A More Beautiful Question Quotes

“That’s because with each new advance, Thrun said, one must pause to ask, Now that we know what we now know, what’s possible now?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“we all live in the world our questions create.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“In Hal Gregersen’s study of business leaders who question, he found that they exhibited an unusual “blend of humility and confidence”15—they were humble enough to acknowledge a lack of knowledge, and confident enough to admit this in front of others.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Rothstein maintains. “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.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“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.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“embrace ignorance”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“A question can reside in the mind for a long time—maybe forever—without being spoken to anyone.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“or flashlights that, in the words of Dan Rothstein of the Right Question Institute (RQI), “shine a light on where you need6 to go.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Noonan observes that if you never actually do anything about a problem yourself, then you’re not really questioning—you’re complaining”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“We come out of the womb questioning,” noted the small-schools-movement pioneer Deborah Meier.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Always the beautiful answer Who asks a more beautiful question. —E.E. Cummings”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“What if a job interview tested one’s ability to ask questions, as well as answer them? The logical way to achieve that would be to ask interviewees to generate questions. While job interviews often end with the interviewee being asked, Do you have any questions?, that’s treated more as a rote throwaway line, and if anything it invites only closed, practical questions (When would I start? How much travel will there be?) as opposed to thoughtful, creative questions. As an alternative approach, tell every person coming in for an interview to bring a few questions with them. Make it clear those questions should be ambitious and open-ended—Why, What If, and How questions are recommended. These should also be relevant to your company or industry. The questions might inquire about ways the company or its offerings could be expanded or improved; a customer or societal challenge that could be tackled by the company; an untapped opportunity to be explored. The questions this person brings will reveal a lot about him or her. Are the questions audacious and imaginative, or more modest and practical? Do the questions indicate that the candidate did some research before forming them (if so, good sign: it indicates the candidate knows how to do contextual inquiry). To test whether the person can question on the fly, you might ask, during the interview, that the candidate build upon one or more of the prepared questions with additional questions (using the Right Question Institute practice of follow-up questioning to improve and advance existing questions). For example, if she has suggested a What If scenario, ask her to now challenge her own assumptions with Why questions, or get her to take her idea to a more practical level by generating How questions. This will show if a person knows how to “think in questions.” If the candidate has come up with at least one interesting question and then improved on that question during the interview, that person is clearly a gifted questioner and is likely a welcome addition to a company’s culture of inquiry.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“That, right there, is a beautiful question for the ages: What do you want to say? Why does it need to be said? What if you could say it in a way that has never before been done? How might you do that?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Keep yourself away from the answers,60 but alive in the middle of the question—this is the warning scrawled on the wall in the room where the acclaimed Irish novelist Colum McCann does his writing. I asked McCann what he meant by that line, and he wrote back, “We must embrace the notion that answers are in fact quite boring. The Irish are especially good or infuriating in this respect. We answer questions with questions. But in my opinion that’s a good place to be. A little perplexed by the perplexity of life.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“As to which question to choose, to some degree the question chooses you. It’s the one that resonates with you for some reason only you understand. What will make it a beautiful question for you, and one worth staying with, is the passion you feel for it. Look for a question that is “ambitious yet actionable”—or, as the physicist Edward Witten puts it, a question that’s hard enough to be interesting, but realistic enough that you have some hope of answering it.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“We all have goals, plans, passions, interests, concerns; we have lots to do and to think about, so why add on a big, difficult unanswered question? Because a question can be propulsive. You may have lists of things to do, goals to achieve, as we all have, in a drawer somewhere; but if you have one compelling question, it’s harder to set aside and ignore. To quote David Cooperrider, a powerful question never sleeps. It can get deep into your head, to the point that you may find yourself working on it both consciously and unconsciously.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“We found the common ground between gun owners and nonowners by using questions,” Bond told me. Among the questions people could agree on: Do you care about gun violence? Are you for gun responsibility? “These elicited unqualified yeses,” Bond said, “whereas statements like ‘Gun owners must be more responsible’ elicited personalized, defensive answers.” Bond considers questions to be “the verbal equivalent of nonviolent conflict resolution.” The only way to get any traction on polarizing issues is to attract people on both sides, “not bully them into submission.” As he noted, questions—if worded sensitively—can show respect to both sides of an issue, invite participation, and open up conversation. Bond, the former advertiser, described it as “the art of ‘pull’ versus ‘push.’ It can’t be done without questions.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“give yourself a strong incentive to want to risk failure.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“We’ve seen that companies sometimes use a hypothetical What If question to temporarily remove constraints that can inhibit ambitious thinking (What if cost weren’t an issue—how might we do things differently?), and the same principle applies when people are pursuing new ideas or embarking on change in their lives. Often the biggest constraint is fear of failure.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller, who said, “It’s easier to act your way33 into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Jacqueline Novogratz has her own spin24 on this concept, phrased in the question What are you doing when you feel most beautiful? In her travels for the Acumen Fund, she sometimes asks her question in unlikely settings: “I decided to try it out on women living in a slum in Bombay.” At first, it didn’t go over well: “One woman said, ‘There’s nothing in our lives that’s beautiful.’ But finally another woman, who worked as a gardener, said, ‘Well, I can think of one time. All winter long I slog and slog, but when those flowers push through the ground, I feel beautiful.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Roko Belic, who believes that “gratitude is a shortcut to happiness.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“What if we start with what we already have? When innovators look at the world around them, they’re often looking for what’s missing. But while questioning your own life, it’s also important to look, via “appreciative inquiry,” not just for what’s missing, but also for what’s there. The main premise of appreciative inquiry is that positive questions, focusing on strengths and assets, tend to yield more effective results than negative questions focusing on problems or deficits. Strength-based questioning focuses on what is working in our lives—so that we can build upon that and get more out of it.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“In one of his lectures on creativity, the comedian John Cleese talked about the need to find one’s own “tortoise enclosure”—that19 sheltered, quiet place where you can go for extended periods to escape from the distractions of the outside world so that you can think without interruption.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“If you fear not having answers to the questions you might ask yourself, remember that one of the hallmarks of innovative problem solvers is that they are willing to raise questions without having any idea of what the answer might be. Part of being able to tackle complex and difficult questions is accepting that there is nothing wrong with not knowing. People who are good at questioning are comfortable with uncertainty.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“That word process is key. You don’t just “find” answers to complex life problems (or any type of complex problem, including business ones). You work your way, gradually, toward figuring out those answers, relying on questions each step of the way.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“How might we? (HMW) form of questioning”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“For innovative questioning to gain traction, there has to be a willingness throughout the company to build on ideas, to keep the tone of questioning generally positive (à la appreciative inquiry), and to use language that is open and inclusive (How might we?). Responding to exploratory questions with highly practical ones (How much will it cost? Who’s going to do all this new work? What happens if the idea fails?) can have an important place in the discussion, but not necessarily at the early stages. Part of building a culture of inquiry is teaching people to defer judgment while exploring new ideas and big questions. This is necessary because many of46 us are conditioned to react to questions by trying to answer them too quickly or by countering them “devil’s advocate” style.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“the best corporate learning environments have some common elements. Bringing in outsiders to teach and inspire; encouraging insiders to teach each other; putting employees’ work on the walls to share ideas, especially on work in progress—all invite questioning and feedback from others and encourage greater collaboration”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“A learning company might also think of itself as an ongoing “idea conference,” as in What if we could create the experience of a TED conference, every day, within the company”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas