A More Beautiful Question Quotes

“As Winston Churchill once said, “The trick is to go from one failure65 to another, with no loss of enthusiasm.” But how does one learn to perform that “trick” of “failing enthusiastically”?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“These days it’s easier and less expensive to just try out your ideas than to figure out if you should try them out.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“The kids used their time much more efficiently by constructing right away. They tried one way of building, and if it didn’t work, they quickly tried another. They got in a lot more tries. They learned from their mistakes as they went along, instead of attempting to figure out everything in advance. The point of the marshmallow experiment was not to humble MBA students (if anything, that was a side benefit), but rather to better understand how to make progress when tasked with a difficult challenge in uncertain conditions. What we learn from those kids is that there’s no substitute for quickly trying things out to see what works. Looking at this through the questioning prism: The MBA students got stuck too long contemplating the possible What Ifs, while the kids moved quickly from What If to How. As soon as they thought of a possible combination, they tried it to see how it would work.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“The possibilities for prototyping will be greatly expanded as 3-D printing becomes widely available and affordable over the next few years. The technology, which makes it easy to sketch an idea for an object on a computer screen and then manufacture a physical version (usually made of plastic or steel), is “enabling a class of ordinary people61 to take their ideas and turn those into physical, real products,” according to J. Paul Grayson, chief executive of the design-software company Alibre. It provides just one more way to bring our questions into the physical world.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“A prototype is a question, embodied.”60 Given a body, the question becomes harder to ignore. Nanda’s question—What if a clock had wheels?—became much more compelling to people when they actually saw a clock with wheels.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“One of the difficult early challenges at this stage is to make a commitment to one idea. At the wide-open What If stage of inquiry, one tends to ask many questions, to explore multiple possibilities—from practical to far-out ideas. But when it comes time to act on an idea, you have to narrow possibilities and converge on the one deemed worthy of being taken to the next level.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“The How stage of questioning is where the rubber meets the road or, in Nanda’s case, the clock hits the floor. It’s the point at which things come together and then, more often than not, fall apart, repeatedly. Reality intrudes and nothing goes quite as planned.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“the conscious brain is resistant to wide-open idea generation and far-reaching connective inquiry. 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,51 in the words of author and adult learning expert Kathleen Taylor. In so doing, you may loosen some of the old, stale neural connections and make it easier to form new ones.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“(The designer George Lois, who claims some of his best ideas have come while meandering through the Metropolitan Museum, says, “Museums are the custodians of epiphanies.”)”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“And it’s possible you may get different results depending on which hand you doodle with,” Kounios says. “Using the left hand may stimulate the brain’s right hemisphere.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“The sleeping or relaxed brain cuts off distractions and turns inward, as the right hemisphere becomes more active, leading to periods of greater connectivity.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Google’s scientist-in-residence Ray Kurzweil47 revealed in an interview. He said that when he is working on a difficult problem, he sets aside time, right before going to bed, to review all the pertinent issues and challenges. Then he goes to sleep and allows his unconscious mind to go to work.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough 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.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“In the more relaxed state, neural networks open up and connections of all kinds form more freely.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

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

“It also helps to have a wide base of knowledge on all sorts of things that might seem to be unrelated to the problem—the more eclectic your storehouse of information, the more possibilities for unexpected connections.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“if you have a curious mind—and if you actively ask questions and gather knowledge to sate that curiosity—this also can aid in connective inquiry by providing “a plethora of raw materials to be connected,” as Zhong puts it. In particular, if your curiosity has been focused on a particular problem, and you’ve been doing deep thinking, contextual inquiry, questioning the problem from various perspectives and angles, asking your multiple Whys—it all becomes fodder for later insights and smart recombinations.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“we can’t necessarily control the brain’s search for remote connections—much of which happens in the unconscious mind—but we can provide impetus and help guide that search by focusing on a problem to be solved, a challenging question to be answered. “Having that goal or that question you’re working on is very important,” Zhong confirms. If your conscious mind puts a big question out there, chances are good that your unconscious mind will go to work on it.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Just asking Why and What If will not necessarily cause these neural connections to occur—but questioning can help nourish the trees and extend the reach of those branches.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“We arrive at originality because the dendrites have reached out and made contact with the branches of faraway “trees,” thereby enabling us to combine thoughts, bits of knowledge, and influences that normally do not mix.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“remote associations—“like when we think of ‘table’ and the idea of ‘under the table’”—require more of a neural reach. The brain’s right hemisphere, made up of cells with longer branches, is better suited for this task.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“To get a picture of what’s going on, Heilman says, start by thinking of the brain as a forest full of trees. “Think of a neuron, or a nerve cell, as one of those trees,” he says. In this analogy, the cell body forms the tree trunk; there are major branches, known as axons, and smaller branches, dendrites, that extend out to the farthest reaches. “In the brain, some of those trees are closer together than others, and the branches communicate with each other.” As this happens, “neural connections” are formed, which can produce new thoughts, ideas, and insights.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

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

“But this much can be said of Phillips, Polaroid’s Land, Netflix’s Hastings, Acumen’s Novogratz, the Airbnb founders, and others in this book: Confronted with a problem that was larger than themselves, they decided to make that problem—and the question that defined the problem—their own. The difference between just asking a question or pursuing it is the difference between flirting with an idea or living with it. If you choose the latter, the question will likely become what the psychotherapist Eric Maisel calls a “productive obsession.”35 It will surface, recede, then surface again. It will invade your dreams as it embeds itself in your subconscious. You’ll wrestle with it, walk with it, sleep with it.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“One classic example involved a hospital33 group that hired IDEO to help answer the question What is our patient experience like? The hospital executives were surprised when IDEO, instead of doing a snazzy PowerPoint presentation, showed them a long, deadly dull video of a hospital ceiling. The point of the film: “When you lie in a hospital bed all day, all you do is look at the ceiling, and it’s a really shitty experience,” IDEO’s Paul Bennett explained. The firm understood this because someone from IDEO actually checked into the hospital, was wheeled around on a gurney, and then lay in a hospital bed for hours. This kind of “immersive” approach enables the firm to consider a question or problem from the inside out, instead of from the outside looking in. (Soon after seeing the video, the hospital’s nurses took it upon themselves to decorate the ceiling tiles in each room.)”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Contextual inquiry is about asking questions up close and in context, relying on observation, listening, and empathy to guide us toward a more intelligent, and therefore more effective, question.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Everything that’s ever happened to you or occurred to you in your life informs every decision you make—and also influences what questions you decide to ask. So it can be useful to step back and inquire, Why did I come up with that question?” Burton adds, “Every time you come up with a question, you should be wondering, What are the underlying assumptions of that question? Is there a different question I should be asking?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“incumbency has an interest in maintaining the status quo. To question well, you must have the ability to say, ‘It doesn’t have to be that way.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

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

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