A More Beautiful Question Quotes

“One of the most important things questioning does is to enable people to think and act in the face of uncertainty. As Steve Quatrano of the Right Question Institute puts it, forming questions helps us “to organize our thinking around18 what we don’t know.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Cooperrider says that “organizations gravitate toward the questions they ask.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Being willing to question is one thing; questioning well and effectively is another.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“In some ways, it can be more difficult or risky for those in authority to question. 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

“The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer observed that questions “are the engines of intellect5—cerebral machines that convert curiosity into controlled inquiry.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“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

“A journey of inquiry that (hopefully) culminates in change can be a long road, with pitfalls and detours and often nary an answer in sight. That’s why it can be helpful to approach inquiry systematically, as a step-by-step progression. The best innovators are able to live with not having the answer right away because they’re focused on just trying to get to the next question.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“when we want to shake things up and instigate change, it’s necessary to break free of familiar thought patterns and easy assumptions. We have to veer off the beaten neural path. And we do this, in large part, by questioning.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“questions challenge authority and disrupt established structures, processes, and systems, forcing people to have to at least think about doing something differently. To encourage or even allow questioning is to cede power”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“All of which means that, whereas in the past one needed to appear to have “all the answers” in order to rise in companies, today, at least in some enlightened segments of the business world, the corner office is there for the askers”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Yet chances are, for the rest of her life, that four-year-old girl will never again ask questions as instinctively, as imaginatively, or as freely as she does at that shining moment. Unless she is exceptional, that age is her questioning peak.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“But in searching for common denominators among these brilliant change-makers, one thing I kept finding was that many of them were exceptionally good at asking questions.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“The Why/What If/How progression offers a simplified way to approach questioning; it’s an attempt to bring at least some semblance of order to a questioning process that is, by its nature, chaotic and unpredictable. A journey of inquiry is bound to lead you into the unknown (as it should), but if you have a sense of the kinds of questions to ask at various stages along the way, you’ve at least got some road markers. Indeed, this is the beauty of “process” in general: It may not provide any answers or solutions, but, as one design-thinker told me, having a process helps you to keep taking next steps—so that, as he put it, “even when you don’t know what41 you’re doing, you still know what to do.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“What do you want to say? Why does it need to be said”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

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

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

“What might the potential for humans be if we really encouraged that spirit of questioning in children, instead of closing it down? I”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“To the extent a school is like a factory,”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

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

“What makes you think you know more than the experts? (The answer is that you don’t know more, you know less—which sometimes is a good thing.) Another”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert.” Such a mind, he added, is “open to all possibilities” and “can see things as they are.” Suzuki”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“questioning is a more subtle and complex skill than many realize, involving three kinds of sophisticated thinking—divergent, convergent, and metacognitive. Some of it comes naturally to kids, but some must be learned and practiced. Since questioning seems to drop off at around age five, the innate questioning skills we start out with have long been neglected by junior high and high school. By that time, “the question-asking muscle,” as Rothstein calls it, has atrophied and needs to be built up.     Can”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

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

“Still, technology doesn’t necessarily ease the trepidation many people feel about going public with ideas—particularly at the rough, early stages. As the writer Peter Sims noted in63Harvard Business Review, most of us, throughout our school years and even in the business world, have been taught to hold back ideas until they are polished and perfect. That tendency toward overthinking and excessively preparing, rather than quickly trying out ideas to get feedback and to see what works and doesn’t, is a behavior that becomes ingrained over time. But”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

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

“Libraries are being remade as interesting maker spaces, with the librarian playing more of the role of the teacher of inquiry-based learning,”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“With so much evidence in its favor and with everyone from Einstein to Jobs in its corner, why, then, is questioning underappreciated in business, undertaught in schools, and underutilized in our everyday lives?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“(This great quote from Close was featured recently on the site BrainPickings: “Ask yourself an interesting enough question3 and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome—which I think is a more interesting place to be.”)”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“well-meaning people are often trying to solve a problem by answering the wrong question.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas