hole.
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.
we’ve gotten used to having our queries answered quickly and in bite-size servings.
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.
“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?
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
disruptive innovation
Clayton Christensen introduce this term
twenty-five-year2 posteighties period of efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.
Why 25 years?
How can we save a little bit of money, make it a little more efficient, where can we cut costs?” But Yamashita says the era of “small-minded questions”
Small-mind vd expansive question
to advance their agenda, their position, or their brands.
In order to innovate now,
to ask more expansive q...
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The old, closed questions (How many? How much? How fast?) still matter on a practical level, but increasingly businesses
sophisticated open questions (Why? What if? How?)
clearer sense of purpose, a vision for the future, and an a...
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“The free association done in brainstorming sessions is often shackled by peer pressure and as a result generates obvious responses.”
company leaders often prefer being supplied with answers over questions “because answers allow us to take action, while questions mean that we need to keep thinking.”)
outsider looking at your business will probably never understand it as well as you do. Hence, that outsider generally shouldn’t be telling you what to do. He/she should be helping you to see things from a different angle, challenge your own assumptions, reframe old problems, and ask better questions—so that, in the end, you can figure out the solutions yourself.
Where did the balance between thinking and doing get out of equilibrium?”
thinking skills at the company via a course called Thinking 2.0. “It’s advocating that people have to learn how to find the tensions in arguments, and how to build the scaffolding of questions around problems,”
What would you do if you ran the U.S. Postal Service?
