A More Beautiful Question Quotes

“Great questioners “keep looking”—at a situation or a problem, at the ways people around them behave, at their own behaviors. They study the small details; and they look for not only what’s there but what’s missing. They step back, view things sideways, squint if necessary.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Part of the value in asking naïve questions, Bennett says, is that it forces people to explain things simply, which can help bring clarity to an otherwise complex issue. “If I just keep saying, ‘I don’t get it, can you tell me why once more?,’ it forces people to synthesize and simplify—to strip away the irrelevances and get to the core idea.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

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

“So perhaps the first rule of asking why is that there must be a pause, a space, an interruption in the meeting, a halt of “progress,” a quiet moment looking out the window on the bus. Often, these are the only times when there is time to question.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“at least temporarily, it’s necessary to stop doing and stop knowing in order to start asking.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“to ask powerful Why questions. To do so, we must: •  Step back. •  Notice what others miss. •  Challenge assumptions (including our own). •  Gain a deeper understanding of the situation or problem at hand, through contextual inquiry. •  Question the questions we’re asking. •  Take ownership of a particular question. While a fairly straightforward process, it begins by moving backward.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“nonexperts or outsiders are often better at questioning than the experts. No one would argue that expert knowledge isn’t valuable—but when it’s time to question, it can get in the way.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“A year before Jennifer’s question and Land’s feverish walk, in December of 1942, he had said to Polaroid employees, “If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it . . . if you think of, detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream even if the end is a long way off, for there are about five thousand steps to be taken before we realize it; and start making the first ten, and stay making twenty after, it is amazing how quickly you get through those five thousand steps.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Importantly, the professor was also “willing to ask questions without knowing the answer. Teachers and professors, we think our authority rests on having answers. But students find it really liberating to have a teacher say, ‘I don’t know the answer—so let’s figure this out together.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“In studying “master questioners,” Hal Gregersen inquired about their childhoods and found that most had “at least one adult in their lives who encouraged them to ask provocative questions.” The Nobel laureate scientist Isidor Isaac Rabi was one such child; when he came home from school, “while other mothers asked their kids ‘Did you learn anything today?’ [my mother ] would say, ‘Izzy, did you ask a good question today?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“And perhaps questions, by their very nature, invite and allow for more participation by more kids throughout the class. You don’t have to know the answer to ask a question, so the smart kids don’t dominate. Rothstein thinks it also has something to do with the students’ tendency to quickly become invested in the questions they’ve thought of on their own. “The ‘ownership’ part of this is very important,” he said. “We’ve had kids say that when you ask your own question, you then feel like it’s your job to get the answer.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Fear is the enemy of curiosity”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“What Dan Meyer did in showing the video and then holding back as he waited for that question to form in students’ heads was to transfer ownership: Instead of asking the question himself, he allowed students to think of it on their own—at which point it became their question.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“In some ways, Meier was trying to extend the kindergarten experience through all grades. Teaching kindergarten “was such an extraordinary intellectual experience, and I thought, Why couldn’t we just keep doing that?” Only in kindergarten, she told me, “do we put up with kids asking questions that are off-topic.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Before settling on her five habits of mind, 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. “I’ve always been very concerned with democracy. 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?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

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

“I asked Meier about that second question, and she said it originally popped into her head about forty years ago, when a third-grade student at her Harlem school said to her, “What’s different about this school is you’re interested in what we don’t know, not just what we do know.” Meier was very taken with that comment; it confirmed to her, more than any of the impressive test results her school was achieving, that she was doing what she’d set out to do when she started the Central Park East schools.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“the more general problem of schools favoring memorized answers over creative questions is nothing new. Some point out that it’s built into an educational system that was created in a different time, the Industrial Age, and for a different purpose.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“What’s this?” and “What’s that?” 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.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“What If possibilities are powerful things; they are the seeds of innovation. But you do not get from idea to reality in one leap, even if you’ve got spring-force dynamics on your side. 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. This is the final, and critical, How stage of inquiry—when you’ve asked all the Whys, considered the What Ifs . . . and must now figure out, How do I actually get this done? It’s the action stage, yet it is still driven by questions, albeit more practical ones.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“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. They often result from connecting existing ideas in unusual and interesting ways.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Exploring What If possibilities is a wide-open, fun stage of questioning and should not be rushed.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“(Epiphanies often are characterized as “Aha! moments,” but that suggests the problem has been solved in a flash. More often, insights arrive as What if moments—bright possibilities that are untested and open to question.)”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“(Basic formula: Q (questioning) + A (action) = I (innovation). On the other hand, Q – A = P (philosophy).”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“This all comprises the first stage of innovative questioning—first confronting, formulating, and framing the initial question that articulates the challenge at hand, and trying to gain some understanding of context. I think of this as the Why stage, though not every question asked at this juncture has to begin with the word why. Still, this is the point at which one is apt to inquire: •  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?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“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. Until Watson acquires the equivalent of human curiosity, creativity, divergent thinking skills, imagination, and judgment, it will not be able to formulate the kind of original, counterintuitive, and unpredictable questions an innovative thinker—or even just your average four-year-old—can come up with.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“When I visited Watson and its programmers recently at IBM’s main research facility—where the machine, consisting of a stack of servers, resides alone in a basement, humming quietly and waiting for questions to crunch on—I inquired (directing my queries to the nearby humans, not the machine) whether Watson might ever turn the tables on us and start asking us wickedly complex questions. While that’s not its purpose, its programmers point out something interesting and quite promising: As Watson comes in increasing contact with doctors and medical students currently using the system, the machine is slowly training them to ask more and better questions in order to pull the information they need out of the system. As it trains them to be better questioners, Watson will almost certainly help them to be better doctors.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Through the years, companies from Polaroid (Why do we have to wait for the picture?) to Pixar (Can animation be cuddly?21) have started with questions. However, when it comes to questioning, companies are like people: They start out doing it, then gradually do it less and less. A hierarchy forms, a methodology is established, and rules are set; after that, what is there to question?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“The more we’re deluged with information, with “facts” (which may or may not be), views, appeals, offers, and choices, then the more we must be able to sift and sort and decode and make sense of it all through rigorous inquiry.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“But business leaders sometimes find themselves thrust back into questioning mode during dire or dynamic times, when those rules and methods they’ve come to rely on no longer work. Such is the case in today’s business market, where the speed of, and need for, innovation has been ratcheted up—forcing some companies to ask bigger and more fundamental questions than they’ve asked in years about everything from the company’s identity, to its mission, to a reexamination of who the customer is and what the core competencies should be. Much of it boils down to a fundamental question that a lot of companies find themselves asking right now: With all that’s changing in the world and in our customers’ lives, what business are we really in?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas