a more beautiful question 
by warren berger 



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Contents
Introduction
1 The Power of Inquiry
2 Why We Stop Questioning
3 The Why, What If, and How of Innovative Questioning
4 Questioning in Business
5 Questioning for Life
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index of Questions
A Note on the Author
INTRODUCTION
Why Questioning?
As a journalist, I’ve been asking questions my whole professional life. But until
a few years ago, I hadn’t thought much about the art or the science of
questioning. And I never considered the critical role questioning plays in
enabling people to innovate, solve problems, and move ahead in their careers
and lives.
That changed during my work
1 on a series of articles, and eventually a book,
on how designers, inventors, and engineers come up with ideas and solve
problems. My research brought me in contact with some of the world’s leading
innovators and creative minds. As I looked at how they approached challenges,
there was no magic formula, no single explanation, for their success. 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.
For some of them, their greatest successes—their breakthrough inventions, hot
start-up companies, the radical solutions they’d found to stubborn problems—
could be traced to a question (or a series of questions) they’d formulated and
then answered.
I thought this was intriguing, but it only had a small part in the book I was
working on, so I tucked the idea away. Subsequently, I began to notice—as is
often the case when something has come onto your radar—that questioning
seemed to be everywhere I looked. In the business world, for instance, as I
interviewed corporate executives for my writing in Harvard Business Review
and Fast Company, I found a great deal of interest in questioning. Many
businesspeople seemed to be aware, on some level, of a link between
questioning and innovation. They understood that great products, companies,
even industries, often begin with a question. It’s well-known that Google, as
described by its chairman, is a company that “runs on questions,”
2 and that
business stars such as the late Steve Jobs of Apple and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos
made their mark by questioning everything.
Yet, as I began to explore this subject within the business sector, I found few
companies that actually encouraged questioning in any substantive way. There
were no departments or training programs focused on questioning; no policies,
guidelines, best practices. On the contrary, many companies—whether
consciously or not—have established cultures that tend to discourage inquiry in
the form of someone’s asking, for example, Why are we doing this particular
thing in this particular way?
Much the same could be said about schools. Here again, as I talked to educators,
I found a genuine interest in the subject—many teachers acknowledge it’s
critically important that students be able to formulate and ask good questions.
Some of them also realize that this skill is apt to be even more important in the
future, as complexity increases and change accelerates. Yet, for some reason,
questioning isn’t taught in most schools—nor is it rewarded (only memorized
answers are).
In talking to social entrepreneurs working on big, thorny global problems of
poverty, hunger, and water supply, I found that only a few rare innovators were
focused on the importance of asking the right questions about these issues. For
the most part, the old, entrenched practices and approaches tend to hold sway.
The nonprofit sector, like much of industry, is inclined to keep doing what it has
done—hence, well-meaning people are often trying to solve a problem by
answering the wrong question.
In a way, this is true of all of us, in our everyday lives. The impulse is to keep
plowing ahead, doing what we’ve done, and rarely stepping back to question
whether we’re on the right path. On the big questions of finding meaning,
fulfillment, and happiness, we’re deluged with answers—in the form of off-theshelf advice, tips, strategies from experts and gurus. It shouldn’t be any wonder
if those generic solutions don’t quite fit: To get to our answers, we must
formulate and work through the questions ourselves. Yet who has the time or
patience for it?
On some level, we must know—as the business executive knows, as the
schoolteacher knows—that questions are important and that we should be paying
more attention to them, especially the meaningful ones. The great thinkers have
been telling us this since the time of Socrates. The poets have waxed on the
subject: E. E. Cummings, from whom I borrowed this book’s title, wrote, Always
the beautiful answer / who asks a more beautiful question. Artists from Picasso
to Chuck Close have spoken of questioning’s inspirational power. (This great
quote from Close was featured recently on the site BrainPickings: “Ask yourself
an interesting enough question
3 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.”)
Scientists, meanwhile, have been great proponents of questioning, with
Einstein among the most vocal champions. He was asking smart questions from
age four (when he wondered why the compass pointed north), and throughout
his life Einstein saw curiosity as something “holy.” Though he wondered about a
great many things, Einstein was deliberate in choosing which questions to tackle:
In one of his more well-traveled quotes—which he may or may not have actually
said—he reckoned that if he had an hour
4
to solve a problem and his life
depended on it, he’d spend the first fifty-five minutes making sure he was
answering the right question.
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?
Part of it may be that we see questioning as something so fundamental and
instinctive that we don’t need to think about it. “We come out of the womb
questioning,” noted the small-schools-movement pioneer Deborah Meier. And
it’s true—any preschooler can ask questions easily and profusely. A recent study
found the average
5
four-year-old British girl asks her poor mum 390 questions a
day; the boys that age aren’t far behind. So then, it might be said that
questioning is like breathing: It’s a given, an essential and accepted part of life,
and something that anyone, even a child, can do.
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.
This curious fact, in and of itself, gives rise to all sorts of questions.
Why does that four-year-old girl begin to question less at age five or six?
What are the ramifications of that, for her and for the world around her?
And if, as Einstein tells us, questioning is important, why aren’t we trying to
stem or reverse that decline by finding ways to keep questioning alive?
On the other hand, that four-year-old may turn out to be an exception; she may
be one of the rare people who doesn’t stop questioning, like Bezos and Jobs, or
like one of the “master questioners” featured in this book. And if that’s the case,
well, that raises questions, too.
Why do some keep questioning, while others stop? (Was it something in the
genes, in the schools, in the parenting?)
And if we look at the questioners versus the nonquestioners, who seems to be
coming out ahead?
The business world has a kind of love/hate relationship with questioning. The
business-innovation guru Clayton Christensen
6—himself a master questioner—
observes that questioning is seen as “inefficient” by many business leaders, who
are so anxious to act, to do, that they often feel they don’t have time to question
just what it is they’re doing.
And those not in leadership roles frequently perceive (often correctly) that
questioning can be hazardous to one’s career: that to raise a hand in the
conference room and ask “Why?” is to risk being seen as uninformed, or
possibly insubordinate, or maybe both.
Yet—as recently documented in a fascinating research study of thousands of
top business executives—the most creative, successful business leaders have
tended to be expert questioners. They’re known to question the conventional
wisdom of their industry, the fundamental practices of their company, even the
validity of their own assumptions. This has not slowed their rise in business—
rather, it has “turbocharged” it,
7
to quote Hal Gregersen, a business consultant
and INSEAD professor who, along with Christensen and another business
professor, Jeff Dyer, coauthored the research showing questioning to be a key
success factor among innovative executives.
Indeed, the ability to ask the right questions has enabled business leaders to
adapt in a rapidly changing marketplace, Gregersen notes. Inquiring minds can
identify new opportunities and fresh possibilities before competitors become
aware of them. 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.
Considering all of this, one almost can’t help but ask the following:
If we know (or at least strongly suspect) that questioning is a starting point
for innovation, then why doesn’t business embrace it?
Why don’t companies train people to question and create systems and
environments that would encourage them to keep doing so?
And if companies were to do this, how might they go about it?
Regarding those first two questions, one possible answer—and it may also
apply to similar questions about why nonprofit organizations don’t question
more, and why schools don’t teach or encourage questioning—is that 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—not something that is
done lightly in hierarchical companies or in government organizations, or even
in classrooms, where a teacher must be willing to give up control to allow for
more questioning.
Anything that forces people to have to think is not an easy sell, which highlights
the challenge of questioning in our everyday lives—and why we don’t do it as
much as we might or should. Clearly, it is easier (and more “efficient,” as a
nonquestioning business executive might say) to go about our daily affairs
without questioning everything. It’s natural and quite sensible to behave this
way. The neurologist John Kounios observes
8
that the brain finds ways to
“reduce our mental workload,” and one way is to accept without question (or
even to just ignore) much of what is going on around us at any time. We operate
on autopilot—which can help us to save mental energy, allow us to multitask,
and enable us to get through the daily grind.
But 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.
With the constant change we face today, we may be forced to spend less time
on autopilot, more time in questioning mode—attempting to adapt, looking to recreate careers, redefining old ideas about living, working, and retiring,
reexamining priorities, seeking new ways to be creative, or to solve various
problems in our own lives or the lives of others. “We’ve transitioned into always
transitioning,”
9 according to the author and futurist John Seely Brown. In such
times, the ability to ask big, meaningful, beautiful questions—and, just as
important, to know what to do with those questions once they’ve been raised—
can be the first steps in moving beyond old habits and behaviors as we embrace
the new.
How can we develop and improve this ability to question? Can we rekindle that
questioning spark we had at age four? During my conversations and visits with
more than a hundred business innovators, scientists, artists, engineers,
filmmakers, educators, designers, and social entrepreneurs, they shared methods
of asking questions and solving problems. Some shared stories of how
questioning guided their careers or their businesses. Others recounted how a
particular question helped change their life. Many offered insights, techniques,
and tips on the art of inquiry.
Based on their experience—while also borrowing ideas and influences from
existing theories of creativity, design thinking, and problem solving—I devised a
three-part Why–What If–How model for forming and tackling big, beautiful
questions. It’s not a formula, per se—there is no formula for questioning. It’s
more of a framework designed to help guide one through various stages of
inquiry—because ambitious, catalytic questioning tends to follow a logical
progression, one that often starts with stepping back and seeing things differently
and ends with taking action on a particular question.
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.
This book is structured around questions, with one leading to another. Forty-four
questions divide up sections within the chapters, and lots more questions are
embedded within each section. The thirty “question sidebars” scattered
throughout the book tell stories of breakthrough ideas, innovations, or new ways
of thinking that began with a powerful (and sometimes offbeat) question. A
“Question Index” is at the back of the book—because if facts are entitled to an
index, then why not questions?
As to what, exactly, constitutes a “beautiful question”: When I first launched
the idea behind this book as the blog A More Beautiful Question, I laid out the
following entirely subjective definition:
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.
That definition makes clear that this book is not about grand philosophical or
spiritual questions—Why are we here? How does one define “good”? Is there
life after death?—all of those great questions that spark endless, impassioned
debate. I am not particularly qualified to discuss such questions, nor do they fit
within the category of what I would call actionable questions.
The focus here is on questions that can be acted upon, questions that can lead
to tangible results and change. The esteemed physicist Edward Witten
10
told me
that in his work he is always searching for “a question that is hard (and
interesting) enough that it is worth answering and easy enough that one can
actually answer it.”
We don’t often ask such questions; they’re not the kind of queries typically
typed into the Google search box. While it could be said that ours is a Golden
Age of Questioning—with all the online resources now available for getting
instant answers, it’s reasonable to assume people are asking more questions than
ever before—that distinction would be based purely on volume, not necessarily
on the quality or thoughtfulness of the questions being asked. Indeed, on Google,
some of the most popular queries
11 are which celebrity is or isn’t gay. In many
cases, our Google queries are so unimaginative and predictable that Google can
guess what we’re asking before we’re three words into typing it.
This book is more concerned with questions that Google cannot easily
anticipate or properly answer for you—questions that require a different kind of
search. What is the fresh idea that will help my business stand out? What if I
come at my work or my art in a whole different way? How might I tackle a longstanding problem that has affected my community, my family? These are
individualized, challenging, and potentially game-changing questions.
In my inquiry into the value of inquiry, I’ve become convinced that
questioning is more important today than it was yesterday—and will be even
more important tomorrow—in helping us figure out what matters, where
opportunity lies, and how to get there. We’re all hungry for better answers. But
first, we need to learn how to ask the right questions.
CHAPTER 1
The Power of Inquiry
If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they make a decent foot?
What can a question do?
What business are we in now—and is there still a job for me?
Are questions becoming more valuable than answers?
Is “knowing” obsolete?
Why does everything begin with Why?
How do you move from asking to action?
If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they make a
decent foot?
Back in 1976, long before there
1 was a Google to field all of our queries, a
young man named Van Phillips started asking the question above, first in his
head and then aloud. Phillips felt his future depended upon finding a good
answer, and no one seemed to have one for him.
He was twenty-one years old and had been living the charmed life of an
athletic, handsome, and bright young college student. But one day in the summer
of that year, Phillips’s fortunes changed. He was water-skiing on a lake in
Arizona when a small fire broke out on the boat pulling him. In the ensuing
confusion, the boat’s driver didn’t see that a second motorboat, coming around a
blind curve in the lake, was headed straight at Phillips.
Phillips awoke from anesthesia the next morning in a hospital. He recalls, “I
did the proverbial ‘I don’t want to look, but let’s see’” and checked under his
blanket to find “an empty place where my left foot should have been.” The limb
had been severed, just below the knee, by the other boat’s propeller.
At the hospital, Phillips was fitted with “a pink foot attached to an aluminum
tube.” The “foot” wasn’t much more than a block of wood with foam rubber
added; such was the state of prosthetic limbs at the time. Phillips left the hospital
with instructions: Get used to your “new best friend,” walk on it twice a day, and
“toughen up that stump.” One of the first times he tried to walk on the foot,
Phillips recalls, he tripped “on a pebble the size of a pea.” He knew, right then,
this was not going to work for him. He recalls visiting his girlfriend’s parents’
house around that time, and being taken aside by her father, who said, “Van—
you’re just going to have to learn to accept this.” When he heard that, Phillips
recalls, “I bit my tongue. I knew he was right, in a way—I did have to accept
that I was an amputee. But I would not accept the fact that I had to wear this
foot.”
At that moment, Phillips exhibited one of the telltale signs of an innovative
questioner: a refusal to accept the existing reality. He’d shown other signs before
that in childhood—as a kid, he once went through his house and removed all the
doorknobs (mischievous What If I take this apart? childhood stories are common
among questioners). But now, as an adult, he was experiencing a critical Why
moment, as in Why should I settle for this lousy foot?
This did not seem an unreasonable question to Phillips, particularly since he
was very aware—as was everyone else at the time—that amazing things were
happening in the world of technology, particularly in the U.S. space program.
Hence, he naturally wondered why some of the vast means and know-how that
enabled a man to walk on the moon couldn’t somehow be applied to his downto-earth problem.
What he hadn’t thought of at that time—it would become clear to him later, as
he got to know more about the field of prosthetics—was that some problems do
not have governments or large corporations rushing to solve them. The
prosthetics industry had been “in a time warp for decades,” Phillips recalls. No
one was investing in it because the customer base, amputees, was no one’s idea
of an attractive business market. “But this worked to my advantage in a way,”
Phillips told me, years later. Since progress had been stalled for so long, it left
plenty of room to question outdated approaches and status quo practices—and to
inject much-needed fresh thinking.
Still, Phillips quickly found, as a naïve questioner sometimes does, that his
Why and What If inquiries weren’t particularly welcome in the realm of What Is.
Frequently in various professional domains—in hospitals or doctors’ offices, in
business conference rooms, even in classrooms—basic, fundamental questions
can make people impatient and even uncomfortable. Phillips’s questions about
why there weren’t better prosthetic limbs, and whether that could be changed,
could be taken as a challenge to the expertise of those who knew far more than
he did on the subject—the doctors, the prosthetics engineers, and others who
understood “what was possible” at the time.
As an outsider in that domain, Phillips was actually in the best position to ask
questions. One of the many interesting and appealing things about questioning is
that it often has an inverse relationship to expertise—such that, within their own
subject areas, experts are apt to be poor questioners. Frank Lloyd Wright put it
well when he remarked that an expert is someone who has “stopped thinking
because he ‘knows.’”
2
If you “know,” there’s no reason to ask; yet if you don’t
ask, then you are relying on “expert” knowledge that is certainly limited, may be
outdated, and could be altogether wrong.
Phillips was not going to convince the experts that he knew better (and in fact,
he didn’t “know” better—he only suspected). Somewhere along the line, he took
another critical step for a questioner tackling a challenge: He took ownership of
that question, Why can’t they make a better foot? To do this, he had to make a
change of pronouns: Specifically, he had to replace they with I.
This is an important concept, as explained by the small, independent inventor
and inveterate questioner Mark Noonan, who once, after suffering
3 his
umpteenth backache from shoveling snow, wondered, Why don’t they come up
with a better shovel? Noonan solved the problem himself, inventing a shovel
with a long handle, a lever, and a wheel—when you use it, you no longer have to
bend your back. Noonan observes that if you never actually do anything about a
problem yourself, then you’re not really questioning—you’re complaining. And
that situation you’re complaining about may never change because, as Regina
Dugan, a former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
director, has observed about problems in general, “We think someone else—
someone smarter
4
than us, someone more capable, with more resources—will
solve that problem. But there isn’t anyone else.”
When Van Phillips realized that he was going to have to answer his own
question, he also understood, almost immediately, that to inquire about
prosthetics in a meaningful way he would have to wade into that world. He had
been a broadcast major in college, but now changed directions and enrolled in
one of the top prosthetics study programs in the United States, at Northwestern
University, from whence he found work in a prosthetics lab in Utah. He began to
understand how and why prosthetic limbs were designed the way they were.
He would spend nearly a decade grappling with his original question, then
forming new ones, and eventually acting upon those. Phillips’s journey of
inquiry led him to some unusual places: He extracted lessons from the animal
kingdom and borrowed influences from his local swimming pool as well as from
the battlefields of ancient China.
In his pursuit of a better foot, he faltered many times—literally, he fell to the
ground again and again. This would happen as he was trying to answer his latest
question (I wonder if this prototype will hold up better than the last one?) by
taking it for a test run. He would receive his disappointing answer each time the
new version of the foot broke under him. He would curse and swear, and then,
inevitably, he would begin to ask new questions—attempting to understand and
learn from each of his failures.
Then one day, the foot under him didn’t break. And Phillips knew, at that
moment, that he was about to change the world.
What can a question do?
The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer observed that
questions “are the engines of intellect
5—cerebral machines that convert curiosity
into controlled inquiry.” Fischer’s “engine” is just one of many metaphors that
have been used to try to describe the surprising power that questions have.
Questions are sometimes seen as spades that help to unearth buried truths; or
flashlights that, in the words of Dan Rothstein of the Right Question Institute
(RQI), “shine a light on where you need
6
to go.”
The late Frances Peavey, a quirky,
7 colorful social activist whose work
revolved around what she called “strategic questioning” aimed at bridging
cultural differences between people, once observed that a good question is like
“a lever used to pry open the stuck lid on a paint can.”
Maybe we talk about what a question is like because it’s hard to wrap our
minds around what it actually is. Many tend to think of it as a form of speech—
but that would mean if you didn’t utter a question, it wouldn’t exist, and that’s
not the case. A question can reside in the mind for a long time—maybe forever
—without being spoken to anyone.
We do know that the ability to question, whether verbally or through other
means, is one of the things that separates us from lower primates. Paul Harris, an
education professor
8 at Harvard University who has studied questioning in
children, observes, “Unlike other primates, we humans are designed so that the
young look to the old for cultural information.” He sees this as an important
“evolutionary divide”—that from an early age, even before speech, humans will
use some form of questioning to try to gain information. A child may pick up a
kiwi fruit and indicate, through a look or gesture directed at a nearby adult, a
desire to know more. Chimpanzees don’t do this; they may “ask” for a treat
through signaling, but it’s a simple request for food, as opposed to an
information-seeking question.
So then, one of the primary drivers of questioning is an awareness of what we
don’t know—which is a form of higher awareness that separates not only man
from monkey but also the smart and curious person from the dullard who doesn’t
know or care. Good questioners tend to be aware of, and quite comfortable with,
their own ignorance (Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of the TED
Conferences, has been known to brag, “I know more about my ignorance
9
than
you know about yours”). But they constantly probe that vast ignorance using the
question flashlight—or, if you prefer, they attack it with the question spade.
The author Stuart Firestein, in his
10
fine book Ignorance: How It Drives
Science, argues that one of the keys to scientific discovery is the willingness of
scientists to embrace ignorance—and to use questions as a means of navigating
through it to new discoveries. “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.”
This expansive effect of questions has been studied by Dan Rothstein, who
along with his colleague Luz Santana established the Right Question Institute, a
small and fascinating nonprofit group formed in order to try to advance the
teaching of questioning skills. Rothstein believes that questions do something—
he is not sure precisely what—that has an “unlocking” effect in people’s minds.
“It’s an experience we’ve all had at one point or another,” 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.”
How might we prepare during peacetime to offer help in times of war?
12
The exigencies of war have brought forth many a beautiful question. In 1859, a young Swiss
Calvinist named Henry Dunant traveling in Italy came upon the aftermath of a bloody battle
between the Austrian and French armies. On the battlefield some forty thousand men lay dead
or wounded, and Dunant hastily organized the locals in binding wounds and feeding the
injured. Upon his return home, Dunant wrote: “Would there not be some means, during a
period of peace and calm, of forming relief societies whose object would be to have the
wounded cared for in time of war by enthusiastic, devoted volunteers, fully qualified for the
task?” And thus the Red Cross national relief societies were born. The subsequent idea of
pooling the skills and resources of various Red Cross Societies to provide humanitarian
assistance in peacetime, and not just during war, also was championed by Dunant.
Rothstein has seen this phenomenon at work in classrooms where students
(whether adults or children) are instructed to think and brainstorm using only
questions. As they do this, Rothstein says, the floodgates of imagination seem to
open up. The participants tend to become more engaged, more interested, in the
subject at hand; the ideas begin to flow, in the form of questions. Harvard
Business Review writer Polly LaBarre
11 echoes this in describing the effect that
lively and imaginative questioning can have in business settings: Such questions
can be “fundamentally subversive, disruptive, and playful” and seem to “switch
people into the mode required to create anything new.”
How do questions do this? The neurologist and author Ken Heilman,
13 a leading
expert on creative activity in the brain, acknowledges that scant research has
been focused on what’s happening in the brain when we ask questions.
Neurologists these days can tell us what’s going on in the cerebral cortex when
we daydream, watch a commercial, or work on a crossword puzzle, but,
strangely, no one has much to say about the mental processes involved in
forming and asking a question. However, Heilman points out, there has been
significant neurological study of divergent thinking—the mental process of
trying to come up with alternative ideas. Heilman notes, “Since divergent
thinking is about saying, ‘Hey, what if I think differently about this?’ it’s
actually a form of asking questions.”
What we know about divergent thinking is that it mostly happens in the more
creative right hemisphere of the brain; that it taps into imagination and often
triggers random association of ideas (which is a primary source of creativity);
and that it can be intellectually stimulating and rewarding. So to the extent that
questioning triggers divergent thinking, it’s not surprising that it can have the
kind of mind-opening effect that Rothstein has observed in classrooms using
RQI’s question-based teaching.
Rothstein points out, however, that questions not only open up thinking—they
also can direct and focus it. In his exercises, students may begin with wide-open,
divergent “what-if” speculation, but they gradually use their own questions to do
“convergent” (focused) thinking as they get at the core of a difficult problem and
reach consensus on how to proceed. They even use questions for “meta cognitive
thinking,” as they analyze and reflect upon their own questions. “People think of
questioning as simple,” Rothstein says, but when done right, “it’s a very
sophisticated, high-level form of thinking.”
It is also egalitarian: “You don’t have to hold a position
14 of authority to ask a
powerful question,” noted LaBarre. 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. The latter is no
small thing given that, as author Sir Ken Robinson has observed, “In our culture,
not to know16
is to be at fault, socially.”
Being willing to question is one thing; questioning well and effectively is
another. Not all questions have the positive effects described above. Open
questions—in particular, the kind of Why, What If, and How questions that can’t
be answered with simple facts—generally tend to encourage creative thinking
more than closed yes-or-no questions (though closed questions have their place,
too, as we’ll see).
What may be even more important is the tone of questions. Confronted with a
challenge or problem, one could respond with the question Oh my God, what are
we going to do? Faced with the same situation, one might ask, What if this
change represents an opportunity for us? How might we make the most of the
situation?
Questions of the second type, with a more positive tone, will tend to yield
better answers, according to David Cooperrider,
17 a Case Western professor who
has developed a popular theory of “appreciative inquiry.” Cooperrider says that
“organizations gravitate toward the questions they ask.” If the questions from
leaders and managers focus more on Why are we falling behind competitors?
and Who is to blame?, then the organization is more likely to end up with a
culture of turf-guarding and finger-pointing. Conversely, if the questions asked
tend to be more expansive and optimistic, then that will be reflected in the
culture. This is true of more than companies, he maintains. Whether we’re
talking about countries, communities, families, or individuals, “we all live in the
world our questions create.”
What business are we in now—and is there still a job for me?
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 around
18
what we don’t know.” This may explain why questioning is so important in
innovation hotbeds such as Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs must figure out,
seemingly daily, how to create new products and businesses from thin air, while
navigating highly competitive, volatile market conditions.
Sebastian Thrun, the engineer/inventor
19 behind Google’s experimental selfdriving X car and the founder of the online university Udacity, acknowledges the
two-way relationship between technological change and questioning. The
changes are fueled by the questions being asked—but those changes, in turn, fuel
more questions. 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?
In some sense, innovation means trying to find and formulate new questions
that can, over time, be answered. Those questions, once identified, often become
the basis for starting a new venture. Indeed, the rise of a number of today’s top
tech firms—Foursquare, Airbnb, Pandora Internet Radio—can be traced to a
Why doesn’t somebody or What if we were to question, in some cases inspired by
the founder’s personal experience.
One such example, which has become a modern classic business story, is the
origin of the Netflix video-rental service. The man who would go on to start the
company, Reed Hastings, was reacting to one
20 of those frustrating everyday
experiences we’ve all had. Hastings had been lax in returning some movies
rented from a Blockbuster video store, and by the time he got around to it, the
late charges were exorbitant. A frustrated Hastings wondered, 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?)
Surely, others have been similarly outraged by late fees. But Hastings decided
to do something about it, which led to a subsequent question: What if a videorental business were run like a health club? He then set about figuring out how
to design a video-rental model that had a monthly membership, like a health
club, with no late fees. (Years later, Hastings would question whether Netflix
could and should expand its model: Why are we only renting the films and
shows? What if we made them, too?)
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?
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?
As companies are forced to ask tough questions in the face of change, so, too,
are the people working for those companies, or, increasingly, working for
themselves or just trying to find work, period. The same forces roiling
businesses—rapid technological upheaval, leading to changes in how jobs are
performed and what skills are required—are creating what the New York Times
recently characterized
22 as a perfect storm in which no one, whether blue-collar
or white-collar and whatever level of expertise, can afford to stand pat. “The
need to constantly adapt is the new reality for many workers” was the theme of
the piece headlined “The Age of Adaptation.” The story had a term for what is
now required of many workers—serial mastery.
To keep up, today’s worker must constantly learn new skills by, for example,
taking training courses. But as the Times article points out, these workers “are
often left to figure out for themselves what new skills will make them more
valuable, or just keep them from obsolescence.”
Stories like this have been appearing with greater frequency—the Times
columnist Thomas Friedman has written extensively
23 about a new global
economy that is ruthlessly demanding more skills and more inventiveness from
the workforce. A quick scan of the stories’ online comment sections reveals how
people feel about all of this: worried and bewildered, but also, in some cases,
angry and bitter. I went to school, got a degree, picked up a skill, gained
expertise in my field—I established myself over the years. Why should I have to
start over?
Unfortunately, that’s a Why question that, however justified and reasonable it
may seem, doesn’t lead anywhere. The rules Friedman is talking about have
already changed; fair or not, like it or not. The challenge now is to figure out
what these new conditions mean for each of us—what openings they create, and
how best to exploit those openings and possibilities. A training program may be
appropriate, but before taking any action, fundamental questioning is essential.
How can you know whether retraining is worthwhile, or which kinds of training,
without first spending time on questions such as:
• 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?
Changing tracks in a career is a form of innovation, on a personal level—and
requires the same kind of rigorous inquiry that a business should undertake in
pursuing a new direction or strategy. What’s required is not just a onetime
adaptation; more likely, we’ll all have to be adept at continually changing tracks
as we move forward.
Joichi Ito, the director of the
24 esteemed MIT Media Lab, offers an interesting
theory about the need for lifelong adaptation. When the world moved at a slower
pace and things weren’t quite so complex, we spent the early part of life in
learning mode. Then, once you became an adult, “you figured out what your job
was and you repeated the same thing over and over again for the rest of your
life.” Today, Ito explains, because of constant change and increased complexity,
that rinse-and-repeat approach in adult life no longer works as well. In a time
when so much of what we know is subject to revision or obsolescence, the
comfortable expert must go back to being a restless learner.
Are questions becoming more valuable than answers?
As expertise loses its “shelf life,” it also loses some of its value. If we think of
“questions” and “answers” as stocks on the market, then we could say that, in
this current environment, questions are rising in value while answers are
declining. “Right now, knowledge is a commodity,”
25 says the Harvard
education expert Tony Wagner. “Known answers are everywhere, and easily
accessible.” Because we’re drowning in all of this data, “the value of explicit
information is dropping,”
26 according to Wagner’s colleague at Harvard, the
innovation professor Paul Bottino. The real value, Bottino added, is in “what you
can do with that knowledge, in pursuit of a query.”
The glut of knowledge has another
27
interesting effect, as noted by author
Stuart Firestein: It makes us more ignorant. That is to say, as our collective
knowledge grows—as there is more and more to know, more than we can
possibly keep up with—the amount that the individual knows, in relation to the
growing body of knowledge, is smaller.
The good news, Firestein notes, is that there is more ignorance for us to
explore. There are more “collectively known” things that we, as individuals, can
learn about and a vast expanse of unknown things we could, potentially,
discover. Overall, there’s more darkness into which we can shine that “question
flashlight.”
Another way to think of it is that as we increasingly find ourselves surrounded
by the new, the unfamiliar, and the unknown, we’re experiencing something not
unlike early childhood. Everywhere we turn, there’s something to wonder and
inquire about. MIT’s Joi Ito says that as we try to come to terms with a new
reality that requires us to be lifelong learners (instead of just early-life learners),
we must try to maintain or rekindle the curiosity, sense of wonder, inclination to
try new things, and ability to adapt and absorb that served us so well in
childhood. We must become, in a word, neotenous (neoteny being a biological
term that describes the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood). To do so,
we must rediscover the tool that kids use so well in those early years: the
question. Ito puts it quite simply: “You don’t learn unless you question.”
Questions trump answers: Some people have been saying this for a while, among
them John Seely Brown. The former chief scientist at Xerox Corporation, Brown
headed up its famous Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) for years. More
recently, as cofounder of an innovation think tank known as the Deloitte Center
for the Edge, Brown advises some of the world’s leading companies on how to
keep pace in a turbulent environment. He has also written about how our
approach to education must be completely rethought, in light of what he calls the
“exponential change” that is upon us.
Things are changing so fast, Brown told me, “I have to reframe how I even
think about using all of this technology. I find myself asking all kinds of
fundamental questions. And as I do that, I eventually realize that the lenses I’m
looking through to see the world around me are wrong—and that I have to
construct a whole new frame of reference.”
What if we could paint over our mistakes?
28
When electric typewriters became popular in the 1950s, the ribbons made it harder to erase
typing errors—a problem noticed by Bette Nesmith Graham. Graham worked two jobs: bank
secretary (and heavy typist) by day, commercial artist at night. One night while doing artwork,
she wondered, What if I could paint over my mistakes when typing, the way I do when
painting? She filled a small bottle with a paint and water formula and brought it to the office.
Her “miracle mixture” made it easy to cover over typing errors, and soon Graham was
supplying hundreds of other secretaries with her correction fluid. The year before she died in
1980, Graham sold Liquid Paper for close to $50 million, giving half of that to her son, the
former Monkees band member Mike Nesmith—who used it to fund innovations of his own at
the pioneering multimedia recording company Pacific Arts.
The problem is not just rapid change—it’s also the sheer volume of
information rushing at us from all directions and many sources. Without a
filtering device, we can’t separate what’s relevant or reliable from what’s not.
When we’re overloaded with information, “context becomes critical,” Brown
says. “What matters now is your ability to triangulate, to look at something from
multiple sources, and construct your own warrants for what you choose to
believe.” That can involve “asking all kinds of peripheral questions,” Brown
notes, such as What is the agenda behind this information? How current is it?
How does it connect with other information I’m finding?
The author Seth Godin is
29
touching on a similar idea when he writes, “Our
new civic and professional life is all about doubt. About questioning the status
quo, questioning marketing or political claims, and most of all questioning
what’s next.” To navigate in today’s info-swamp,
30 we must have, according to
Bard College president Leon Botstein, “the ability to evaluate risk, recognize
demagoguery, the ability to question not only other people’s views, but one’s
own assumptions.” 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.
Can technology help us ask better questions? For the most part, it is better suited
to responding to questions—not so good at asking them. Picasso was onto this
truth fifty years ago when he commented, “Computers are useless—they only
give
31 you answers.”
On the other hand, technology can serve up amazing, innovative, life-changing
answers—if we know how to ask for them. The potential is mind-boggling,
32 as
IBM’s Watson system demonstrates. Its winning appearance in 2011 on the TV
quiz show Jeopardy! proved it could answer questions better than any human.
Today, IBM is feeding the system a steady diet of, among other things, medical
information—so that it can answer just about any question a doctor might throw
at it (If patient exhibits symptoms A, B, and C, what might this indicate?). But
the doctor still has to figure out what to ask—and then must be able to question
Watson’s response, which might be technically accurate but not
commonsensical.
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.
Is “knowing” obsolete?
Today, only a small group of medical professionals are using the Watson system
to answer their questions. But eventually, all doctors—and all the rest of us, as
well—will have access to some form of cloud-based super-search-engine that
can quickly answer almost any factual question with a level of precision and
expertise that’s way beyond what we have now. Which reinforces that the value
of questions is going to keep rising as that of answers keeps falling.
Clearly, technology will have the answers covered—so we will no longer need
to fill our heads with those answers as much as we once did, bringing to mind a
classic Einstein story. A reporter doing an interview concludes
33 by asking
Einstein for his phone number, and Einstein reaches for a nearby phone book.
While Einstein is looking up his own number in the book, the reporter asks why
such a smart man can’t remember it. Einstein explains that there’s no reason to
fill his mind with information that can so easily be looked up.
Why did my candy bar melt? (And will my popcorn pop?)
34
During the World War II years, Percy Spencer, a self-taught engineer leading the power tube
division at defense contractor Raytheon, focused his efforts on the magnetron—the core tube
that made radars so powerful they enabled U.S. bombers to spot periscopes on German
submarines. Standing next to a magnetron one day, Spencer noticed that a candy bar in his
pocket had melted. He then wondered, Could the energy from the radio waves be used to
actually cook food? He placed some popcorn kernels near the tube and soon was munching on
the world’s first microwave popcorn. In 1947, Raytheon put the first Radarange microwave
ovens on the market—but it took another twenty years before the appliances were small
enough to fit on a countertop.
In the current era of Google and Watson, with databases doing much of the
“knowing” for us, many critics today question the wisdom of an education
system that still revolves around teaching students to memorize facts. One such
education critic, the author Sugata Mitra, made just this point
35 at a TED
Conference by tossing out the provocative question Is “knowing” obsolete? Of
course, not all knowledge is mere factual information; the TED question, as
worded, is overly broad. But if we zero in on a narrow kind of knowledge—
stored facts or “answers”—then that kind of “knowing” might be better left to
machines with more memory.
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.
Moreover, only through effective inquiry can we fully explore, probe, access,
and, hopefully, figure out what to do with all those answers the technology has
in store for us. This goes beyond just being able to query a search engine or a
database; immense resources and capabilities are available today to those who
are able to access and traverse the network that now exists online.
By tapping into social networks, online sources of information, and digital
communities, it is increasingly feasible, MIT’s Ito points out, for an individual to
tackle a large challenge or question, or to launch an initiative or movement. One
can do so relatively quickly by “pulling resources—answers, expert advice,
partners, sources of funding, influence—from the network as you need it.”
However, “the main way you pull support from the network is by querying it.
And you need to understand how to frame the questions to get the best
response.”
In light of this, there’s never been a better time to be a questioner—because it
is so much easier now to begin a journey of inquiry, with so many places you
can turn for information, help, ideas, feedback, or even to find possible
collaborators who might be interested in the same question.
As John Seely Brown notes, a questioner can thrive in these times of
exponential change. “If you don’t have that disposition to question,” Brown
says, “you’re going to fear change. But if you’re comfortable questioning,
experimenting, connecting things—then change is something that becomes an
adventure. And if you can see it as an adventure, then you’re off and running.”
Why does everything begin with Why?
As Van Phillips began to proceed further on his own journey, he was, to use
Brown’s words, “questioning, experimenting, connecting things.” He revised his
initial Why question—If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t I (not they)
make a decent foot?—and began to immerse himself deeply in the world of
prosthetics.
The more Phillips learned, the more questions he had: about the materials
being used (Why wood, when there were so many better alternatives?); about the
shape (Why did a prosthetic foot have to be shaped like a bulky human foot? Did
that even make sense?); about the primary purpose of a replacement foot (Why
was there so much emphasis on trying to match the look of a human foot?
Wasn’t performance more important?).
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?
The situation Van Phillips confronted was unusual in some ways. He didn’t
have to go looking for his Why problem; it came to him. He didn’t have to
wonder about whom it affected or whether it was worth his time. But when the
problem was thrust upon him, he asked a proactive Why question (instead of just
passively wondering, Why did this have to happen to me?). Then he kept asking
more Why questions as he explored the nature and the dimensions of the
problem.
Innovative questioners, when faced with situations that are less than ideal,
inquire as to why, trying to figure out what’s lacking. Oftentimes, these
questions arise out of mundane, everyday situations, such as that “late fees”
problem encountered by Reed Hastings before he founded Netflix. Similarly,
Pandora Internet Radio founder Tim Westergren, a former band musician,
observing all the talented-yet-struggling musicians he knew, wondered why it
was so difficult for them to connect with the audience they deserved. Airbnb
cofounder Joe Gebbia, along with roommate Brian Chesky, wanted to know why
people coming to his town at certain times of the year had so much trouble
getting hotel accommodations.
The New York Times technology reporter David Pogue has written about how
so many things that are now part of our everyday lives—such as ATM machines,
computer documents, and shampoo bottles—all started the same way: We get
these breakthroughs, Pogue writes, “when someone looks at the way things
36
have always been done and asks why?”
And the phenomenon isn't limited to business innovation and invention stories;
asking Why can be the first step to bringing about change in almost any context.
Gretchen Rubin showed how a simple
37 Why question could be applied to one’s
everyday life—and be the spark that leads to dramatic change. One rainy day,
looking out the window of a New York City bus, Rubin pondered, Why am I not
happy with my life as it is? This question got her thinking about the nature of
happiness, then researching that, then applying what she learned to her own life
—and, importantly, to the lives of others. Thus was born her immensely
successful multimedia venture known as The Happiness Project.
We can and should ask Why about career, family relationships, local
community issues—anywhere we might encounter a situation that is ripe for
change and improvement. Why is my career not advancing in the way I’d hoped?
Or if it is advancing, and I’m still not happy, why is that? Why is my product or
service failing to connect with customers who ought to love it? Why is my fatherin-law so difficult to get along with?
Why aren’t the players urinating more?
39
Many companies and even entire industries can be traced back to a question—but they’re
usually not as odd as this one. In 1965, Dwayne Douglas, a football coach at the University of
Florida, wondered, Why aren’t the players urinating more after the games? The coach was
baffled because he knew his players were drinking water on the sidelines; what he didn’t
realize was that they were sweating away more fluids than could be replaced with water.
Douglas shared his question with J. Robert Cade, a professor of renal (kidney) medicine at the
university—who set about formulating a drink that could replace the electrolytes lost through
sweat. Cade’s mixture was first tested on the freshman football team—who proceeded to
defeat the upperclassmen in a practice session. The drink became known as Gatorade (named
after the team mascot) and helped launch a sports drink industry now worth almost $20 billion.
Sometimes questioners go out looking for their Why—searching for a question
they can work on and answer. The term problem-finding is used to describe this
pursuit, and while it may seem odd to go looking for problems, according to the
business consultant Min Basadur
38—who teaches problem-finding skills to
executives at top companies—it’s one of the most important things to do for an
established business, large or small. As Basadur notes, if you are able to “find” a
problem before others do, and then successfully answer the questions
surrounding that problem, you can create a new venture, a new career, a new
industry. Here again, as Basadur attests, it applies to life, as well—if you seek
out problems in your life before they’re obvious, before they’ve reached a crisis
stage, you can catch and address them while they still offer the best opportunities
for improvement and reinvention.
Just asking Why without taking any action may be a source of stimulating
thought or conversation, but it is not likely to produce change. (Basic formula: Q
(questioning) + A (action) = I (innovation). On the other hand, Q – A = P
(philosophy). In observing how questioners tackle problems, I noticed a pattern
in many of the stories:
• 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.
The Why/What If/How sequence represents a basic and logical progression,
drawing, in part, on several existing models that break down the creative
problem-solving process. For example, current theories of “design thinking,”
40
used by IDEO and other leading designers to systematically solve problems,
have laid out a process that starts with framing a problem and learning more
about it (similar to my Why stage), then proceeds to generating ideas (which
corresponds to What If), and eventually builds upon those ideas through
prototyping (which could be thought of as the How stage). A similar progression
—moving from understanding a problem, to imagining possible solutions, to
then going to work on those possibilities—can also be seen in the creative
problem-solving processes of the business consultant Min Basadur (who, in turn,
owes a debt to earlier processes developed by the little-known but legendary
Creative Problem Solving Institute of Buffalo, New York). Echoes of this are
even in the classic four-stage process of creativity—
Preparation/Incubation/Illumination/Implementation—developed nearly a
century ago by the British psychologist Graham Wallas.
All of which is to say there is good reason why the stages of questioning
proceed in the order laid out in this book. It corresponds to what has been
learned, through the years, about how best to confront problems and work
toward possible solutions. It’s also based on observation of how many of the
questioners featured in the book cycled through the process of coming up with
innovative solutions.
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 what
41 you’re doing, you still know what to do.”
How do you move from asking to action?
At some point, Van Phillips progressed from Why to What If. Phillips was by
now working in the prosthetics industry and doing his own “contextual inquiry”
(inquiring up close and in context) in his endeavor to understand how things
were done in that business, so that he could question more intelligently.
Yet even as Phillips began to gain expertise in prosthetics, he tried to maintain
his original “outsider” perspective. As he was working on his project, he was
advised by a mentor to go to the patent office and research everything that had
been done on prosthetic foot inventions. “My reaction to that was ‘I’m not going
to pollute my mind with everyone else’s ideas. I’m following my own path, not
somebody else’s.’”
Phillips was not in a hurry; he was not looking for quick answers from experts.
“If you give the mind time and space, it will do its own work on the problem,
over time,” he said. “And it will usually come up with interesting possibilities to
work with.” Gradually, those possibilities began to surface in Phillips’s mind. At
the What If stage the imagination begins to go to work, whether we’re conscious
of it or not. The mind, if preoccupied with a problem or question long enough,
will tend to come up with possibilities that might eventually lead to answers, but
at this stage are still speculations, untested hypotheses, and early epiphanies.
(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.)
Exploring What If possibilities is a wide-open, fun stage of questioning and
should not be rushed. Today, the idea of “sitting with” and “living with” a
question may seem strange, as we’ve gotten used to having our queries answered
quickly and in bite-size servings. Stuart Firestein, in his book Ignorance,
wonders if we’ve gotten too comfortable with this. Are we too enthralled with
answers? he asks. Are we afraid of questions, especially those that linger too
long?
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. Einstein was an early
believer in this form of “combinatorial thinking”; today it is widely accepted as
one of the primary sources of creativity. Since this type of thinking involves both
connections and questions, I think of it as connective inquiry.
As Van Phillips got, in his words, “knee-deep” into his foot project, he did lots
of interesting, offbeat connective inquiry. For example, he’d started thinking
about the spring force of a diving board and wondering, What if you could
somehow replicate a diving board’s propulsive effect in a prosthetic foot?
Somewhere along the way he learned about animal leg movements—in
particular, about how the powerful tendons in a cheetah’s hind legs produced
remarkable spring-force whenever the legs were bent and the tendons
compressed. What if a human leg could be more like a cheetah’s?
What if a car windshield could blink?
42
In 1902 Alabama tourist Mary Anderson watched her New York streetcar driver struggling to
see through his snow-covered windshield and wondered, Why doesn’t someone create a device
to remove the snow? (The “someone,” of course, became Mary, designer of the first
windshield wiper.) Sixty years later, Bob Kearns brought the windshield wiper into the
modern era by posing a new question of his own. Dissatisfied with wipers that moved at one
speed whether it was pouring or drizzling outside, Kearns inquired, Why can’t a wiper work
more like my eyelid, blinking as much (or little) as needed? Kearns worked on his
“intermittent wiper” idea in his basement, eventually coming up with an elegantly simple
three-component electronic sensing and timing device. (The sad story of how the Big Three
car companies infringed on his patent is told in the 2008 film Flash of Genius.)
He also made a mental con-nection with a distant memory. When he was
growing up, his father owned an antique Chinese sword with a C-shaped blade.
Phillips had always been fascinated by this sword because the curved blade was
actually stronger and more flexible than a straight one. This created a fresh
possibility in his mind: Instead of a traditional L-shaped lower leg and foot,
what if he dispensed with the heel and created a limb that was one smooth,
continuous curve, from leg to toe? With such a design, and with the right
materials, he’d be able to incorporate the elasticity of a cheetah’s tendons and
the bounce of a diving board. On such a limb, an amputee could not just walk,
but run and jump.
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.
How do I decide which of my ideas is the one I’ll pursue?
How do I begin to test that idea, to see what works and what doesn’t?
And if/when I find it’s not working, how do I figure out what’s wrong and fix
it?
Today, most of us are in a better position to build on our ideas and questions
than ever before. We can use computer sketch programs, create YouTube videos
of what we’re doing, set up beta websites, tap into social networks for help—or
even launch a Kickstarter project to fund our efforts to solve a problem or create
something new.
Phillips didn’t have any of those resources at the time he was working on his
foot. He sketched by hand, then built clay prototypes in his basement lab. He
would trek up to the kitchen to bake in his oven the ingredients that would go
into his superfoot. “I was curing parts between fifty-pound hot plates in my
oven, burning myself a lot,” he told me.
Phillips created somewhere between two hundred and three hundred
prototypes of the Flex-Foot, and “a lot of them broke the first time you put your
weight down on them.” Every time a foot broke, he dissected the failure through
questioning: Why did it break? What if I change the mix of materials? How will
this new version hold up? Each time Phillips fell, he landed in a place that was
further ahead, closer to the breakthrough. He was failing forward, the whole
time.
The Flex-Foot prosthetics that Phillips introduced, starting in the mid-1980s
and continuing until he sold the line and his company in 2000, revolutionized the
prosthetics industry. While the Flex-Foot line had various models for different
uses, its most dramatic was the Cheetah—which incorporated various disparate
influences (the diving board, the animal leg, the curved Chinese sword). With its
curved blades, it changed everything: the way we think about prosthetics, how
they’re supposed to look, what an amputee can do with them. Using Phillips’s
creation, an amputee climbed Mount Everest; the runner Aimee Mullins became
the first double-amputee sprinter to compete in NCAA track and field, for
Georgetown University; and most famously, the South African runner Oscar
Pistorius ran on two Cheetahs as he competed in the 2012 Olympics. As for
Phillips himself, his prosthetic foot—the decades-long answer to his original
question—enabled him to return to one of his deepest passions in life: He now
runs every day, on the beach near his home in Mendocino, California.
When he’s not running, Phillips is hard at work trying to create new versions
of limbs that do even more for less. In fact, almost as soon as he developed the
Cheetah, he was asking, Why does it have to cost so much? What if the design
were tweaked in some way—through new materials, different processes—so as
to make the limb accessible to more people? How might I make that work?
It’s common for questioners to do this; each “answer” they arrive at brings a
fresh wave of questions. To keep questioning is as natural, for them, as
breathing. But how did they come to be this way? And why aren’t more people
like that?
CHAPTER 2
Why We Stop Questioning
Why do kids ask so many questions? (And how do we really feel about that?)
Why does questioning fall off a cliff?
Can a school be built on questions?
Who is entitled to ask questions in class?
If we’re born to inquire, then why must it be taught?
Can we teach ourselves to question?
Why do kids ask so many questions? (And how do we really
feel about that?)
A few years ago, the American comedian Louis C.K.
1 wrote a bit for his standup act that focused on children and questioning. It starts with a description of a
beleaguered mother and her young child, at McDonald’s. The child asks why the
sky is blue, and the parent snaps, “Just shut up and eat your french fries!” Louis
explains to the audience that while this might seem to be harsh, the reality is
“You can’t answer a kid’s question; they don’t accept any answer.” If you do try
to answer, you only end up caught in an endless circle of Why questions—as he
then demonstrates by recounting a conversation with his own young daughter.
It starts innocently enough (“Papa, why can’t we go outside?”), but eventually
Louis is asked to explain why it’s raining, why clouds form, why he doesn’t
know why clouds form, why he didn’t pay attention in school, why his parents
didn’t care about his education, and why their parents before that were just as
bad. It devolves down to Louis’s trying to explain to his child why “we’re alone
in the universe, and nobody gives a s— about us.” It ends, inevitably, with his
telling his child, “Shut up and eat your french fries!”
The bit nicely captures a truth that any parent—or anyone who’s been around
kids of a certain age—has experienced many times over. What makes it funny,
though, is the comedian’s brutally candid description of how frustrating it can be
to be on the receiving end of kids’ questions. The adult, in this case, becomes
exasperated, insecure, aware of his own ignorance, and reminded of his
insignificance—all because of that word why. As Louis C.K. makes clear, we
may profess to admire kids’ curiosity, but at some point we just don’t welcome
those questions anymore.
Maybe we’re simply worn out by the sheer volume of inquiry among young
children. According to Paul Harris, a Harvard child psychologist and author,
research shows that a child asks about
2
forty thousand questions between the
ages of two and five. During that three-year span, Harris says, a shift occurs in
the kind of questions being asked: from simple factual ones (name of object) to
the first requests for explanations by thirty months. By age four, the lion’s share
of the questions are seeking explanations, not just facts.
As this is happening, rapid brain growth is occurring. At the University of
Washington, advanced brain-scan technology shows connections forming in
young brains (some of the lab’s work is featured
3
in Tiffany Shlain’s fascinating
film Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks). The lab’s scans reveal an
explosion of connections (synapses) between neurons in young children’s brains
—amounting to about a quadrillion connections, or more than three times the
number found in an adult brain. Kids’ brains are constantly connecting stimuli or
thoughts. And as they’re making these mental connections, they’re seeking more
information and clarification by way of questioning.
Not that it’s easy for a child to ask a question. Harris has described it as “a
series of complex mental maneuvers.” It starts with knowing that you don’t
know. The asking of a question also indicates that the child understands there are
various possible answers: “When they ask what’s for dinner, they can imagine
that it might be soup or pasta,” Harris writes in his book Trusting What You’re
Told. “Without the ability to conceive of more than one possible way that things
might stand in the world, why ask a question?” Lastly, it means children have
figured out an efficient way to fill this gap in their knowledge—by asking
someone who might know.
Why is the sky blue?
5
It may be the ultimate child’s question, one that every parent is asked at some point. If you
find it hard to answer, you are in good company: Great minds from Aristotle to Isaac Newton
grappled with this query over a span of several centuries, notes Nicholas Christakis, writing
for edge.org. Christakis credits Newton and his light-refraction experiments with first showing
that “white light could be decomposed into its constituent colors.” But this only raised another
question: What might refract more blue light towards our eyes? Scientists eventually learned
that the way incident light interacts with gas molecules in the air causes the light in the blue
part of the spectrum to scatter more. Meanwhile, biologists identified another contributing
factor: our eyes are more sensitive to blue. As Christakis observes, much of the world of
science is contained “in a question that a young child can ask.”
As children venture out into the world—synapses firing in their heads—they
constantly encounter things they cannot classify or label. As the children’s
neurologist Stewart Mostofsky
4 puts it, they have not yet developed “mental
models” to categorize things, so part of what they’re doing when questioning is
asking adults to help them with this huge job of categorizing what they
experience around them, labeling it, putting it in the proper file drawers of the
brain.
When innovators talk about the virtues of beginner’s mind or neoteny, to use
the term favored by MIT Media Lab’s Joi Ito, one of the desirable things they’re
referring to is that state where you see things without labels, without
categorization. Because once things have been labeled and filed, they become
known quantities—and we don’t think about them, may not even notice them.
Somewhere between ages four and five, children are ideally suited for
questioning: They have gained the language skills to ask, their brains are still in
an expansive, highly connective mode, and they’re seeing things without labels
or assumptions. They’re perfect explorers. The physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
talks
6 about young children being scientists because they turn over rocks and
mash things together; Harvard’s Harris points out that they’re also like
anthropologists—they don’t just conduct experiments, they ask the people
around them questions.
People tend to think that kids don’t care much about the answers—that, as
Louis C.K. suggests in his “Why?” routine, no matter what you answer, they’re
just going to ask Why again. But they do, in fact, seem to care very much about
the answers they get. A recent University of Michigan study
7
found that when
preschoolers ask Why, they’re not just trying to annoy adults or simply prolong a
conversation—“they’re trying to get to the bottom of things.” In the studies,
when kids were given actual explanations, they either agreed and were satisfied,
or they asked a follow-up question; whereas if they didn’t get a good answer,
they were more likely to be dissatisfied and to repeat the original question.
The INSEAD professor and questioning expert Hal Gregersen says that if you
watch closely what’s happening when kids ask adults questions, “the reason kids
ask ‘why’ over and over again is often because we don’t understand their
questions, or we’re just not listening. And by asking over and over, they’re
saying to us, in effect, ‘You are not hearing me—you’re not understanding what
I’m asking.’”
As children begin preschool, a curious change starts to happen around
questioning. Preschoolers are entering a stimulation-rich environment,
surrounded by other presumably inquisitive kids, with ready access to an adult
question-answerer known as the teacher—seemingly ideal conditions for
questioning. Yet they immediately begin to ask fewer
8 questions, according to
Harris, who cites studies done in various cultures around the world, all showing
the same result. He theorizes that a “comfort” factor is at work here; at home
with a parent, children are more willing to share their questions than they are at
preschool.
But even so, preschoolers are still asking questions at a higher rate than older
schoolkids. Most preschool environments are relatively unstructured and allow
for more free-form play and exploration—which may be key to helping kids
maintain their propensity to inquire and learn at this level.
Interestingly, the more preschool models itself after regular school—the more
it becomes a venue for loading kids up with information and feeding them
answers to questions they have not yet asked—the more it seems to squelch their
natural curiosity. The child psychologist Alison Gopnik has
9 been outspoken in
criticizing the trend of turning preschool into school—which, she notes, is driven
by overambitious parents and (in the United States, at least) by federal mandates
requiring more standardized teaching in preschool.
When we start teaching too much, too soon, says Gopnik, we’re inadvertently
cutting off paths of inquiry and exploration that kids might otherwise pursue on
their own. As Gopnik puts it, “Children are the research and development
division of the human species.” If they are permitted to do that research—to
raise and explore their own questions, through various forms of experimentation,
and without being burdened with instructions—they exhibit signs of more
creativity and curiosity.
Gopnik says young kids learn in much the same way scientists do, by
exploring and experimenting, and that we should beware of trends toward more
structured and academic early-childhood programs. That academic rigor comes
soon enough, as students begin grade school—which is when questioning by
kids really starts to disappear.
Why does questioning fall off a cliff?
In 2010, Professor Kyung-Hee Kim10 at William & Mary College observed that
results of creativity tests given at schools in the United States, using the wellknown Torrance system, had begun to decline in 1990—and had been dropping
since. This finding triggered a wave of articles in the U.S. media, including a
Newsweek cover story, “The Creativity Crisis,” which focused on the complex
question of how to address this problem by doing a better job teaching creativity
to children. Amid the article’s deep discussion of creativity and neuroscience—
covering neural networks, differences between right- and left-brain functions,
and the relationship between divergent and convergent thinking—was a
throwaway line buried deep in the piece that seemed, to me, to cut to the heart of
the matter: “Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100
questions a day. By middle school, they’ve pretty much stopped asking.”
If you chart what happens to kids’ questioning—and the Right Question
Institute
11 has done that, using data from the 2009 U.S. “Nation’s Report
Card”—it looks as if questioning (denoted by the solid line in the chart) falls off
a cliff, even as children’s use of reading and writing skills steadily climbs
through the school years.
That steep decline in questioning might not be alarming, in and of itself: One
might conclude that children just don’t need to question as much once they’re
reading and writing (and texting and googling). But the problem is, as kids stop
questioning, they simultaneously become less engaged in school. When the
engagement level of students
12
is measured, as in a recent Gallup study, we see
the same falling-off-the-cliff phenomenon as students move from elementary
school through high school. (When Gallup released this study in early 2013, at
the same time as the American “fiscal cliff” crisis, the author Daniel Pink
asked
13 on his blog, “Does the ‘student cliff’ matter more than the fiscal cliff?”).
This suggests there may be a relationship—which many teachers could tell you
without needing to conduct a formal study—between students asking questions
and their being engaged and interested in learning. Admittedly, there’s a bit of a
chicken-and-egg situation here: Do kids stop questioning because they’ve lost
interest in school, or do they lose interest in school because their natural
curiosity (and propensity to question) is somehow tamped down?
I’ve asked that question of a number of children’s neurologists and
psychologists, as well as teachers and education experts. Clearly, various factors
can influence kids’ question-asking and their curiosity levels as they grow up.
For instance, at around age five, the brain starts trimming back some of those
neural connections that were expanding so rapidly the first few years; this
“synaptic pruning” could translate to less questioning and less wondering about
the surrounding world. Also, as we develop mental models of that world—with
more categorization, more labels—we have less need to ask “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.”
Wagner told me that he often sits in on classes to observe the questioning
dynamic. “I was in a seventh-grade science class and this kid started asking all
kinds of questions about the universe and stars—and the teacher was just trying
to say, ‘Look, here are the planets, now memorize this.’ And this was powerful
to me. The message was that in this class ‘we don’t have time for questions—
because that will take time away from the number of answers I have to cover.’”
To be fair, many teachers feel helpless in the face of this. As one California
high school teacher lamented, “I have so many state standards
14
I have to teach
conceptwise, it takes away time from what I find most valuable—which is to
have [students] inquire about the world.”
Dominic Randolph,
15 principal of the Riverdale Country School in New York,
uses the corporate term product-driven to describe many of today’s schools.
Under pressure to improve test scores, they’ve tried to instill businesslike
efficiency into a process designed to impart as much information as possible to
students, within a given time frame—leaving little or no time for student inquiry.
Why do we want kids to “sit still” in class?
17
As normal twelve-year-olds, the sixth-grade students at Marine Elementary School near
Minneapolis tended to squirm, slump, kick, and fidget in their seats—they had an abundance
of energy, and controlling it required them to focus so much on sitting still they had trouble
concentrating on their schoolwork. Their teacher Abby Brown wondered: What if they didn’t
have to sit still? Brown learned from the latest research at the Mayo Clinic about “activitypermissive education,” which advocates letting kids move as they learn. Brown then helped
design a new kind of school desk with a raised seat that puts the user in a semi-standing
position and allows more freedom of movement. With the new desks, her students’
attentiveness immediately improved—and Brown’s creation is being looked at as a model for
other classrooms.
When teachers are under this kind of pressure to follow mandated guidelines,
it can cause them to be less receptive to students’ ideas or inquiries—as one
researcher demonstrated in a fascinating study. Susan Engel of Williams College
did
16 an experiment with two sets of teachers: One group was not given specific
guidelines on how to teach a science class, while the other group was “subtly
encouraged” to follow a worksheet. The first group of teachers tended to respond
with interest and encouragement when students expressed their own ideas. The
second group said things like “Wait a minute. That’s not on the instructions.”
Engel concluded that “teachers are very susceptible to external influences; their
understanding of the goal of teaching directly affects how they respond when
children spontaneously investigate.”
While some of the problems involving overloaded curriculum and “teaching to
the test” seem to have been exacerbated in recent years, 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.
As a number of education critics have pointed out, schools in many
industrialized nations were not, for the most part, designed to produce innovative
thinkers or questioners—their primary purpose was to produce workers. The
author Seth Godin writes, “Our grandfathers and great grandfathers
18 built
schools to train people to have a lifetime of productive labor as part of the
industrialized economy. And it worked.”
To create good workers, education systems put a premium on compliancy and
rote memorization of basic knowledge—excellent qualities in an industrial
worker. (Or, as the cartoonist and Simpsons creator Matt Groening puts it, “It
seems the main rule that
19
traditional schools teach is how to sit in rows quietly,
which is perfect training for grown-up work in a dull office or factory, but not so
good for education.”)
And not so good for questioning: To the extent a school is like a factory,
students who inquire about “the way things are” could be seen as insubordinate.
It raises, at least in my mind, a question that may seem extreme: If schools were
built on a factory model, were they actually designed to squelch questions?
Logically, as we move from an industrial society to more of an entrepreneurial
one, it makes sense that we would want to trade in the factory/obedience model
of schooling for more of a questioning model. But as the world changed and the
workplace changed with it, the old educational model hasn’t evolved much—and
for the most part hasn’t adapted to the modern economy’s need for more
creative, independent-thinking “workers.”
Godin and others believe that in attempting to modernize old models of
schooling, we should start by asking some basic questions about purpose. Godin
offers up this query as a starting point: What are schools for? (That question
could also be phrased as Why are we sending kids to school in the first place?)
With all the current debate around education reform—discussions of
conflicting models for schools, competing educational philosophies, differing
ideas of how to test, design curricula, evaluate teachers—somehow the
fundamental Why questions, which can help frame a larger discussion, don’t
seem to come up much.
If we do stop to consider Godin’s question, although there’s no one answer to
it, many would agree that at least part of the answer could be summed up as “To
prepare students to be productive citizens in the twenty-first century.”
That, in turn, raises another fundamental question: What kind of preparation
does the modern workplace and society demand of its citizens—i.e., what kind of
skills, knowledge, and capabilities are needed to be productive and thrive?
The answer to that, again, is not simple, but among those who’ve studied the
needs of the evolving workplace from an educational standpoint—and two
people at the forefront are Tony Wagner and John Seely Brown—the consensus
seems to be that this new world demands citizens who are self-learners; who are
creative and resourceful; who can adjust and adapt to constant change. Both
Wagner and Brown put “questioning” at the top of the list of key survival skills
for the new marketplace.
(As for skills not needed in this new environment? Ability to memorize and
repeat back facts—because, as noted in the last chapter, new technology puts
many of those facts at our fingertips, eliminating the need for memorization.
Indeed, this prompts another of Godin’s provocative questions: Should we
abandon the failed experiment of teaching facts?)
If we simply zoom in on that one Why question regarding the basic purpose of
schools, and if we agree that one of their primary purposes is to enable a twentyfirst-century citizen to be a lifelong learner, able to adapt to constant change in
the modern world . . . and if we also acknowledge that the ability to question
effectively is among the most important of the critical skills needed . . . this
question naturally arises:
What if our schools could train students to be better lifelong learners and
better adapters to change, by enabling them to be better questioners?
How might we create such a school?
To start answering those questions—attempting to envision a school of
tomorrow with questioning baked in at its core—it is instructive to glance back
at New York’s Harlem neighborhood in
20
the 1970s, where a substitute-teacherturned-principal named Deborah Meier created a radical model for a school
designed to foster inquiry.
Can a school be built on questions?
In education circles, Meier, now in her eighties, is seen as a legendary figure. A
pioneer of the “small schools” movement that emerged several decades ago, she
was the first educator to receive a MacArthur “genius” award in recognition of
her work at the groundbreaking Central Park East schools in New York.
Today Meier remains involved with a number of schools she started in the
Northeast and writes a popular blog about education, where she poses
unfailingly interesting questions:
Is a test-driven education the most likely path for producing an inventive and
feisty citizenry?
What would it look and sound like in the average classroom if we wanted to
make “being wrong” less threatening?
And this one, which I particularly like: What might the potential for humans be
if we really encouraged that spirit of questioning in children, instead of closing
it down?
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.
Meier opened the first of her schools
21
in 1974 in a dilapidated, old school
building in East Harlem, an area that, at the time, “epitomized the collapse of the
New York City school system,” according to Seymour Fliegel, a former school
official in that district. Meier was herself the product of a tony New York
private-school education. After getting her master’s degree she eventually found
herself teaching in a Chicago public school and was dismayed by the conditions.
She began working on experimental approaches to education, which brought her
to the attention of a New York school superintendent—who, faced with a
desperate situation in Harlem, offered Meier a chance to try out some of her
ideas.
Meier felt that instead of just pushing information at kids, schools needed to
teach them how to make sense of what they were being told so they would know
what to make of it and what to do with it. She said in an interview at the time,
“My concern is with how students become critical thinkers and problem solvers,
which is what a democratic society needs.”
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?
Meier’s core questions came out of her own connective inquiry; they blended
elements of her early education in an Ethical Culture school with ideas she
picked up from other well-known education innovators, including John Dewey,
Jean Piaget, and Theodore Sizer.
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?”
As Meier established her question-based schools, the classes were run in
unorthodox ways, with students given much more autonomy and freedom. Upon
visiting in the late seventies, Fliegel encountered “an astonishingly rich
educational program,”
22 which, for example, “included extensive mapmaking,
studies of Native American woodlands culture in seventeenth century Harlem,
Egyptian and Roman history, the Dutch settlement of New York, printing and
newspapers, the emergence of cities (including a mini-study of the neighborhood
around the school) and African American history.”
A third-grade class studying medieval society “not only read books but built
castles and made armor,” while a first-grade class “developed the idea of
building a mythical city.” Students were taken to the local museums and studied
nature in Central Park; Meier felt that “outside the classroom children tend to
observe things more keenly and ask more questions.”
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 offtopic.”
Meier learned to listen carefully to students’ questions, finding that they often
contained insights that prompted her to rethink her own assumptions and
occasionally reconsider the curriculum. “We had one of those world maps with
the U.S. right in the middle—remember those? And one of the students looked at
it and said, How come the East Indies are in the west? And that question got me
thinking about the impact of what you put in the center, and what it does to
everything else. And it became part of our curriculum. It had so many
implications for how you see yourself.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, the students warmed to Meier’s approach—but the
parents were another story. Some did not know what to make of the unorthodox
lessons and the kids’ autonomy; an environment such as the one Meier created
suggested to some a lack of discipline and structure. As Meier pointed out
decades later, however, while it’s counterintuitive to many teachers and school
administrators, often when you give kids more freedom to pursue what they’re
interested in, they become easier to control. The much harder thing is forcing
them to sit still for five hours and pay attention to information they don’t care
about.
The complaints at the time led to an inquiry. Fliegel (who wrote about his
experience several years later) was sent by the school superintendent to
investigate. He came away thoroughly impressed and recommended that the
school board back Meier, which it did. In the years that followed, the remarkable
success of the Central Park East schools became evident. Over the next decade,
in a city with a dropout rate that ranged between 40 and 60 percent, only 1
percent of Meier’s students failed to finish secondary school.
Meier’s question-driven schools struggled after she left, and there were few
imitators—until recently. Today, around the world, a growing number of schools
are embracing some of the principles Meier was trying to teach: that students
must develop the “habit” of learning and questioning, that knowledge cannot be
force-fed to them. But such schools still represent just
23 a “drop in the bucket” in
terms of the overall education system, notes Nikhil Goyal, New York–based
author of a book on modernizing schools.
Goyal began studying high schools while still attending one himself. A few
years ago, when he was a sixteen-year-old junior at a Long Island high school,
he became frustrated with his uninspiring school experience and wondered, Isn’t
there anything better than this? So he started examining other schools, across
the country. I met him when, at seventeen, he was in the midst of his research;
he had found the Beautiful Question website and, since he loves asking
questions, offered to be one of the site’s inquiry researchers. But he helped me
most in providing a crash course on the current state of inquiry-based schools.
Goyal studied schools such as Brightworks and High Tech High, both in
California, as well as a handful of others (some public, some private). He was
well versed in the approaches of the famously successful schools of Finland and
knew that Singapore’s schools also were breaking new ground.
Among the schools he studied up close, Goyal was thrilled by what he found.
Some of them had no grades, no tests—none of the memorization of facts that
dominated his own school experience. Students got to work on interesting
projects, sometimes of their own choosing, lasting for months. At Brightworks,
“the entire curriculum is based around big questions.” Goyal said he thought one
of the best things about these project-based or inquiry-based schools is that they
got students to ask introspective questions such as What’s interesting to me?
“Nobody’s ever asked them that before,” Goyal said.
Many of the schools doing inquiry-based learning are still too new to judge
whether they are turning out extra successful or productive adults (however one
might measure that). But we do know that some of their core principles—the
emphasis on letting students explore, direct their own learning, and work on
projects instead of taking tests—can also be found at Montessori schools, which
have been around long enough to have a track record of adult success stories.
And what a track record Montessori has. Today, so many former students of
this private-school system (which only teaches as high as eighth grade) are now
running major companies in the tech sector that these alumni have become
known as the Montessori Mafia.
24 Their ranks include Wikipedia founder Jimmy
Wales, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and the cofounders of Google, Sergey Brin and
Larry Page. (The former Google executive Marissa Mayer—now the head of
Yahoo!
25—has said that Brin’s and Page’s Montessori schooling, though long
ago, remained a defining influence. “You can’t understand Google unless you
know that Larry and Sergey were both Montessori kids,” according to Mayer.
“They’re always asking, Why should it be like that? It’s the way their brains
were programmed early on.”)
Montessori is private, expensive, and exclusive; so are some of the other
inquiry-based schools, and those that are public are few and far between. In
terms of schools offering this approach, “we’re probably talking about less than
one percent of the overall school system,” Goyal points out.
Why do movie tickets cost the same for hits or duds?
27
Challenging students to grapple with real-life questions can help them to grasp abstract
concepts, notes Cornell business school professor Robert H. Frank. That’s why Frank asks his
pupils to “pose an interesting question based on something they have observed or experienced
—and then employ basic economic principles in an attempt to answer it.” Case in point:
Frank’s student Peter Hlawitschka asked, Why do tickets for popular Broadway shows
command premium prices, while movie theaters charge the same price no matter how hot the
show is? Hlawitschka’sexplanation, as shared by Frank in a New York Times article, is that
unlike on Broadway, additional copies of a popular movie can be inexpensively made and
shown many times a day on multiple screens. With low prices, movie theater owners can fill
many more seats and generate far more revenue than if they charged premium prices for a
more limited number of screenings.
At the vast majority of schools, teachers who wish to encourage more inquiry
by students must engage in small acts of defiance—going off-script in their
lessons, sometimes revising the standard texts and teaching materials. Dan
Meyer, a high school math teacher
26
in New York, tells a story in a popular
TEDx talk about how he had to devise his own methods to encourage his
students to ask their own questions and formulate their own problems.
Meyer pointed out that a typical lesson on the problem of “How long will it
take to fill a water tank?” provides far too many tips and hints along the way.
Meyer decided to “eliminate all the substeps given to kids, so they have to figure
it out. Instead of telling them what matters, they need to decide what matters.”
At first, Meyer began to strip a lot of the text out of his teaching materials,
giving kids less, so they would have to ask and think more. Then he came up
with an even better idea: He showed his class a video of a water tank filling up . .
. “agonizingly slowly,” he says. Students began to “look at their watches, rolling
their eyes. And they’re all wondering, at some point, ‘Man, how long is it gonna
take to fill up?’ That’s how you know you’ve baited the hook.”
Who is entitled to ask questions in class?
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.
This is not insignificant, for two reasons. As Meyer understood, if a student
thinks of a question him/herself, it is likely to be of more interest than someone
else’s question. But this issue of “Who gets to ask the questions in class?”
touches on purpose, power, control, and, arguably, even race and social class.
Dennie Palmer Wolf, a professor
28 of education at Brown University,
examined the role of questioning in schools for her academic paper “The Art of
Questioning” and found that teachers tended “to monopolize the right to
question” in classrooms. (To the extent that students shared in that privilege,
Wolf cited research showing that it was “the private preserve of the few—the
bright, the male, the English-speaking.”) Moreover, Wolf’s research found that
questions were often used by teachers primarily to check up on students, rather
than to try to spark interest; such questions were apt to leave a student feeling
“exposed” rather than inspired.
John Seely Brown points out that questioning by students can easily come to
be seen as a threat by some teachers. “If you come from the belief that teachers
are meant to be authoritative, then teachers are going to tend to want to cut off
questioning that might reveal what they don’t know.”
Deborah Meier thinks the desire to control students and maintain order isn’t
necessarily coming just from teachers. At one point in my talk with her, I
mentioned that today’s business culture—with its ad messages promoting “break
the rules” and “think different” messages—seems to embrace the same
independent-thinking ethos that Meier tried to instill in the grade schoolers in
Harlem several decades ago. But when I suggested to Meier that perhaps the
establishment had caught up with her ideals—that, with our new hunger for
innovation, we might be more willing today to tolerate, and possibly even teach,
questioning—she had her doubts.
She believes we continue to live in a society that wants questions to be asked
by some, but not others. “Yes, we want a Silicon Valley,” she said, “but do we
really want three hundred million people who actually think for themselves?”
What is a flame?
29
It seems such a simple question, but do you know the answer? Actor Alan Alda had been
fascinated with that question as a child. Nearly seventy years later, Alda started the Alan Alda
Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University in New York and he started off
by organizing a contest to see who could best explain What is a flame? The kicker: Kids age
nine to twelve would serve as the judges. More than eight hundred scientists or science buffs
took up the challenge; the winner, physicist Benjamin Ames, made a seven-minute animated
music video explaining oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, incandescence, and oxidation (with atoms
represented by Legos). You might say Alda and Ames answered another beautiful question:
How do you make science enjoyable for kids? The next question Alda’s contest will take on:
What is time? (See the winning answers at centerforcommunicatingscience.org.)
When Meier started teaching in urban schools, she was dismayed to find that
low-income children, in particular, “were trained not to ask questions in school,”
and she doesn’t think that has changed much in the ensuing years. The
discouraging may not be deliberate in most cases. Teachers under pressure to
cover more material, and particularly those in underfunded, overcrowded urban
schools, can face formidable challenges in trying to manage large classrooms.
The imperative to maintain order and “just get through the lesson” can be at odds
with allowing kids to question.
But other, subtle forces may be conspiring against student questioning. For
instance, children may be self-censoring their questions due to cultural pressures.
Joshua Aronson of New York University
30 has studied some of the difficulties
that low-income minority students face, such as the disproportionate tendency of
schools to suspend African-American boys. But Aronson has also conducted
interesting research on what he calls “the stereotype threat.” It zeroes in on the
psychology of stigma, in particular “the way human beings respond to negative
stereotypes about their racial or gender group.” Aronson studied standardized
test performances among black, Latino, and female college students, and his
findings suggest that when a person perceives him/herself as the target of a wellknown stereotype (e.g., girls aren’t good at math), it can have an adverse effect
on performance in school.
Would students who are battling against stereotypes be less inclined to
interrupt lessons by asking questions, revealing to the rest of the class that they
don’t know something? “Absolutely,” Aronson said. “Fear is the enemy of
curiosity. Unfortunately, if you’re in that situation, you may feel pressure to look
a certain way to others.” That can cause students to act as if they already know
or just don’t care. “You’re inclined to play it safe,” Aronson says, rather than
risk the possibility of confirming the stereotype.
Parents, too, undoubtedly play a role in determining which kids ask questions
in school. A recent study of fourth- and fifth-grade
31 students by Indiana
University sociologist Jessica McCrory Calarco found that students from
families with higher incomes were more likely to be encouraged by their parents
to ask questions at school, whereas children from modest backgrounds were
encouraged by their parents to be more deferential to authority—and to try to
figure things out for themselves, instead of asking for help. “Even very shy
middle-class children learned to feel comfortable approaching teachers with
questions, and recognized the benefits of doing so,” Calarco reports. “Workingclass children instead worried about making teachers angry if they asked for help
at the wrong time or in the wrong way, and also felt others would judge them as
not smart if they asked for help.” These differences, Calarco found, stemmed
directly from what “children learn from their parents at home.”
Deborah Meier, however, bristled at those findings. “The study makes it sound
as if those lower-income parents are wrong, but they’re not wrong,” she said.
“They know that if their kids ask questions, they might get in trouble. They’re
telling their children to be careful in school.” The middle-class kids are in a
different situation, Meier notes. “They go to school feeling safe.” And because
they feel safe, they can take the risk of raising their hands.
But even the “safe” middle-class student who has been encouraged by parents to
question may still find that the typical classroom environment doesn’t stimulate
curiosity or inspire inquiry. One of the “master questioners” I
32
interviewed was
a fifteen-year-old high school student, Jack Andraka, who, through his own
remarkable journey of inquiry, was able to develop a new, highly effective, and
inexpensive way to screen for certain types of cancer. (The full story of how
Andraka used questions to solve the problem is in the next chapter.) I was
curious whether someone such as Andraka, who clearly is inclined to question,
learned to do so in school, and whether he tended to ask a lot of questions there.
He said his parents taught him to question. “They would ask me questions, and
they would get me to ask them questions—but then they would never answer the
questions they guided me to,” Andraka told me. “They would instead have me
go and explore through experiments or personal experience and make a
hypothesis.”
At school—which Andraka described as “your ordinary public high school,”
located in Maryland—“we really do not have students ask enough questions and
do enough exploration by themselves. The teacher tells you what to do and you
do it. You’re really restricted with these tight guidelines. In my opinion, that’s
not the best way to learn.”
I asked Andraka whether his classmates asked a lot of questions. “In my high
school, to be quote-unquote cool, you’re typically very quiet and sit in the
corner, and you might snicker among your friends every now and then. So that,
to me, is pretty boring.” As for himself, Andraka said, “Either I’m extremely
quiet and working on something else like trying to find a new way to test for
pancreatic cancer, for example, or I’m basically answering every single question.
But I don’t ask questions like ‘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 even a born-and-bred questioner such as Andraka isn’t asking questions in
school, it suggests a fundamental problem. Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana of
the Right Question Institute say it’s no mystery what’s going on: Even in the
most progressive schools, questioning is still primarily the domain of the
teacher. “Questions are used a lot in the classroom but it’s mostly one-way,”
says Rothstein. “It’s not about the student asking, it’s about the teacher
prompting the student by using questions that the teacher has formulated.” By
taking this approach, Rothstein says, teachers “have inadvertently contributed to
the professionalization of asking questions—to the idea that only the people who
know more are allowed to ask.”
After two decades of studying and teaching questioning, Rothstein and
Santana hope their three-year-old Right Question Institute—young as a toddler,
and just as enamored of questions—can help shift the balance of power in
classrooms by putting the kids in charge of the questions.
If we’re born to inquire, then why must it be taught?
When the Boston high school teacher
33 Ling-Se Peet used the Right Question
Institute’s “Question Formulation Technique” for the first time in her humanities
class, she began by laying out a provocative premise to her twenty-five students:
Torture can be justified.
In the parlance of Rothstein and Santana, this opening statement is known as a
Q-focus because its purpose is to provide a focal point for generating questions
from the students. Peet’s class was divided into small groups, and each group’s
initial task was to come up with as many questions as possible, within a time
limit, pertaining to that statement.
After reviewing a set of rules (write each question down, don’t debate or try to
answer questions, just keep trying to think of more questions), the students in
each group began to come at that premise from a variety of angles. Some
questions aimed at bringing clarity to the issue: How do you define torture?
When is torture used? Some were offbeat yet intriguing: Can torture make you
happy? Other questions expanded the scope of the discussion: Does torture have
anything to do with justice? Who are most likely to be tortured?
The kids had no experience doing this type of questioning exercise, but
according to Peet, after some initial reservations about the rules (some felt that
questions ought to be answered as soon as they were raised), the questions began
to flow freely within each group, with each written down by a group member.
Then the students were directed to the second stage of the exercise: They were
instructed to change open questions to closed ones, and vice versa—so that, for
example, an open question that began as Why is torture effective? might be
changed to a closed one: Is torture effective? The purpose of this part of the
exercise, according to Rothstein, is to show that a question can be narrowed
down in some cases, or expanded in others. As students do this, he says, they
begin to see that “the way you ask a question yields different results and can lead
you in different directions.”
Next, the students were asked to “prioritize” their questions: to figure out
which three were the most important to move the discussion forward. Rothstein
and Santana stress the importance of this “convergent” part of questioning. They
feel it’s not enough to encourage students to toss out questions endlessly; to
question effectively, they must learn how to analyze their own questions and
zero in on ones they would like to pursue further.
Some of the questions from the student groups that made it through to this
final stage included Why does torture work? Who decides whether torture should
be justified or not? How can someone’s pain be the price for the outcome you
want?
By the end of the session, Rothstein observed, some of the kids “looked
spent.” The process is difficult, he acknowledges, because “it requires them to
do something they’ve never done—to think in questions.” But in this class, and
in others where the Right Question Institute’s technique has been tried, a high
level of engagement among students has been observed. This may be partly
because Rothstein and Santana cleverly designed the process with gamelike rules
(only questions allowed; any nonquestion must be turned into a question) that
inject an element of play into it. 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.”
The question process Rothstein and Santana developed was years in the making.
It didn’t start out being for kids in school—it was originally intended to help
adults use questioning more effectively in their dealings with government
bureaucrats, doctors, landlords, and school officials.
Luz Santana knew from firsthand experience
34
that those who don’t know how
to ask the right questions are vulnerable to being denied that which they might
need or are entitled to have. Santana migrated to the United States from Puerto
Rico when she was in her twenties and, after initially being on welfare, found a
job working in a factory. “Then I got laid off,” she told me, “and as I tried to
navigate the social services system to get into a job training program, I was
denied.”
Santana didn’t know how to properly inquire as to why she was turned down;
“I didn’t know how to advocate for myself,” she says. She was fortunate that as
she was being denied, another social worker intervened on her behalf, pointing
out that Santana actually was qualified for the program. Santana entered the
training program, got a job, simultaneously went back to school, and eventually
earned a master’s degree. But she never forgot that early lesson about the need
for people, especially those disadvantaged, to be able to effectively speak up for
themselves. She ended up going into social services work herself, as a housing
advocate in the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts.
There she met Rothstein—who had a very different background (Kentucky
bred, Harvard educated) but similar interests. Rothstein had gotten his doctorate
in education at Harvard, where he was intrigued by this question:
What can the people thinking about social problems or making social policy
learn from the people who are actually affected by those problems?
As Rothstein gravitated toward urban policy work, he became a director of
neighborhood planning in Lawrence and met Santana at a gathering on housing
problems in the city. Toward the end of the meeting, from the periphery of the
room, Santana raised her hand and asked whether the city was getting enough
input from the people actually affected by the housing problems being discussed.
“And I thought that would have been a great question to start the meeting with,”
Rothstein recalls.
Subsequently, Rothstein asked for Santana’s help with the launch of a high
school dropout-prevention program in Lawrence. While working on the
program, they became aware of a particular obstacle: parents clearly needed to
be more involved in their children’s education and in school policies affecting
those kids—yet many of the parents refused to attend school meetings.
Rothstein and Santana logically asked, Why? “They told us they didn’t go to
the meetings because they didn’t even know what questions to ask,” Rothstein
recalls.
This was a lightbulb moment for the two of them: What if we could find a way
to help parents ask better questions at school meetings?
They had their What If question, but as they proceeded to the How stage of
trying to act on it, they took a wrong turn. Rothstein and Santana thought the
most efficient way to help parents ask better questions at school meetings would
be to supply them with those questions. So the two of them began compiling
questions for various situations (questioning school budgetary decisions,
questioning why a child was being suspended, etc.) and gave them to the parents
to take to the meetings.
“We went to one of the meetings where the parents had these question lists,”
Santana recalls, “and they’d go up to the microphone and read questions from
the list. But as soon as they were asked a question by someone from the school,
they’d turn back to us, like, What do I do now?” Santana says she and her
partner quickly understood their mistake: “We realized that the parents needed to
think on their own—and come up with their own questions.”
Rothstein and Santana began coaching parents how to do that. In particular,
they taught them how to inquire about school decisions that most affected them
—which meant probing the reasons behind the decisions, the process that led to
those decisions, and the role parents could play in that process.
As the program went along, a few parents revealed something surprising: They
were using these same questioning techniques in other situations, outside the
school meetings—while trying to get information from a doctor in the
emergency room, or in settling a dispute with a landlord.
This led Rothstein and Santana to begin to expand their question-teaching
process and try it out in a variety of situations. They began working with health
clinics, social services agencies, and adult education programs around the
country. They found that their questioning techniques
35 were being used by
immigrant parents in New Mexico, residents at a homeless shelter in Louisville,
and sugarcane-plantation workers in Hawaii. Rothstein and Santana formed a
nonprofit organization, which, in 2011, came to be known as the Right Question
Institute.
As their questioning technique was slowly gaining traction in adult education
programs, something interesting happened: Adult-ed teachers reported that some
adult students, upon learning the technique, were wondering, Why didn’t I learn
this in high school? Which, in turn, led to another What If moment for Rothstein
and Santana:
What if we take our adult question-formulation program and adapt it for
school-age kids?
Rothstein and Santana then designed a program for K–12 classrooms, broken
down into a series of steps:
Teachers design a Question Focus (e.g., “Torture can be justified”).
Students produce questions (no help from the teacher; no answering or
debating the questions; write down every question; change any statements
into questions).
Students improve their questions (opening and closing them).
Students prioritize their questions. They are typically instructed to come
to agreement on three favorites.
Students and teachers decide on next steps, for acting on the prioritized
questions.
Students reflect on what they have learned.
The process is designed to be simple enough that teachers can learn it in an
hour, and students can grasp it immediately. However, making it simple was
hard—that basic formula took about a decade to produce.
The RQI technique has drawn widespread praise from teachers. When her
students start thinking in questions, observes the Boston high school teacher
Marcy Ostberg, it “seems to unlock something for them.”
36 Rothstein says
teachers have been lining up for RQI sessions at teacher conferences. “When
they come to the sessions and learn about it,” he said, “they’re slapping their
heads and saying, How come we’ve never done this before?”
The social critic Neil Postman wondered
37 about this more than two decades
ago, when he wrote about the importance of questioning in education and posed
this query of his own:
“Is it not curious, then, that the most significant intellectual skill available to
human beings is not taught in schools?”
Rothstein was asked in a newspaper interview why there has been a longstanding failure to teach questioning, and whether it’s because:
• We don’t think it needs to be taught, or
• We don’t know how to teach it.
“My answer to that is yes and yes,” he said. Regarding that first rationale,
Rothstein says that questioning is thought of simply as “a natural part of speech”
and something people do instinctively. Many, including Deborah Meier, feel that
kids are born questioners, and that we don’t need to teach it—we just have to
stop discouraging it. But Rothstein maintains that 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 questionasking muscle,” as Rothstein calls it, has atrophied and needs to be built up.
Can we teach ourselves to question?
If the question muscle has atrophied by junior high, imagine its condition by the
time a student goes to college. Indeed, Rothstein’s downward-sloping question-
asking chart continues to plummet right through the college years. University
professors I interviewed confirmed a dearth of student questions, even among
bright Ivy Leaguers.
“For twenty years I’ve been teaching at the Harvard Business School,”
professor Clayton Christensen told me. “And I love this place, but the intuition
to ask questions, the curiosity, is much less than twenty years ago.” As to the
cause: “If all you do as you’re growing up is watch stuff on a screen—or go to
school, where they give you the answers—then you don’t develop the instinct
for asking questions,” Christensen said. “They don’t know how to ask because
it’s never been asked of them.”
How might parents make their kids better questioners?
40
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?’” Clayton Christensen thinks
parents can help their kids be more inquisitive by posing what if questions “that invite children
to think deeply about the world around them.” But Christensen thinks it’s also important to
encourage kids to solve problems in a hands-on way, via challenging household tasks and
chores. That worked for IDEO cofounder David Kelley. His career as a problem-solving
designer was forged in a childhood home where “if the washing machine broke, you went and
tried to make a new part to fix it.”
William Deresiewicz, the acclaimed author
38 and essayist who teaches at Yale
University, cited another factor. “The college education that students are getting
now, particularly at elite institutions, tends to be technocratic,” he said. “They’re
trained to develop expertise in a particular area—trained to solve the problems
that are particular to that area. It’s about jumping through hoops, and mastering
what’s on the test. There’s no time where students are asked to step back and
think about what they’re doing—and why they’re doing it. What I’m seeing is a
failure among these students to ask big questions about values and meaning and
purpose. What we really need is for these kids—our future leaders—to learn
how to ask those kinds of questions and not just technocratic ones.”
Deresiewicz says the best professors can inspire that kind of inquiry, but
they’re rare. He cites as an example a favorite professor and mentor of his own,
about whom Deresiewicz has written elegantly (“He had a young person’s
ability
39
to see the world with fresh eyes. His white hair shot up off his forehead
like a jolt of discovery”). I asked Deresiewicz what his professor did to spark
inquiry.
“He had an ability to reframe things—to ask questions that got at something
fundamental. Sometimes the questions almost seemed stupid; there’s the idea of
‘the holy fool’ who asks the questions no one else will, and that was part of what
he was doing.” In doing this, Deresiewicz has written, his professor “was
showing us that everything is open to question, especially the things we thought
we already knew.”
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.’”
Is it possible the kind of Socratic teaching that Deresiewicz’s professor did could
make a comeback in the online world? That’s what Sebastian Thrun is hoping.
Thrun, known for developing Google’s self-driving car and other tech
breakthroughs, says he was never comfortable asking disruptive questions in his
native Germany but found a much more receptive environment in Silicon Valley.
While working at Google he also taught at Stanford University; in 2011, an
artificial intelligence course he co-taught was offered online, and Thrun was
surprised to see that tens of thousands signed up for it. Soon after, he made the
jump from self-directed cars to self-directed learning. The online university he
launched, Udacity, is one of a growing number of such programs that have been
attracting attention (and mixed reviews) in the past few years. But one of the
interesting things Thrun is trying to do with Udacity is to bring the Socratic
method to online teaching.
The Udacity courses are designed not just to broadcast lectures but to inject
thoughtful questioning at critical junctures, to get students thinking about what
they’re learning. As for encouraging students to ask their own questions, Thrun
and one of his partners
41
in the start-up, a former Google designer named Irene
Au, insist that questioning is actually easier online—because anonymity helps.
You don’t have to be “that person” in the back of the huge lecture hall, trying to
shout out a question at the end of class while others in the room are itching to
exit. (One college professor recently observed
42
that he’d never gotten as many
student questions as when he began teaching online.)
Yale’s Deresiewicz is skeptical. He points out the big difference between
typing a question into your computer and asking a real, live professor (he also
thinks the online college revolution is the first step in dismantling universities to
get rid of the overhead of actual classrooms and teachers). He sees no substitute
for the collaborative and unpredictable give-and-take between an assembled
group of students and a learned master: “You can’t improve on Socrates’s
invention,” Deresiewicz concludes.
Whether or not online courses provide an answer in and of themselves, they are
part of a larger phenomenon in which more people of all ages are beginning to
direct their own learning, exercising their questioning muscles—and doing so
outside the established institutions of learning.
Nikhil Goyal thinks this is where the future of learning-by-inquiry is going to
happen—not in schools (“I have no hope that the schools, for the most part, will
change,” he said), but in makeshift classrooms, often held in “maker” or
“hacker” spaces where people come together to build and create.
John Seely Brown holds a similar view: “The kids who actually drop out of
school or who view that the real learning happens after school, they’re becoming
part of this massive network of maker movements that is forming.” The maker
movement is mostly about building things (whether low-tech or high-tech), as
well as creating art and music. But it’s driven by project-based, peer-to-peer
learning, which tends to happen as novice “makers” in the group question the
more experienced ones. This is going on in basements, playgrounds, museums
(San Francisco’s Exploratorium recently established a maker space), and,
perhaps most surprisingly, libraries. “Libraries are being remade as interesting
maker spaces, with the librarian playing more of the role of the teacher of
inquiry-based learning,” Brown says.
Brown believes that young people may be honing better new-economy skills
outside the classroom than in it; they’re learning to create, experiment, build,
question, and learn. So it may turn out that in a world of exponential change,
“these are the kids who will have the skills to rise to the top.”
In a sense, we’re all “makers” now, or, at least, we would do well to think of
ourselves that way. Whether or not we were ever properly taught how to
question, we can develop the skill now, on our own, in our own spaces. One way
to start is by looking at how other practiced questioners do it—focusing, in
particular, on how they employ fundamental Why, What If, and How questions
to solve problems and create change.
CHAPTER 3
The Why, What If, and How of
Innovative Questioning
Why . . .
WHY do we have to wait for the picture?
WHY does stepping back help us move forward?
WHY did George Carlin see things the rest of us missed?
WHY should you be stuck without a bed if I’ve got an extra air mattress?
WHY must we “question the question”?
What if . . .
WHAT IF we could map the DNA of music?
WHAT IF your brain is a forest, thick with trees? (And what if the branches
touch?)
WHAT IF you sleep with a question? (Will you wake with an answer?)
WHAT IF your ideas are wrong and your socks don’t match?
How . . .
HOW can we give form to our questions?
HOW do you build a tower that doesn’t collapse (even after you put the
marshmallow on top)?
HOW can you learn to love a broken foot?
HOW might we create a symphony together?
WHY . . .
Why do we have to wait for the picture?
Edwin Land was a brilliant inventor,
1 sometimes described today as the Steve
Jobs of his time. He was capable of seeing new possibilities—at times coming to
him as detailed, fully formed visions—that others could not begin to imagine.
Yet even Land couldn’t see the life-changing opportunity he held in his own
hands on a sunny winter’s day in 1943. Rather, a question from a precocious
three-year-old suddenly brought the future into focus.
Land was on vacation with his family in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He had taken
some photographs of his young daughter, Jennifer, using his favorite camera. In
those days, film had to be taken to a darkroom or a processing lab for
development; Land knew this, as did any adult. But young Jennifer had a
different take. She asked her father why they couldn’t see the picture he had just
taken without having to wait.
Land found he had no good answer for her. He took this as a challenge, a
“puzzle she had set for me,” as he described it.
“Stimulated by the dangerously invigorating plateau air,” Land recalled in a
speech years later, “I thought, Why not? Why not design a picture that can be
developed right away?”
Land, then in his midthirties, was already used to tackling big questions. The
two-time Harvard dropout had parlayed his fascination with light polarization
into a modestly successful business. His technology, which allowed for filtering
light and reducing glare, was used on sunglasses and photo filters. Land had
bigger ambitions, hoping it could actually save lives: What if we could reduce
automobile accidents through polarized headlights and windshields?
This idea, which Land explored during the 1930s and early 1940s, was to use
polarization so that headlights, while still fully lighting the road ahead, would no
longer blind drivers coming the other way. But Land couldn’t get backing from
the automakers, and by 1943 his company was slowing down and in need of a
fresh innovation.
After Land spent a couple of hours thinking about Jennifer’s query, he began
to build upon her initial Why with a series of What If questions of his own. The
fundamental challenge he faced could be summed up as What if you could
somehow have a darkroom inside a camera?
According to Christopher Bonanos, author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid,
Land knew that “it wouldn’t do to have a tank
2 of chemicals sloshing around
inside a camera.” But what if those chemicals “could be contained in little
pouches, and then spread over the negative somehow?” This was one of a series
of questions Land worked through during a feverish couple of hours spent
walking by himself. He wondered, How would one print a positive? How would
you configure both negative film and positive paper in the back of the camera?
Land wasted no time in giving form to the questions, and partial answers,
swirling in his head. That very day he summoned a colleague and began to write
out a detailed plan for an instant camera. He began creating prototypes so
quickly that he produced the first instant test photo (a picture of himself) within
a few months. But, facing hurdles and setbacks, too, Land’s team had to struggle
to get the first black-and-white instant camera to market by a promised
introduction date four years later.
Land’s own questions weren’t even fully answered by then. From the outset,
he had envisioned something greater than what he was able to deliver in 1948 in
a splashy introduction. Land grappled with questions like How can we do this in
color? Why can’t the camera be easier to use? Another thirty years would pass
before he answered those questions with his masterpiece: the color, one-button,
even faster-printing SX-70.
The journey to answer his daughter’s beautiful question may have been long
and arduous at times, but Land was primed and ready for the trip. 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.”
The Polaroid story is a favorite of innovators and questioners because it shows a
number of interesting things about the dynamics of questioning. To begin with, it
demonstrates that a game-changing question can come from anyone, even a
naïve child. This underscores a point made earlier, that 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.
The Polaroid tale also nicely illustrates the sequential inquiry process that can
be triggered by a certain kind of catalytic question. This Why–What If–How
progression—which can be identified in many stories of innovative
breakthroughs—is clearly evident in the Polaroid example.
Land’s worldview began to shift as soon as he (with prompting from Jennifer)
looked at an existing, less-than-ideal reality and asked, in effect, Why does it
have to be that way? This led to a blizzard of What If hypothetical queries as
Land worked through many smaller questions in service of a larger one: What if
you could have a darkroom inside a camera? He connected ideas and pieces of
knowledge from his work in chemistry, optics, and engineering—the author
Bonanos observes that everything Land knew seemed to come together. But all
of that clever connective inquiry would have come to nothing if Land hadn’t
eventually proceeded to the How stage: getting his ideas down on paper, getting
feedback on the idea, then beginning to create early, tangible versions of his
camera-with-darkoom-inside; then testing those early versions, failing, revising,
testing again.
I’m sure Land never thought of his creative process as being divided into Why,
What If, and How stages. But the logic in this sequence reflects how people tend
to approach and work through problems—progressing from becoming aware of
and understanding the problem, to thinking of possible solutions, to trying to
enact those solutions.
Each stage of the problem solving process has distinct challenges and issues—
requiring a different mind-set, along with different types of questions. Expertise
is helpful at certain points, not so helpful at others; wide-open, unfettered
divergent thinking is critical at one stage, discipline and focus is called for at
another. By thinking of questioning and problem solving in a more structured
way, we can remind ourselves to shift approaches, change tools, and adjust our
questions according to which stage we’re entering.
If What If is about imagining and How is about doing, the initial Why stage
has to do with seeing and understanding. The “seeing” part of that might seem
easy—just open your eyes and look around, right? But Edwin Land couldn’t see
a problem that was right in front of him; at first only Jennifer could see it. That
suggests those who would like to get better at asking Why have two options.
You can conduct all business, including the business of everyday life, constantly
accompanied by a curious and vocal three- or four-year-old, who will see what
you miss. Or you can attempt to adjust the way you look at the world so that
your perspective more closely aligns with that of a curious child. That second
option is by no means easy—it takes some effort to see things with a fresh eye.
That’s only part of what’s required 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.
Why does stepping back help us move forward?
The term stepping back is often used when we talk about questioning—step back
and ask why, step back and reconsider, and so forth. But what are we stepping
back from?
It’s not insignificant that Edwin Land was on vacation when the big Why
question surfaced. He was removed from the day-to-day rush of his work. He
had the time and the distance from practical business matters to entertain a
question that was highly impractical. Meanwhile, Land’s daughter, in asking her
question, inspired him to pause briefly to consider reality from a naïve
perspective. This points to a second, different kind of back step—his distancing
himself from his own assumptions and expertise. For a moment, he stopped
knowing and began to wonder.
To question well—in particular, to ask fundamental Why questions—we don’t
necessarily have to be on vacation, accompanied by a precocious three-year-old.
But at least temporarily, it’s necessary to stop doing and stop knowing in order to
start asking.
The “doing” part would seem to be more in our control to stop than the
“knowing”—yet it might be even harder. In a world that expects us to move fast,
to keep advancing (if only incrementally), to just “get it done,” who has time for
asking why?
This is particularly true in the workplace. A good way to become unpopular in
a business meeting is to ask, “Why are we doing this?”—even though the
question may be entirely justified. It often takes a thick-skinned outsider to be
willing to even try. George Lois, the renowned designer of iconic magazine
covers and celebrated advertising campaigns, was also known for being a
disruptive force in business meetings. It wasn’t just that he was passionate in
arguing for his ideas; the real issue, Lois recalls, was that often he was the only
person in the meeting willing to ask why. The gathered business executives
would be anxious to proceed on a course of action assumed to be sensible. While
everyone else nodded
3
in agreement, “I would be the only guy raising his hand
to say, ‘Wait a minute, this thing you want to do doesn’t make any sense. Why
the hell are you doing it this way?’”
Others in the room saw Lois to be slowing the meeting and stopping the group
from moving forward. But Lois understood that the group was apt to be
operating on habit—trotting out an idea or approach similar to what had been
done in similar situations before, without questioning whether it was the best
idea or the right approach in this instance. The group needed to be challenged to
“step back” by someone like Lois—who had a healthy enough ego to withstand
being the lone questioner in the room.
Why does it pay to swim with dolphins?
4
Stepping back from everyday work and activities can allow for the kind of reflection and deep
questioning that occasionally leads to career-changing (and even industry-changing) insights.
Such was the case with Marc Benioff, an executive at the tech company Oracle who took an
extended break from his job so he could just think. Benioff journeyed to India and then
continued on to Hawaii, where, as he told the authors of The Innovator’s DNA, he went
swimming with dolphins in the Pacific Ocean. Out there in the water, he thought of a question:
“I asked myself ‘Why aren’t all enterprise software applications built like Amazon and
eBay?’” This inspired Benioff to launch Salesforce.com, which set out to use the Internet to
radically change the design and distribution of business software programs. Within eight
years, Benioff’s company had $1 billion in sales and was credited with “turning the software
industry on its head.”
The pressure to keep moving forward—and the accompanying reluctance to
step back and question—is not just a business phenomenon. As everyday life
becomes more jam-packed with tasks, activities, diversions, and distractions,
“stepping back and questioning” is unlikely to get a slot on the schedule. Which
means some of the most important questions—about why we’re engaging in all
those activities in the first place—never get raised.
Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, says that it’s becoming
increasingly difficult for people to find time “to step back and ask a large
question like, ‘What do I want from life, anyway?’” Rubin says that for a long
time, she was caught up in this same cycle herself. “I was so focused on my
daily to-do list that I didn’t spend any time thinking about whether I was actually
happy or how I could be happier.” As previously noted, Rubin’s “back-step”
moment came during a bus ride on a rainy day, at one of those rare times when
everything slowed down enough to allow her to ask, Why am I not happy? (And
what if I were to do something about that?)
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.
If asking Why requires stepping back from “doing,” it also demands a step back
from “knowing.” Whether in life or in work, people become experts within their
own domains—generally confident that they already know what they need to
know to do well in their jobs and lives. Having this sense of knowing can make
us less curious and less open to new ideas and possibilities. To make matters
worse, we don’t “know” as much we might think we do.
Robert Burton, a neurologist and
5
the author of the book On Being Certain,
contends that we all suffer from a common human condition of thinking we
know more than we do. For years, Burton has been grappling with the question
What does it mean to be convinced?
He told me he has concluded, based on extensive research, that the feeling of
“knowing” is just that—a feeling, or a sensation. However, the feeling is so
strong that it creates what Burton calls a “certainty epidemic”—wherein many
people overestimate their knowledge, put too much faith in their “gut instinct,”
and walk around convinced they have more answers than they actually do. If you
feel this way, you’re less likely to ask questions.
Furthermore, we also get in the habit of not paying much attention to the world
around us. Neurologists have found that our brains are hardwired to quickly
categorize, filter, and even ignore some of the massive amounts of stimuli
coming at us every moment. A nice description of this phenomenon
6 comes from
Maura O’Neill, the chief innovation officer for USAID, a government agency
focused on social problems. In her writing, O’Neill observed, “Our brains have
evolved to dump most of what we see, quickly categorize the rest, and file it
away in our long term memory using our brain’s equivalent of the Dewey
Decimal system.”
As O’Neill notes, this behavior developed for practical reasons. Our ancestors
needed to quickly determine if something coming at them was friendly or
harmful; today, we still need to do that at times, though we’re more often
concerned, in this info-rich environment, with trying to sort what’s new and
important from what’s known or extraneous. We make judgments in fractions of
a second: This I’ll pay attention to, everything else I’ll ignore because (a) it
doesn’t concern/interest me or (b) I already know about it.
We make that judgment about what’s “known” based on everything we’ve
experienced already—and as O’Neill notes, “the more we see, hear, touch, or
smell something, the more hard-wired in our brain it becomes.” We routinely
“default to the set of knowledge and experience each one of us has.”
This works well under most circumstances, but when we wish to move beyond
that default setting—to consider new ideas and possibilities, to break from
habitual thinking and expand upon our existing knowledge—it helps if we can
let go of what we know, just temporarily. You have to be adventurous enough
(and humble enough) to enter the “know nothing” zone of a constant questioner
such as Paul Bennett.
Bennett is a longtime creative director at the innovation firm IDEO. A native of
the United Kingdom who grew up in Singapore, he originally headed up IDEO’s
London office, then helped open branches in Asia. A globe-trotter, he is
constantly observing and wondering why, for instance, people in certain parts of
China hang their dried fish on the line right next to their washed clothes. Bennett
shares many of his observations and questions in a blog titled The Curiosity
Chronicles.
“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.”
Having grown comfortable in that role, Bennett says, he is able to ask
“incredibly naïve questions” without feeling the least self-conscious. For
example, when Bennett was called in to speak at the parliament in Iceland during
the country’s financial meltdown, “I asked stupid questions like ‘Where’s the
money?’ Not because I was trying to be disrespectful but because no one seemed
to be able to give a straight answer to this basic question.”
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.”
Sometimes, he says, his naïveté gives others permission to step back and
rethink in ways they might not normally be comfortable doing. In some parts of
Asia, for example, rigid hierarchical structures in business and government tend
to discourage questioning. “In those cultures, people sometimes welcome
outsiders coming in and asking basic questions because they may be wondering
about these things themselves—but they don’t want to ask because they can’t
afford to look foolish or disrespectful.”
Bennett says that within IDEO, the company recognizes it’s important to
create an environment where it’s safe to ask “stupid” questions. “You need to
have a culture that engenders trust,” he says. “Part of questioning is about
exposing vulnerability—and being okay with vulnerability as a cultural
currency.” So at the firm, no question is too basic to ask; and co-workers are
encouraged to support and build upon others’ questions, rather than dismissing
them or giving pat answers. Bennett says, “We allow people to fall backwards
and be caught by one another.”
In Silicon Valley, IDEO and other innovation-driven firms go out of their way to
protect and encourage naïve questioning because they know, from experience,
that it can lead to valuable insights that result in breakthrough ideas and
successful products. The valley is a place where everyone, it seems, is racing
nonstop to get to “what’s next.” This would seem an unlikely place for slowing
down, stepping back, and asking fundamental questions. Yet a number of the
best minds in the tech sector have embraced this approach, led in recent years by
the late cofounder of Apple, Steve Jobs,
7 who was a proponent and practitioner
of the Zen principle known as shoshin, or “beginner’s mind.”
Jobs was determined to reimagine and re-create the ways we integrate
technology into our everyday lives. This required asking fundamental questions
(Jobs was known to be a dogged questioner of everything from current market
practices to the ideas of his employees, many of whom were subject to
deconstructive interrogation). One of his tools in challenging conventional
wisdom was a bit of ancient wisdom, brought to
8 Northern California in the
1960s by a Japanese Zen master named Shunryu Suzuki. Author of the book Zen
Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Suzuki immigrated to the area and taught there until his
death in 1971.
In his book, Suzuki writes, “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 also made an important point that underscores the potential value of
this way of thinking to a would-be innovator: “In the beginner’s mind there are
many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
Beginner’s mind, along with other Zen principles of deep thinking,
mindfulness, listening, and questioning, gradually caught on with others in
Silicon Valley, beyond Jobs and Apple. Les Kaye is a Zen abbot
9 whose Kannon
Do Zen Meditation Center is located in Mountain View, California, just down
the road from Google. His followers include folks from Google and Apple, as
well as various tech-start-up entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists who fund
them. Kaye is aware that some of these people may be motivated by the notion
that a “question-everything” Zen mind-set could be used to help spark new ideas
and innovations (one recent book coined the term Zennovation to describe the
merging of Zen principles and innovation strategies).
Kaye is quick to point out, “It would be a mistake for people to think, ‘If I do
Zen practice, I’ll become more creative.’ It’s not a magic pill.” Moreover,
Kaye’s center cites “no striving” as a guiding Zen principle; it’s considered
inappropriate to lust after material gains and business success. When I pointed
out to Kaye that Steve Jobs seemed to successfully use “beginner’s mind” to
envision new products as he simultaneously “strived” for greater market share,
Kaye, who once studied with Jobs at the same Zen center, remarked, “Steve had
an unusual relationship with Zen. He got the artistic side of it but not the
Buddhist side—the art, but not the heart.”
Still, Jobs proved that, for better or worse, you can be both a questioner and a
conqueror. Indeed, you can extract practical lessons from beginner’s mind,
whether or not you choose to go “full Zen.” Randy Komisar, a partner in the
renowned
10 Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield &
Byers, and a Zen practitioner, says the key to adopting this manner of observing
and questioning is to make an effort to become, in his word, “detached”—from
everyday thoughts, distractions, preconceived notions, habitual behaviors, and
even from oneself. “Basically, you begin to observe yourself as if you were a
third party.” If you can achieve that sense of detachment, your thinking becomes
more “flexible and fluid,” Komisar maintains, and “you find yourself in a better
position to question everything.”
TED founder Richard Saul Wurman says it helps him, when approaching any
new situation or subject, to think of his mind as “an empty bucket.” The job is to
slowly and methodically fill that bucket, Wurman says, and you begin by asking
the most basic of questions.
Beginner’s mind is akin to adopting a more childlike mind-set. That’s not as
fanciful as it might sound. I mentioned previously that Joichi Ito, director of the
prestigious MIT Media Lab—which has had a hand in creating everything from
the Kindle electronic reader to futuristic cars that can fold in half—favors the
term neoteny to describe the phenomenon of maintaining childlike mental
attributes as an adult. Ito says one can train oneself to think this way.
The Media Lab has a “kindergarten for adults” atmosphere, where constant
play is encouraged. The lab is also designed so that people from different
disciplines work together, which means “we are often looking at a problem11
we’re not an expert in,” says Tod Machover, a cutting-edge musical composer
and MIT professor who, in his experimental work at the lab, helped create the
popular interactive video game Guitar Hero. Machover says it’s not uncommon
for breakthrough ideas to come from people who are working outside their area
of expertise because the novices are “able to see a problem with a fresh eye,
forget about what’s easy or hard, and not worry about what other people in that
field have done.”
For those who doubt whether “serious” adults can actually be encouraged to
think more like children, a study conducted by the researchers
12 Darya Zabelina
and Michael Robinson at North Dakota State University indicates that it’s
actually easy for people to “think young,” with a little nudge.
Zabelina had noticed, in previous studies, that young children tended to
perform well on creativity tests because they are uninhibited. So Zabelina and
Robinson took two groups of adults and instructed one group to think of
themselves as “seven-year-olds, enjoying a day off from school” (the other
group just thought of themselves as the adults they are). When the two groups
were given a creativity test, the “think young” group came up with better, more
original ideas and exhibited “more flexible, fluid thinking.”
Zabelina believes that “mind-sets are flexible. It is possible to tap into the
more open way of thinking of a child.” All that’s needed, it seems, is to be given
permission (by others or by ourselves) to take that step back in time.
Why did George Carlin see things the rest of us missed?
When we do step back, what do we then see? We’re seeing essentially the same
realities and situations. But with more distance, a bigger picture comes into
view. We may now be able to see the overall context; we might notice the
patterns and relationships between things we’d previously thought of as separate.
This can change everything. Upon stepping back and reexamining something
you’ve been looking at the same way for years, you might suddenly feel as if
you’re seeing it for the first time.
If you’ve ever experienced this, it feels a bit like déjà vu in reverse. With déjà
vu, you go somewhere you’ve never before been yet it seems oddly familiar;
conversely, when you look at something familiar and suddenly see it fresh, this
is a case of vuja de, to use a quirky term13
favored by Stanford University
professor and author Bob Sutton.
Sutton has argued that if we train ourselves to look at the world around us
through a vuja de lens, it can open up a range of new possibilities—fresh
questions to ask, ideas to pursue, challenges to tackle, all previously unnoticed
because they were camouflaged in overly familiar surroundings. Adopting this
view, business leaders and managers are more apt to notice inconsistencies and
outdated methods—as well as dormant opportunities. Someone working on
social issues or even personal ones is likely to notice more and to ask
fundamental questions about what he or she notices.
It isn’t easy, Sutton notes: “It means thinking of things that are usually
assumed to be negative as positive, and vice versa. It can mean reversing
assumptions about cause and effect, or what matters most versus least. It means
not traveling through life on automatic pilot.”
As with beginner’s mind, Sutton’s vuja de idea has resonated in various
corners of the innovation sector, having been picked up by, among others, IDEO,
whose general manager, Tom Kelley, has written that vuja de provides the
ability to “see what’s always been there
14 but has gone unnoticed.”
But years before IDEO or even Sutton talked about vuja de, the term was
mentioned, albeit briefly,
15
in a stand-up comedy routine by the American
comedian George Carlin. In the midst of his act, Carlin paused, as if he’d just
had an epiphany—then announced to the audience that he’d experienced vuja de,
which, as he explained, was “the strange feeling that, somehow, none of this has
ever happened before.”
Carlin died in 2008, but his daughter, the comedian and radio host Kelly
Carlin,
16
feels the vuja de way of looking at the world—of observing mundane,
everyday things as if one were witnessing something strange and fascinating—is
exactly the way Carlin went through his life and got his material. “When the
familiar becomes this sort of alien world and you can see it fresh, then it’s like
you’ve gone into a whole other section of the file folder in your brain,” she said.
“And now you have access to this other perspective that most people don’t
have.”
Carlin used that perspective to develop a style of observational humor that
could be thought of as the Why school of comedy. “It was observing our
everyday life—baseball, dogs and cats, the way someone stands in front of the
refrigerator—and asking, Why do we do things the way we do them?” Kelly
Carlin says. George Carlin studied routine behaviors that most of us take for
granted, mapping the inconsistencies, searching for some kind of rationale (and
usually not finding one). When we’ve lost our keys and are searching for them,
he wondered, why do we keep looking in the same few places, over and over?
Kelly Carlin, who often interviews other comedians on her podcast series
Waking from the American Dream, thinks comedians in general are more apt to
have a vuja de perspective. “Most comics grew up feeling like they didn’t
belong,” she says. “They were the class clowns, the outsiders—maybe the one
who had the learning disability and didn’t do well in an academic setting. As
outsiders, it’s natural for them to stand back and observe, and to wonder about
what everyone is doing. And eventually, that’s where they get their material.”
George Carlin once said that
17 he could not help noticing the irrational
behaviors, all the things that just don’t make sense—and that he sometimes
wished he didn’t notice all of it because it agitated him so much.
Most of us have the opposite problem—we don’t notice enough. IDEO’s Kelley
thinks it’s because we don’t generally take the time required for close
observation. When people fail to see what’s right in front of them, it’s often
because “they stopped looking too soon.”
18
The Dartmouth University business professor Vijay Govindarajan and
19
the
consultant Srikanth Srinivas have devised an exercise that nicely illustrates what
Kelley is talking about. In their seminars, they briefly show attendees the figure
below:
Then, Srinivas told me, the figure is covered up and he asks, “How many
squares did you see?”
The easy answer is sixteen. But the more observant people in the group are apt
to notice—especially after Srinivas allows them to have a second, longer look—
that you can find additional squares by configuring them differently. In addition
to the sixteen single squares, there are nine two-by-two squares, four three-bythree squares, and one large four-by-four square, which brings the total to thirty
squares.
“The squares were always there, but you didn’t find them until you looked for
them,” Govindarajan and Srinivas wrote on the Harvard Business Review blog,
after they published the puzzle there. (They got hundreds of responses from
readers, whose answers to “How many squares?” ranged from sixteen to thirty
up to sixty—if you count the thirty squares with black edges as well as the thirty
with white edges—and all the way to infinity.)
Srinivas told me he uses the exercise to illustrate that we often fail to see all
the possibilities available to us because we simply haven’t spent enough time
looking. He said the exercise particularly resonates with people who are in a
difficult situation: “Sometimes people feel like they have nowhere to go and
they’ve run out of options, and my point is, ‘There is always another square,
another possibility, if you just keep looking for it.’”
Why can’t computers do more than compute?
21
In the 1950s it wasn’t clear how computers could be used outside of mathematics. Conway
Berners-Lee, a British mathematician who worked on the early commercial electronic
computers, was fascinated by the question, Could computers be used to link information rather
than simply compute numbers? The question was later refined by his son, software engineer
Tim Berners-Lee. Overwhelmed by massive amounts of research data, Berners-Lee wondered
if there were a way to combine the nascent Internet with linked hypertext documents to better
find and share information. In 1989, he proposed the global hypertext project to be known as
the World Wide Web. His prototype included the now familiar architecture of web browsers,
HTML, HTTP, and URLs.
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. In Sutton’s writings on vuja de and how to
see the familiar, he advises “shifting our focus from objects or
20 patterns in the
foreground to those in the background.”
Such close observation demands patience and persistence. After seeing the
first sixteen squares, we’re inclined to move on and look elsewhere; but the
thirtieth square, the one you notice later, can turn out to be a window of
opportunity that others haven’t yet seen. Einstein talked about looking for the
needle in the haystack and finding it—at which point most people stop looking.
The secret, he said, is to keep looking, in search of an even better needle.
Why should you be stuck without a bed if I’ve got an extra air
mattress?
In the fall of 2007, Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky had one question uppermost in
their minds, and it wasn’t a beautiful one. “How were we going to pay
22
the
rent? That was the main issue at the time,” Gebbia recalls. He and his roommate,
Chesky, had no jobs, and not much money. But they did have a decent San
Francisco apartment with a place to sleep and a roof over their heads. Which was
more than could be said for many of the people coming to town for a local
business conference—the city’s hotels were all booked, and conference-goers
were desperate for a place to stay.
This situation (which Gebbia and Chesky had experienced firsthand as visitors
to prior conferences) didn’t make sense to them: Why can’t we find a place for
these people to crash for a night or two? Which then led to Why not our place?
Gebbia and Chesky got hold of three inflatable air mattresses. They could
simply have run a cheap classified ad, rented out their airbeds for a modest fee
during the conference, and picked up enough money to cover a small portion of
that month’s rent. But almost immediately, they started to think bigger about this
idea and asked all kinds of What If questions, such as What if we provide more
than just a mattress to sleep on? They didn’t have much to offer, but they threw
in a modest breakfast (how modest? Pop-Tarts!) and sightseeing tips. And rather
than just put a listing on Craigslist, Gebbia and Chesky (who both had a design
background) thought, What if we create our own website?
They did all of this, rented out the three mattresses to three individuals who
didn’t know each other, and everyone enjoyed the experience. Gebbia says, they
now started to think, Why not make a business out of this? What if we could
create this same experience in every major city?
Here is where the two dreamers ran headfirst into conventional wisdom.
Initially, no one, outside of Chesky, Gebbia, and a third partner they brought on,
thought this was an idea that made business sense or was worth supporting. Paul
Graham, a renowned angel investor in Silicon Valley who runs the start-up
incubator firm Y Combinator, believed quite simply, “No one would want to
stay in
23 someone else’s bed.”
The idea that would eventually become Airbnb was challenging a basic
assumption: that you needed established, reputable hotels to provide
accommodation for out-of-town visitors. Those paying close attention might
have noticed that just a few years prior to this, lots of people held similar
assumptions about cars—you could buy them, you could rent them, but there
was no practical way to share them. Then an entrepreneur named Robin Chase
asked, Why not?—and subsequently introduced Zipcar.
Gebbia told me that part of the reason he and Chesky believed this was a
problem worth solving—the reason, he suspects, that they saw what others
missed—was that they had been on both sides of the problem. “We knew what it
was like to come to town needing a place to stay, and we knew what it was like
to have extra space that we needed to rent,” Gebbia said. “So we connected those
two dots. In retrospect it makes complete sense—but at the time, no one else had
connected those dots.”
Gebbia and Chesky had a kind of “rebel” attitude that goes with successful
questioning. 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.”
Gebbia and Chesky had to overcome that initial resistance by continuing to
push forward on their original question (about whether they could expand that
first hosting experience into a business), and they were propelled by new
questions at each step of the way. They wondered, What if we take this idea on
the road and test it in another city? With the 2008 Democratic presidential
convention in Denver, they found the perfect place to launch—lots of people
coming into town, not enough hotels. But how would those visitors, and the
people with space to rent, learn about Airbnb? Gebbia and Chesky couldn’t
afford ads; so they had to make news. The founders knew that the news channels
would be doing stories about how crowded and overbooked Denver was. They
pitched Airbnb as a “solution story” to news producers and ended up on CNN.
The bookings came in and the Denver launch was a success.
But Gebbia says they kept questioning, kept iterating and refining the model
for another year before they felt they had it right. They used the site themselves,
stayed in rentals, and asked, What’s working here and what’s not? When they
noticed, for example, that exchanging money with apartment hosts was awkward
—“It just felt like the whole experience was relaxed and fun, until it came time
to pay,” Gebbia recalls—this spurred them to ask, What if you could pay online?
When they noticed that many of the visitors to their site were asking about
foreign cities, this led to a big question: Why are we limiting this to the U.S.?
What if we go global? Within less than two years, they were in more than a
hundred countries, doing a million bookings, and flush with more than one
hundred million investment dollars. They had even won over early skeptics such
as Y Combinator’s Graham, who became one of their seed investors.
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 power
24
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?”
Whether or not Airbnb, joined by others, will be able to successfully lead that
ambitious “sharing economy” movement is an open question, and one that—
even more than the earlier questions about whether people would be willing to
share homes and beds—aggressively challenges assumptions about how our
economy works, the extent to which people are willing to change ingrained
behavior, and whether sharing even makes sense as a viable business model.
Why can’t India have 911 emergency service?
26
This was the question Shaffi Mather tackled, following a health emergency involving his
mother. He started with one ambulance and a simple number (1298) that people could dial in a
crisis. But the toughest question was, How much should we charge? Mather wanted the
service to be available to everyone, so he tried a pay-what-you-can honor system—but
everyone claimed to be poor. So he inquired, How can we get those with money to pay more?
The answer: The better the hospital you requested, the more you were charged for the ride.
With backing from the Acumen Fund, Mather’s service became Asia’s largest ambulance
company, transporting nearly 2 million people. Mather kept questioning along the way, with
occasional misfires: Once, to try to cut costs, he asked, What if the ambulance doctors also
carried the cots? The lesson learned: people assume that any doctor who has to carry cots
must not be a very good doctor.
Clearly, though, the success Gebbia and Chesky have already achieved is
rooted in their willing-ness to challenge assumptions and to believe that
everything is subject to change—regardless of what conventional wisdom holds.
I think of this brand of questioning as a subcategory of Why questions that could
be considered “challenger questions.” They have a certain attitude about them:
restless, rebellious, skeptical of convention and authority. As in:
Why should we settle for what currently exists?
And why should I believe you when you tell me something can’t be done?
Asking challenger questions is inherently uncomfortable—“it creates
dissonance,” notes Paul Bottino,
25 who directs Harvard University’s studentinnovator program. The program draws some of the brightest, most creative
college students—yet even those students arrive with a tendency to accept much
of what they’re told without question, Bottino says. One of his chief tasks is to
teach them “to understand that the 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.’”
That goes against what many are taught in school: that each question has one
right answer and you’d better accept it (and memorize it). When Deborah Meier
established her Central Park East School designed to encourage questioning, the
first “habit of mind” she taught her students was to ask, How do we know what’s
true? Meier wanted them to question everything they were taught and all they
were told. George Carlin had a lifelong mistrust of authority, Kelly Carlin noted,
and his advice to parents was “Don’t just teach your children to read. Teach
them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.”
After years of being conditioned to think that “answers” coming from
“experts” should be accepted, the only way to get more comfortable questioning
the expert assumptions of others is to do it repeatedly and over time, Bottino
says. Among the things one must get used to, in asking challenger questions, is
that you’re likely to be asked the classic antichallenger question: 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 common counterquestion that challengers can expect to be hit with is
some version of Okay, genius, how would you do it better? An interesting
assumption is built into this question: that if someone is going to challenge the
existing ways, then he/she had better have an alternative ready. But it’s
important to ask Why and What If questions even if we don’t yet know the How.
Getting to a better alternative may be a long process, but it has to start
somewhere—and that starting point often involves questioning the status quo.
Why must we “question the question”?
Questions that challenge the prevailing assumptions are useful and sometimes
catalytic—but they can also be flawed themselves. Assumptions and biases of
our own may be embedded in the questions we ask. One of the ways to find out
is to subject those questions to . . . questioning.
Robert Burton, the aforementioned neurologist who writes about the “certainty
epidemic,” the widespread tendency of people to question less than they should,
says that even when people do ask questions, they’re often relying on those same
unreliable gut instincts and biases. “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?”
Questioning one’s own questions—as in, Why am I asking why?—might seem
like a circular exercise, bound to lead nowhere and yield dizziness. But there are
practical, constructive ways to do this, and they can help produce a more
insightful or more informed question. They range from simple practices such as
“the five whys” to more exhaustive methods such as contextual inquiry, wherein
we take our questions out into the larger world to see how they survive contact
with reality.
The five whys methodology originated
27
in Japan and is credited to Sakichi
Toyoda, the founder of Toyota Industries. For decades, the company used the
practice of asking why five times in succession as a means of getting to the root
of a particular manufacturing problem. When, for example, a faulty car part
came out of a factory, asking why the first time would yield the most obvious
answer—say, that someone on the assembly line had made a mistake. By then
asking why that mistake occurred, an underlying cause might surface—such as
insufficient training on a task. Asking why again, the company might discover
the training program was underfunded; and asking why about that could lead
back to fundamental company priorities about where money should be spent and
what was most important in the end.
The value of this kind of excavation-by-inquiry is becoming more widely
recognized in the business world, most recently as part of the Lean Startup
methodology taught by the author/consultant Eric Ries, who is a big proponent
of the five whys. I asked Ries why a simple, almost-childlike practice seems to
work so well. “It’s a technique that’s really designed to overcome the limits of
human psychology,” Ries explained. By this he means that people are inclined to
look for the easiest, most obvious explanation for a problem. On top of that, “we
tend to personalize things that are really systemic.” It’s easier to just blame that
poor assembly-line worker than to consider all the complex, interrelated factors
that may be contributing to the problem.
The five whys
28 can be used outside of business, as well. IDEO has used it to
address a number of behavioral issues. The firm offers this example of how it
can be applied to a lifestyle issue.
Why do you exercise?
Because it’s healthy.
Why is it healthy?
Because it raises my heart rate.
Why is that important?
So that I burn more calories.
Why do you want to do that?
To lose weight.
Why are you trying to lose weight?
I feel social pressure to look fit.
One might ask, Why stop at five? That designated stopping point does seem
arbitrary (in actual practice, you may get to something important after three
whys, other times it might take six—and, admittedly, sometimes the technique
doesn’t work at all). But if you don’t stop asking why at some reasonable point,
you may end up, like Louis C.K. in his “Why?” comedy bit, lost in cosmic
questions about why the universe is the way it is.
However many times you do it, asking “Why?” repeatedly does seem to have
value in all kinds of endeavors that require getting at deeper truths. The
Hollywood character actor and author Stephen Tobolowsky
29 uses this kind of
sequential questioning to burrow down to the core of each character he plays—
and said it usually takes “three levels of questions, three assaults on the fortress,
before you get to something useful and specific as an actor.”
Why isn’t the water reaching the people who need it?
30
With the creation of Water.org, the engineer/activist Gary White teamed up with actor Matt
Damon to tackle the problem of nearly one billion people lacking access to safe water. The
conventional approach was to raise charitable donations to drill wells “and basically give
water projects away.” Seeing this wasn’t working, White and Damon inquired, Why aren’t
charitable efforts succeeding in getting water to where it’s most needed? Turns out the
subsidies were going to local middlemen who ran the utilities—while the poor were still left
having to overpay or walk great distances to get water. Eventually, White and Damon focused
on this empowering question: What if local communities could have the means to create their
own sources of water? Water.org’s innovative “Water Credit” makes small loans available to
people (mostly women) who can then develop or acquire their own water sources. So far it has
helped more than a million people worldwide.
If Tobolowsky is playing, say, a doctor, he may start by questioning the
character’s current motivations, but he’ll gradually use levels of inquiry to go
deeper and deeper: “I’ll ask myself, As a doctor, what am I really good at and
not so good at? Then I’ll go to a deeper level of questioning: Why did I want to
become a doctor in the first place?” When told about the five whys
methodology, Tobolowksy hadn’t heard of it—but said he’s been doing his own
version of the three whys for many years because it works.
There are various other ways to “work on” a question you have chosen to pursue
—to deconstruct it, or to alter its shape and scope. At the MIT Media Lab, Tod
Machover teaches students to broaden their questions in some instances, and
narrow them in others. You might broaden a question to make it more applicable
to more people, and therefore more significant. For example, the Airbnb
founders could have limited the scope of their question to Can we set up an
online accommodation-sharing system in San Francisco?—but they quickly
broadened it to Can this idea work worldwide? On the other hand, as Machover
notes, to move forward on a big question sometimes it’s necessary to break it
down into smaller, more actionable questions—as in, Before we try to do this
thing worldwide, how might we make it work in our own backyard?
Another method of tinkering with questions has been developed by the Right
Question Institute, which has discovered, through its research, that you can
improve a question by opening and closing it. For instance, suppose one is
grappling with the question Why is my father-in-law difficult to get along with?
Like most Why, What If, and How questions, this question is open-ended
because it has no one definitive answer. But note what happens when we
transform this into a closed, yes-or-no question: Is my father-in-law difficult to
get along with?
Worded this way, the question almost forces one to confront the assumption
within the original question—and to consider that it might not be valid (because
the father-in-law, in this scenario, might have other relatives and friends with
whom he gets along swimmingly). So this might cause me to go back and revise
that original question to make it more accurate: Why is my father-in-law so
difficult for me to get along with? In its research, the RQI has found that this
process works both ways—closed questions can also be improved by opening
them up.
While you can do much tinkering around the edges of a question using such
methods, perhaps the best way to question a question is to take it out into the
world with you—and see if the assumptions behind it hold up when exposed to
real people and situations. Often, what seems to be the right question in one
context proves to be the wrong one in another.
The developing world has a shortage of incubators for infants. For years,
health organizations and philanthropic groups asked the logical question: How
can we get more incubators to the places that need them? A relatively
straightforward answer to that question was—donate them. But that was the right
answer to the wrong question. This led to thousands of incubators being donated
to poor nations, “only to end up in ‘incubator graveyards,’”
31 as the New York
Times reported. This was part of a larger problem that went far beyond
incubators; one study found that 96 percent of foreign-donated medical
equipment ended up being used for a short time, then abandoned.
The better question, which was eventually asked by health officials working
on the problem, was Why aren’t people in developing countries using the
incubators they have? On-the-ground observation revealed that the incubators
were prone to breaking down and locals didn’t have the parts or know-how to fix
them. Having answered the Why, the health officials moved to the What If,
specifically, What if we could provide incubators that were easy to maintain and
fix?
One doctor working on the initiative, Jonathan Rosen, knew from his own
study of the problem that cars and car parts were readily available in many of the
areas with incubator problems. So the ultimate question became How can we
make an incubator out of car parts? A nonprofit design group was brought in to
tackle that question, and they eventually pieced together the “car-parts
incubator,” which was inexpensive, easy to use, and could be fixed by anyone
with basic mechanical skills, using parts from a local junkyard.
In the philanthropic world, as well as in business, medicine, and science, there
are many stories like the car-parts-incubator story—in which the wrong question
is asked, based on incomplete information or faulty assumptions, often because
those formulating the questions are too far removed from the problem they’re
trying to solve. One of the best ways to overcome this is to try to close the
distance between the questioner and the problem.
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.
In the business world, IDEO has
32 been a pioneer of this type of research. As the
design firm was being formed twenty-odd years ago, its founders, including the
designer David Kelley and his brother Tom, realized that to solve human
engineering problems (such as, How do we make gadgets that fit into people’s
lives?), the company would have to employ the kind of psychological and
behavioral inquiry normally done by social scientists. So the firm hired
psychologists and other students of human behavior and began to develop its
own methods of observing people.
IDEO understood that to question effectively, one couldn’t do it from inside
the bubble of the company, or in artificial settings such as focus groups. To
understand how people live, you have to immerse yourself in their lives—watch
them in their kitchens, follow them as they go to the supermarket, and so forth.
The company’s researchers sometimes go to great lengths to experience things
firsthand.
One classic example involved a hospital
33 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.)
To do contextual inquiry well, you don’t need a team of trained researchers.
What’s required is a willingness to go out into the world with a curious and open
mind, to observe closely, and—perhaps most important, according to a number
of the questioners I’ve interviewed—to listen. Listening informs questioning.
Paul Bennett says that one of the keys to being a good questioner is to stop
reflexively asking so many thoughtless questions and pay attention—eventually,
a truly interesting question may come to mind. The Acumen Fund’s Jacqueline
Novogratz,
34 whose nonprofit group tackles social problems by first spending
extensive time on the ground in the villages and communities they’re trying to
help, talks about “listening with your whole body”—using all senses to absorb
what’s going on around you.
Contextual inquiry requires a commitment to the question you’re exploring.
It’s one thing to ponder questions in your room, or within your own company’s
offices, or in online surveys; it’s another to go out there and, as Novogratz says,
“spend time sitting on the floor with people, listening to them as they tell you
about their lives.” Deciding to go to that level is part of taking ownership of a
question. It’s about pausing, before jumping in headlong, to ask, Why is this my
problem? And if it’s not my problem, why should it be?
While I was interviewing Srikanth Srinivas—the man who asks people to
count squares and look for unseen windows—he asked an interesting question.
We were discussing how breakthroughs often start with a question and were
focused on stories such as those of Netflix and Polaroid. Srinivas noted that the
questions that were asked (Why should I have to pay late fees? Why do we have
to wait for the picture?) were ordinary questions that could have been asked by
anyone. Then he added, “But most people would have asked a question like that
and then not acted on it. So the question is, why do some people act on a
question?”
There’s no one answer to that; you could say it has to do with imagination,
determination—or sometimes desperation, as in the case of Van Phillips and his
prosthetic foot. 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. And all of this will prove helpful during the What
If stage of inquiry.
WHAT IF . . .
What if we could map the DNA of music?
Before he changed the way many
36
listen to music, Tim Westergren was himself
a musician, playing in a rock band that, like most bands and musicians
Westergren knew back then, struggled to find an audience. Many of the
musicians he knew were talented, but found themselves in that classic catch-22:
they couldn’t build a sizable following unless they were played on the radio, and
they couldn’t get played on the radio unless they had a sizable following.
So this prompted the initial Why question—Why can’t good musicians find the
audience they deserve?—that lodged in Westergren’s head. He eventually quit
the band to get a job in the film industry as a music composer. But his question
stayed with him.
In his new line of work, Westergren’s job was to create music that reflected
someone else’s tastes. “As a film composer, your job is to profile your director’s
tastes and give them what they want,” Westergren told The Street. But he didn’t
just ask directors what they liked; instead, he played various types of music for
them to see how they reacted. Then, he would create what he called “an informal
genome of musical tastes in my head.”
This led to what some would call an epiphany, though it was actually a
moment of connective inquiry. Westergren was reading a magazine article about
the folk musician Aimee Mann—a talented artist with a modest following who,
in Westergren’s words, “was sort of stuck in this no-man’s-land . . . she was
being shelved, and her records weren’t being released.”
Reading about Mann resurfaced the question Westergren had contemplated
before about why musicians couldn’t find audiences, but now something
different happened; the question didn’t just hang in the air. Westergren began to
connect what he had recently learned—“this process I’d developed to profile
music taste”—to the problem faced by Aimee Mann and so many other
musicians.
What if there was a way to use music profiling to somehow connect Aimee
Mann with an audience inclined to like the kind of music she makes?
Westergren knew the technology existed to create algorithmic engines capable
of making fairly straightforward and predictable recommendations (“If you liked
that murder-mystery book, here is another murder-mystery book you might
like”). But what he was envisioning was something far more sophisticated: a
system that could analyze why you liked the music you liked, based on dozens,
perhaps hundreds, of subtle musical characteristics and attributes. He would
have to find a way to break music down to its most basic elements—or, to use
the biological analogy that Westergren was thinking of, its genes. So this was the
real question he had to tackle:
What if we could map the DNA of music?
Once he had his What If question, the How stage began, as it often does, with
sharing the idea and trying to drum up support. Westergren secured enough
backing (in part from maxing out his own credit cards) to hire a team of
musicians and techies. Then they began to work on their experiment.
Every day, a group of musicians hired by Westergren would come in to work,
put on a pair of headphones, and listen to music. They analyzed every song,
breaking the music down into some four hundred attributes—starting with broad
categories such as melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, vocal
performance. Each of those categories was further subdivided into basic building
blocks, or “genes”; voice, for example, could have as many as twenty-five to
thirty attributes, from raspy to smooth. While the musicians dissected the music,
the tech engineers developed a specialized search engine. Both parts were
critical; Westergren felt the “secret sauce” he was developing relied on a blend
of human judgment and algorithm.
It took the better part of a year to build a prototype—“because it takes a while
to analyze music that way,” Westergren explained. “It’s actually completely f---
ing ridiculous to do it like that, but it was the only strategy I could think of.”
The first time he tested the prototype, Westergren typed in a Beatles song and
the system offered up a recommendation: a Bee Gees song. Westergren, thinking
of 1970s, disco-style Bee Gees songs, panicked briefly. But Westergren’s
creation was, on this musical point at least, smarter than he was—early Bee Gees
songs were actually similar, musically, to the Beatles song he had input.
Today, Pandora Radio has seventy million listeners. Westergren is proud that
it answers not only the question of whether music can be mapped genetically,
but also that original query of his—about finding a way to match up musicians
with listeners. Every day, Westergren says, Pandora takes the music of relatively
unknown bands and feeds that music to listeners most apt to enjoy it. Those
listeners may not care about musical genes or the career prospects of obscure
musicians, but the service answers a different question for them: What if a radio
station could know what songs you would like before you knew?
The Pandora story, like many stories of inquiry-driven start-ups, started with
someone’s wondering about an unmet need. It concluded with the questioner,
Westergren, figuring out how to bring a fully realized version of the answer into
the world.
But what happened in between? That’s when the lightning struck. In
Westergren’s case, ideas and influences began to come together; he combined
what he knew about music with what he was learning about technology.
Inspiration was drawn from a magazine article, and from a seemingly unrelated
world (biology). A vision of a new possibility began to form in the mind. It all
resulted in an audacious hypothetical question that might or might not have been
feasible—but was exciting enough to rally people to the challenge of trying to
make it work.
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.
If the word why has a penetrative power, enabling the questioner to get past
assumptions and dig deep into problems, the words what if have a more
expansive effect—allowing us to think without limits or constraints, firing the
imagination. John Seely Brown has written, “In order for imagination to
flourish,
37
there must be an opportunity to see things as other than they currently
are or appear to be. This begins with a simple question: What if? It is a process
of introducing something strange and perhaps even demonstrably untrue into our
current situation or perspective.”
What if we combine three snacks into one? (And then add a prize?)
38
In the 1890s, Frederick Rueckheim, fresh from his native Germany to seek his fortune in
Chicago, had a flash of connective inquiry: Observing the growing popularity of candy,
peanuts, and popcorn snacks, Rueckheim wondered: What if I combine all of those into one?
He vended his mixture at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, but it wasn’t quite right yet; the
candy-coated popcorn tended to clump together, and the name—Candied Popcorn and Peanuts
—was accurate but not compelling. On the question of How to keep it all from sticking
together? Rueckheim added oil to the mix. As for the name, it arrived unexpectedly in 1896,
when someone sampled the snack and declared, “That’s crackerjack!” An inveterate
questioner, Rueckheim kept wondering, What can be added to Cracker Jack to make it even
more appealing? In 1913 he inserted the final ingredient—small prizes.
The Pandora What If question certainly introduced something “strange” into
the world—Westergren’s notion that you could take the whole vast universe of
music and break it down in a genetic manner struck many (especially musicians)
as an off-the-wall idea. But the beauty of the What If stage of questioning is that
it’s a time when off-the-wall ideas are welcome.
Where do those wild, speculative ideas come from? Obviously, if we knew the
precise location of the source, and how to access it, then creativity wouldn’t be
as mysterious and unpredictable as it is. But we do know that coming up with
original ideas or insights—the kind of lightbulb moments that can lead to
imaginative What If questions—often involves the ability to combine ideas and
influences, to mix and remix things that might not ordinarily go together.
Einstein and others have referred to this as “combinatorial thinking”; in this
book, I’ve been using the term connective inquiry to focus on the questioning
aspect. Whatever one calls it, this mix-and-match mental process is at the root of
creativity and innovation.
It can be a relief to know that, in coming up with fresh ideas, we don’t have to
invent from scratch; we can draw upon what already exists and use that as raw
material. The key may lie in connecting those bits and pieces in a clever,
unusual, and useful way, resulting in (to use a term that seems to have
39
originated with the British designer John Thackara) smart recombinations.
Smart recombinations are all around us. Pandora, for example, is a
combination of radio station and search engine; it also takes the biological model
of genetic coding and transfers it to the domain of music (a smart recombination
often takes ideas or influences from separate domains and mashes them
together). In today’s tech world, many of the most successful products—Apple’s
iPhone being just one notable example—are hybrids, melding functions and
features in new ways.
Companies, too, can be smart recombinations. Netflix was started as a videorental business that operated like a monthly membership health club (and now it
has added “TV production studio” to the mix). Airbnb is a combination of an
online travel agency, a social media platform, and a good old-fashioned bed-andbreakfast (the B&B itself is a smart recombination from way back).
People have been combining and recombining ideas for as long as there have
been ideas, but in the Internet age, the opportunities and possibilities for creating
“mashups” seem limitless. “The creative act is no longer
40 about building
something out of nothing but rather building something new out of cultural
products that already exist,” according to Wired magazine.
Smart recombinations are inspired in all sorts of ways. Sometimes they are the
result of cold calculation (How can we combine this moneymaking thing with
that moneymaking thing to make even more money?); sometimes they’re a
product of serendipity. In the case of the hit book Abraham Lincoln, Vampire
Hunter, it was a little of both. The book’s author, Seth Grahame-Smith,
41 was in
a bookstore and noticed one “bestseller table” full of vampire books, while a
nearby table was piled high with Lincoln biographies. As Grahame-Smith later
confessed to the New York Times, he looked at those two piles, and “sort of
shrewdly, from a cynical standpoint, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could
combine these two things?’”
While many recombinations are not particularly “smart,” the ones that stand
out take preexisting elements and remix them to form something original,
surprising, interesting, and useful. That seems to happen when we combine ideas
or influences that, on the surface, have no logical or natural connection—yet,
once combined, form something powerful.
David Kord Murray, a former rocket scientist
42 who worked on projects for
NASA and later became the head of innovation at Intuit, made a study of
connective creativity in his book Borrowing Brilliance. According to Murray,
“The nature of innovation [is that] we build new ideas out of existing ideas.”
Murray cites Einstein, Walt Disney, George Lucas, and Steve Jobs as prime
examples of innovators who “defined problems, borrowed ideas, and then made
new combinations.” They did it, Murray says, by combining things that didn’t
seem to go together and by borrowing ideas “from faraway places.”
Innovators who are good at connecting are inclined to take something they’re
working on—say, Walt Disney’s planning a new amusement park—and begin to
think analogously: What if this amusement park could be like a movie, brought
to life? “In doing this,” Murray explains, “Disney takes his original subject, an
amusement park, and lays a metaphor on top of it and begins to see the whole
thing through that ‘movie’ metaphor—so he creates it with storyboards, and the
employees become cast members, and so on.” Creating theme parks now seems
like an obvious combination—but it was a fresh, surprising, and compelling
mixture when Disney introduced it.
If, as Murray notes, the most creative ideas result from “long distance”
connections (bringing together ideas that seem unrelated and far apart), then that
means the most promising connective inquiries do not merely ask, What if we
combine A and B?, but rather, What if we combine A and Z? (Or better yet, A
and 26?) To forge those illogical connections, Murray advises, “You must quiet
the logical mind.” This is confirmed by the latest neurological research, which
suggests that the human brain is a connective-inquiry machine that never sleeps.
It is constantly sorting through seemingly unrelated bits and pieces and
inquiring, What if I put this together with that?
What if your brain is a forest, thick with trees? (And what if
the branches touch?)
When we entertain challenging questions—Why does X have to be the way it is?
What if I try to think of a different way of doing it?—it’s a form of divergent
thinking,
43 and it triggers some interesting activity in the brain, says Dr. Ken
Heilman, professor of neurology at the University of Florida’s College of
Medicine.
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.
Not all connections are equal, in terms of yielding creative insights. More
obvious mental connections and associations
44—as when we associate a table
and a chair—are more commonplace and tend to occur in the brain’s left
hemisphere, notes the neurology professor John Kounios of Drexel University.
But 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.
Heilman, Kounios, and others have found that mental breakthroughs, the big
insights that can solve problems or come up with highly creative new ideas,
often involve those remote connections that happen in the right hemisphere. 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.
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. Chen-Bo Zhong, a professor at the
45 University of Toronto’s
Rotman School, has done extensive research on connective or associative
thinking—why it can produce insights and creative ideas, what encourages the
brain to engage in this type of thinking, and so forth. Zhong’s research has found
that 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.
What if dots and dashes could sort the world?
46
In 1948, a Philadelphia supermarket executive visited Drexel University’s campus to see if
students could develop an efficient means of encoding product data. As the New York Times
recounts, two grad students tried but were stymied at first. Then one of them spent the winter
at his grandparents’ place in Miami Beach, thinking about the challenge. To represent
information visually, he realized he would need a code. Being a former Boy Scout, Joseph
Woodland wondered, What if Morse code, with its elegant simplicity and limitless
combinatorial potential, could be adapted graphically? That connective inquiry took on life at
the beach when he raked his fingers through the sand and had the revelation that wide lines
and narrow lines could work instead of dots and dashes. Woodland and his fellow student
developed and patented the idea, which eventually led to creation of the bar code.
Moreover, 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.
So even though it can initially be beneficial to approach a problem with a
beginner’s mind, as you progress to imagining What If solutions, it’s useful to
have some acquired knowledge on the problem—preferably gathered from
diverse viewpoints. 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.
(Heilman points out that people who are well read and well traveled, those who
have diverse interests and a broad liberal arts education, are developing “a whole
series of different modules that can enable more connectivity and more
creativity.”)
That storehouse of eclectic knowledge can help you begin to brainstorm What
If ideas; and various exercises can help you do that. But before undertaking
conscious efforts to spark connective inquiry, bear in mind that it seems to thrive
when we’re distracted or even unconscious. So the best thing may be to take
your question for a walk. Or take it to the museum. Or, if you’re feeling lucky,
take it to bed.
What if you sleep with a question?
(Will you wake with an answer?)
Long before he delved deep into the forest of neuron trees and their dendrite
branches, Dr. Heilman, while still a student, made a firsthand discovery about
creativity and brain function. “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.”
Heilman didn’t know it at the time, but his approach made sense for a
biological and chemical reason. When you’re anxious, he learned later in his
professional research, your brain tends to be less creative and imaginative. “You
want to attend to the outside world, not the inside,” he said. “And you’re trying
to get to answers that are the simplest. But when you’re relaxed, you go the other
way—you’re able to go to the inside world.” In the more relaxed state, neural
networks open up and connections of all kinds form more freely.
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.
A growing body of research, including Zhong’s studies, finds that people often
come up with more novel ideas or solutions when they’re relaxed or distracted—
in what Zhong calls a state of inattention. This prompted Zhong to ask, “Should
artists or scientists simply engage in daydreaming to produce groundbreaking
discoveries or trailblazing creations?”
Obviously, as Zhong acknowledges, daydreaming alone is not the answer.
More likely, it can help in the in-between stages of creative problem solving.
Zhong theorizes that it may be best to move back and forth between focused
attention and inattention. As an example of this, consider the teenager Jack
Andraka as he came up with his idea for an innovative cancer-screening test.
Andraka first became focused on early cancer detection after a family friend
died from pancreatic cancer. He did some research and learned that a hundred
people a day were dying from that same disease—and that many people were not
even finding out they had it until it was too late. Given the scope of the problem
and the importance of early detection in potentially saving lives, Andraka
wondered, Why isn’t there a fast, inexpensive test for pancreatic cancer?
Andraka was not a trained scientist, but he was a serious buff who devoured
science journals. He understood, early on, that a better screening test would
probably require combining ideas from different branches of science—and
Andraka was well suited for this task because he was constantly connecting bits
of information picked up in one place to something discovered in another place.
“What I do is, I’ll pick up, for example, the Cancer Journal and then I’ll pick
up a physics article and then some random chemistry article, and I’ll read them
all,” Andraka told me. At some point after doing all of his research, Andraka
says, “I’ll just relax on the couch or walk around and do a lot of thinking: What
if I combine these different ideas to solve this one problem? I just let it incubate
and see if I can connect these different ideas somehow.”
As Andraka was doing his culling, connecting, and occasional “chilling on the
couch,” he began making connections with carbon nanotubes—he had been
learning about them in various articles. He was fascinated to discover that
“carbon nanotubes have this one property that, when you pull them apart, they
change their electrical properties. There’s an antibody that grows inside when
you attach a protein module to it.” This led Andraka to his big What If question
(which was a mouthful): “What if I exposed a single-wall carbon nanotube with
an antibody to a protein overexposed in pancreatic cancer?”
His epiphany was not quite an aha moment; it was a hypothetical question,
albeit a promising one, with, he figured, “about a fifty-fifty chance of being
right.” Then, as he started doing more research into antibodies and their
properties, “everything was matching up and my confidence was growing. Of
course, my parents thought I was crazy.” He then checked with his brother, a
chemist. “I said to him, ‘Hey, does this sound right?,’ and he said, ‘Oh, no, that
would never work!’”
Andraka then e-mailed two hundred professors, and one was interested enough
to give him access to a lab. That’s when Andraka had to figure out, How am I
going to make this thing real . . . and affordable . . . and reliable? Those answers
didn’t come easily, but he developed (at age fifteen, mind you) a paper sensor
that detected cancer a hundred times faster than anything on the market, with
four hundred times the sensitivity. It was also twenty-six thousand times less
expensive than current tests . . . and 100 percent accurate. Andraka’s innovation
earned him an international science fair award and an invitation to be a special
guest at President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address.
Hearing Andraka describe his thought process—including closing his eyes and
allowing all those various bits of information he’d absorbed to coalesce—
reminded me of something Google’s scientist-in-residence Ray Kurzweil
47
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.
A growing body of research describes what happens when we allow the
unconscious mind to work on a problem. Writing recently on the site Big Think,
Sam McNerney pulled together a number
48 of recent studies showing that
sleeping can help people to perform better at solving difficult problems requiring
a creative solution. (McNerney quoted an old John Steinbeck line: “A difficult
problem at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has
worked on it.”)
Similar research exists on daydreaming and its value in producing original,
creative ideas. And everyone knows about the clichéd (but only because it’s
true) idea-in-the-shower moment. The same neurological forces seem to be at
work in all of these instances. The sleeping or relaxed brain cuts off distractions
and turns inward, as the right hemisphere becomes more active, leading to
periods of greater connectivity.
Some of the same effects can be seen during walks (remember Edwin Land,
pacing the grounds of his resort?), long drives, or other activities that distract the
mind a little, but not too much. (Watching a movie is too much of a distraction
and shuts down creative thinking.)
The neurologist Kounios reports “striking anecdotal evidence” that tinkering
or doodling can also induce an inattention that is conducive to having insights.
“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.”
If you’re looking to take a break and simultaneously stimulate connective
inquiry, a visit to the museum might be just the ticket. It engages the
imagination, yet leaves room for thinking; it offers up as inspiration the many
creative connections and smart recombinations that others have produced in the
past; and it exposes the visitor to so many ideas and influences that it provides
abundant raw material for making new mental connections. (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.”)
49
The point about connective inquiry—and the What If stage in general—is that
when you take on a challenging question, if you spend time with that question,
your mind will keep working on it. This doesn’t mean there aren’t conscious
ways to trigger What If ideas, including some of the exercises to follow. But be
willing to slow down, go quiet, and let the question incubate. If nothing else, this
provides a handy excuse when it’s time to get out of bed in the morning: “Give
me another ten minutes, I need to do some more connective inquiry.”
What if your ideas are wrong and your socks don’t match?
If sleeping or daydreaming doesn’t yield enough lightbulb ideas and What If
queries, there are ways to encourage more of this kind of thinking. One way is
by purposely trying to “think wrong.”
This idea’s roots can be found
50
in the work of the creativity guru Edward de
Bono; more recently, it has been embraced by innovation firms such as Frog
Design and the designers Stefan Sagmeister and John Bielenberg. All are
practitioners of divergent thinking—which calls for trying to generate a wide
range of ideas, including offbeat ones, in the early stages of creative problem
solving.
This is not easy to do because 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.
John Bielenberg, a designer best known
52
for running an experimental
problem-solving workshop known as Project M, has been teaching people to
“think wrong” for about two decades. As Bielenberg explains it, truly gifted
innovators and creative geniuses have no difficulty connecting ideas in
surprising and unusual ways. “Picasso and Steve Jobs were natural ‘wrong
thinkers,’” he says, “but the rest of us have to work at it.”
To that end, Bielenberg uses exercises in his workshop that require
participants to make “random connections” between unrelated ideas, or even just
words. Here’s a simple word exercise, and all you need is a dictionary: Choose a
high number and a low number (say 342 and 5); go to page 342 in the dictionary
and find the fifth word. Try to come up with ideas based around that word; take
the word apart and rearrange letters to find other words; then repeat the process
to come up with a second word, and see if you can form an interesting
combination with those two words; you can even advance to a three-word
combination if you like.
A number of creative artists use word-combination exercises like this to get
their creative juices flowing. It’s become so popular that you don’t even need a
dictionary anymore—the Idea Generator app will randomly select and combine
three words for you when you shake your smartphone.
In his workshop and with some of his clients, Bielenberg takes this randomcombination exercise up a notch—for example, by asking a bank to consider
offbeat What If scenarios in which their business is combined with another,
completely unrelated one, as in, What if your bank was run by the makers of
Sesame Street? Would there be puppets in place of tellers?
There are lots of variations on the exercises Bielenberg does. Some years back I
attended a workshop run by the creativity consultant Tom Monahan,
53 who
teaches an exercise he calls 180-degree thinking—which is “thinking wrong”
with a different name. In his exercises, Monahan encourages participants to
come up with ideas for things that don’t work—an oven that can’t cook, a car
that doesn’t move. It sounds crazy, but when you do the exercise, interesting
things can emerge; you come up with offbeat, alternate uses for the oven or the
car.
But the goal of such exercises is not necessarily to generate lasting ideas on
the spot; if you do come up with an idea worth pursuing, that’s a bonus. The real
point is to begin to train the mind to think differently when confronted with a
problem or a challenge—to consider a wide range of possibilities, including
offbeat ones, and to connect ideas that don’t normally go together. It’s an
attempt to develop and strengthen the What If muscle.
As John Seely Brown noted, What If questions tend to free up the imagination
because they allow you to “see things as other than they currently are”—they
allow you to shift reality, if only briefly.
Luke Williams, a former creative director
54 at Frog Design and author of the
book Disrupt, talks about ways that What If questions can be used to “invert”
reality. If the current reality is that restaurants provide people with a menu upon
arrival, the inverse hypothesis is What if a restaurant provided customers with a
menu only when they leave? Williams has worked with clients who have used
hypothetical questioning to challenge the most basic assumptions about
customer behavior. He cites the example of Jonah Staw, who, over dinner with
friends, was exchanging wild, implausible business ideas with others in the
group. Someone asked, What if some company started selling socks that didn’t
match? This classic example of “thinking wrong” could have come straight out
of a workshop by Bielenberg or Monahan. Today, the company
LittleMissMatched—which sells colorful, mismatched pairs of socks to young
girls who consider it a fun fashion statement—is a thriving business.
What if prisons had no walls?
55
There are many differing views on how to reform prisons, but on one point there’s a
consensus: conventional incarceration is not working, as evidenced by high recidivism rates
and soaring costs. In search of an alternative way of dealing with prisoners that might cut
crime, reduce costs, and be more humane, one interesting question being asked is: What if
prisons could be turned inside out, with the convicts released instead of incarcerated? New
technology—in particular, GPS tracking devices—offers the possibility that non-violent
offenders could be released from prison with enhanced high-tech supervision via wearable
devices that broadcast prisoners’ real-time locations and flag any backsliding consistently and
immediately (two failures of current parole systems). The system has already been tested
successfully in Hawaii; if adopted on a broader scale, as the Atlantic notes, it would empty
half of our broken, expensive prisons in one fell swoop.
We can use What If questions to erase the past and make a fresh start. One of
the favorite questions of Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia is What if we could start with a
blank page?—a question that works as well in personal relationships or life
choices as it does in business. We can also use What If questions to remove the
possibility of failure simply by asking, What if we could not fail? We can use
them to envision doing the impossible.
At some point, however, we must contend with reality. An innovation or
creative breakthrough can start with thinking wrong, but along the way
impossibilities must be made possible, as we move from speculation to
something more tangible—-something that exists in the real world. Divergent,
anything-goes thinking must begin to converge around what’s doable. For this to
happen, What If questions must give way to How questions.
HOW . . .
How can we give form to our questions?
Unconscious creativity, wherein all of those mental connections come together
to form What If possibilities as you daydream or sleep, is a welcome gift. But
there comes a time to awake and go to work. This was a problem for Gauri
Nanda.
She was having trouble getting out
56 of bed in the morning. She started with
Why: Why am I oversleeping, why isn’t my alarm clock getting me up? The
answer to that was simple: She’d gotten into the habit (like many of us) of
hitting the snooze button again and again. Nanda was a design student at MIT
with a knack for problem solving, so she analyzed her situation and asked, What
if it was harder to turn off the alarm clock? What if your alarm clock forced you
to get out of bed and chase after it?
This led to a question that could be considered a classic in connective inquiry:
What if I put wheels on it? Nanda had a vision of creating the first alarm clock
on wheels. Her What If question set things in motion—but then again, anyone
can speculate about putting wheels on something. How do you actually put them
on?
Nanda began by doing something that tends to be a starting point of the How
stage—she solicited feedback on her speculative idea, asking a few trusted
friends what they thought of the notion of an alarm clock on wheels that would
roll off a night table and force you to chase it down to turn it off. “They
laughed,” Nanda said, “but in a good way.” They also said it was the kind of
thing they might buy.
Nanda made her first test versions of a rolling clock using materials she had
handy, combined with what she could borrow from the lab at her college. Parts
from LEGO toys, including LEGO motors and wheels, formed her early versions
of what she called the Clocky. To create a protective covering for the clock, to
cushion its regular fall from a night table to the floor, Nanda used shag
carpeting. “It almost made it look like a furry animal,” she recalls.
While testing her invention, Nanda realized “this was going to be much harder
than I thought.” Getting the clock to roll was easy; enabling it to survive those
suicide dives off the night table was another matter. “It’s an unusual thing to
expect a clock to go through,” she acknowledged. How might that shock be
absorbed? Nanda used reinforced electronics inside the clock, along with bigger
wheels designed to take the brunt of the fall. These lessons were learned through
repeated testing—dropping the clock over and over to see how it held up. Nanda
also realized during testing that the runaway clock moved predictably and thus
was easy to catch. She had to figure out how to make it more elusive. She put in
a microprocessor that enabled the clock to move at different speeds, following
various routes.
Nanda’s quirky project drew the attention
57 of technology blogs, which
generated Internet buzz that led to an invitation for Nanda to show her stillunfinished invention on a television program. Now Nanda faced the challenge of
how to make her rough prototype ready for prime time. Visible wires connecting
the clock to a circuit board had to go. The shag-carpet covering needed to be
replaced, eventually by a tough silicon skin.
The Clocky cleaned up well, and after a few media appearances, customer
interest in the product was growing. Thus Nanda now had to figure out How do
we gear up production? How do we handle the orders? How do we launch a
full-fledged business?
Nanda worked through all of those issues, launched her business, Nanda
Home, in 2006, and sold more than a half million units of the Clocky over the
next three years. While the product originated with Nanda’s connective-inquiry
skills and her willingness to ask What If, it would never have come into
existence if Nanda hadn’t taken that far-out idea and turned it, step by step, into
a practical reality.
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. To say it’s the hard part of questioning is not to suggest
it’s easy to challenge assumptions by asking Why, or to envision new
possibilities by asking What If. Those require difficult backward steps and leaps
of imagination. But How tends to be more of a slow and difficult march, marked
by failures that are likely to be beneficial—but don’t necessarily seem that way
at the time.
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.
In committing to an idea, it becomes critical to find a way to share it in order
to get feedback. We all have ideas that live in our own head and never go
beyond that. Even just by telling other people about a question you’re working
on, you’ve begun to form a commitment. “The important thing about telling
everyone
58 your idea is that it puts you on the hook for following through,
because you’re going to look foolish if you do nothing,” observed the designer
Sam Potts.
Nanda did this simply by asking those friends, What would you think of an
alarm clock on wheels—would you ever want something like that? That kind of
verbal pitch is useful up to a point. But you haven’t really committed to an idea
until you’ve given actual form to it. The question or idea must be made tangible
and shareable—the better to be considered, passed around, perhaps tested in
some way.
The most basic way to give form to an idea is to put it on paper (Nanda created
rough sketches of what a Clocky might look like before she started building).
Depending on the idea, putting it in writing—a summary, a proposal—may be
sufficient, but keep in mind that visuals have great power. “If you want everyone
to have
59
the same mental model of a problem, the fastest way to do it is with a
picture,” according to the visualization expert David Sibbet.
That image could be drawn on the back of a napkin, or on an iPad using
various available sketch programs, or with stock art off the Internet. As the
representation of an idea becomes more complex—a test website, say, or a threedimensional early model of a product (such as Nanda’s shag-carpeted clock)—it
moves into the prototype stage.
That’s an overly technical term for something that can be done by anyone, in
almost any endeavor. A prototype could be a short YouTube video that serves as
the first step in making a film; it could be a pilot program or a trial run; a
rudimentary model that may be taped or glued together; a sophisticated 3-D
rendering using computer-aided design software; or just about anything that can
be made to represent an idea in a preliminary form. The IDEO designer Diego
Rodriguez once remarked, “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.
How might we roll it instead of lugging it?
62
The question What if we put wheels on it? has been the basis of countless “smart
recombinations.” For example in 1970 Bernard Sadow, a luggage company executive, was
dragging two heavy suitcases through an airport when he noticed workers easily transporting a
large machine on a wheeled skid. Sadow wondered, What if I put wheels on these suitcases?
That led to a protracted How stage, which began with Sadow attaching four wheels to a
suitcase laid flat—providing a way to drag one’s bags. But that idea was later improved by an
airline pilot, Robert Plath, who thought of using a long upright handle to pull a suitcase
propped up on two wheels (instead of laying flat on four). The end result of all that
questioning by Sadow and Plath: the now-ubiquitous Rollaboard suitcase.
Technology has made it much easier to create prototypes quickly,
inexpensively, in all shapes and forms. (This book started with a prototype: a
blog called A More Beautiful Question, which began to advance some of the
ideas of the book and solicited feedback from readers.) Some programs now can
turn anyone into a sketch artist or website designer; more advanced software also
allows users now to create highly sophisticated models that can be tested in all
kinds of what-if scenarios (so that, for example, a digital prototype of a building
can be subjected to simulated earthquake-level stress, to see how the building
would hold up).
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 people
61
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.
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 in
63Harvard 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 it’s not the natural, instinctive way of exploring and creating. If you look
at the way children act on their questions and ideas, you see a much better
example of how to move quickly and fearlessly from What If to How.
How do you build a tower that doesn’t collapse (even after
you put the marshmallow on top)?
A software designer shared a story about an interesting experiment in which the
organizers brought together a group of kindergarten children who were divided
into small teams and given a challenge: Using uncooked spaghetti sticks, string,
tape, and a marshmallow, they had to assemble the tallest structure they could,
within a time limit (the marshmallow was supposed to be placed on top of the
completed structure).
Then, in a second phase of the experiment, the organizers added a new
wrinkle. They brought in teams of Harvard MBA grad students to compete in
this challenge against the kindergartners. The grad students, I’m told, took it
seriously. They brought a highly analytical approach to the challenge, debating
among themselves about how best to combine the sticks, the string, and the tape
to achieve maximum altitude.
Perhaps you’ll have guessed this already, but the MBA students were no match
for the kindergartners. For all their planning and discussion, the structures they
carefully conceived and constructed invariably fell apart—and then they were
out of time before they could get in more attempts. (I was told by my friend that
the MBA grads also spent too much of their time arguing about who should be in
charge.)
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.
So what does an offbeat test involving marshmallows and kindergartners mean
to those of us operating in the real world? One way to think about it is that in
today’s increasingly dynamic environment, we’re all being challenged (or will
soon be) to take some version of the marshmallow test: we’ll be expected to
quickly adapt to using new and unfamiliar tools, as we try to construct new
businesses, new markets, new careers, new life plans—using ever-changing
technology, without clear instructions, and with the clock ticking. All of which
requires people to be not only better questioners, but better experimenters.
When you take a look at how adults in innovative environments work, they
tend to operate much like the kids in the marshmallow test. At IDEO, the firm’s
designers quickly move from coming up with ideas to building and testing those
ideas. The same is true at MIT Media Lab, where, as the director Joi Ito
explains, the researchers and students don’t spend a lot of time wondering about
the questions they’re pursuing, or debating how best to proceed. They quickly
start doing what you’re supposed to do in a lab—experimenting. As Ito puts it,
“These days it’s easier and less expensive to just try out your ideas than to figure
out if you should try them out.”
What Ito is doing in his lab is also happening at companies such as Google and
Facebook, and throughout much of the tech industry worldwide. At Facebook,
founder Mark Zuckerberg has
64 elevated the idea of quickly building and testing
ideas to a sacred principle that Zuckerberg has described as the Hacker Way. In
a letter to potential Facebook investors at the time of the company’s 2012 IPO,
Zuckerberg explained that while the word hacking has some negative
connotations, at Facebook it means “building something quickly or testing the
boundaries of what can be done.” This means constantly trying out new ideas in
rough form. “Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly
releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything
right all at once . . . Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible
or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype
something and see what works.”
The rapid test-and-learn approach has caught on throughout the entrepreneurial
world, fueled in part by Eric Ries’s Lean Startup phenomenon. Ries maintains
that entrepreneurs, existing companies—or anyone trying to create something
new and innovative—must find ways to constantly experiment and quickly put
new ideas out into the world for public consumption, rather than devoting
extensive resources and time to trying to perfect ideas behind closed doors. Ries
urges businesses to focus on developing what he calls “minimum viable
products”—in effect, quick, imperfect test versions of ideas that can be put out
into the marketplace in order to learn what works and what doesn’t.
But this is more than a business strategy. The basic principles of the test-andlearn approach apply in almost any situation where people are trying to solve
problems in dynamic, uncertain conditions.
How do you make a hard-boiled egg’s shell disappear?
66
The household kitchen is a hotbed for innovative questioning—both by professional
kitchenware designers and inquisitive homemakers simply asking, Why is this chore done this
particular way? and How might it be done better? For Betsy Ravreby Kaufman the task in
question involved making deviled eggs for parties: Kaufman hated the drudgery of eggpeeling as well as having to throw away eggs due to stuck shells or gouges. Standing over a
boiling pot of eggs, she thought, Wouldn’t it be cool if you could hard-boil an egg and not
have shells to peel? Which then morphed to, What if you could boil an egg in a hard-boiled
egg shape, but with the shell off? She pitched her idea to Edison Nation, which backs
invention ideas, and a year later a plastic “hard boiled egg system” called Eggies could be
found not just in Kaufman’s kitchen, but on store shelves, as well.
For example, New York City under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg used
test-and-learn pilot programs on everything from creating more pedestrian areas
to implementing bike-rental programs to setting up a citywide 311 phone call-in
system for providing information to residents. Bloomberg’s administration was
adept at bringing about change by tackling basic Why questions; Bloomberg
acted as a kind of “pilot program mayor.” It made it more possible to enact
large-scale change—because if a pilot program wasn’t panning out, it was easier
to adjust it or just scrap it without having invested in full implementation.
How can you learn to love a broken foot?
Test-and-learn doesn’t sound all that painful. However, baked into this approach
of acting on questions via constant experimentation is the near certainty of
failure—and not just one failure, but quite possibly many, each bringing some
level of disappointment if not actual pain.
Van Phillips tried many prototypes of his prosthetic foot, starting off full of
hope each time—and ending, in some instances, on the ground, his broken foot
beside him. Yet none of this slowed his progress. As Winston Churchill once
said, “The trick is to go from one failure
65
to another, with no loss of
enthusiasm.” But how does one learn to perform that “trick” of “failing
enthusiastically”?
“Every time a prototype breaks, it’s heartbreaking,” Phillips said. But it’s also
an opportunity: How do I learn to learn from failure? The answer is, through
questioning. Rather than run from a failure or try to forget it ever happened, hold
it to the light and inquire, Why did the idea or effort fail? What if I could take
what I’ve learned from this failure and try a revised approach? How might I do
that?
Stanford University’s Bob Sutton says that
67 when analyzing a misstep, in
addition to asking what went wrong, you should also ask, In this failure, what
went right? (Conversely, when you try out something and it seems to have
succeeded, look for what went wrong or could have been better, Sutton says. The
best learning comes from looking at successes and failures side by side.)
In analyzing a series of setbacks, a key question to ask is Am I failing
differently each time? “If you keep making the same
68 mistakes again and
again,” the IDEO founder David Kelley has observed, “you aren’t learning
anything. If you keep making new and different mistakes, that means you are
doing new things and learning new things.”
In sharing early versions of an idea with the world at large, one is likely to
receive negative feedback—which some people interpret as evidence of a
failure. But that’s not necessarily true, says Harvard’s Paul Bottino, who points
out that when it comes to feedback, “dissonance can actually be more valuable
than resonance.” As people push back on your idea, it can be a good indication
that you’re entering uncharted, potentially important territory—because you’re
more likely to get negative feedback (“That could never work!”) on ideas that
challenge common assumptions. “Dissonance is the most misunderstood kind of
feedback,” Bottino says. “We really should welcome it and learn to make the
most of it.”
As Bottino points out, it’s critical when taking on a challenging project to
know how to solicit outside input and help, and to know how to engage with
potential advisers, supporters, and collaborators. If you’re pursuing a truly
ambitious question, you probably can’t answer it alone. Collaborative inquiry
begins with asking others, Do you find this question as interesting as I do? Want
to join me in trying to answer it?
The Internet and social networking has made it easier to find and connect with
those who share our interests—and who may be exploring similar questions and
challenges. Even if they’re not, you might still be able to stoke their curiosity
and garner their support.
Jack Andraka could not have gotten far with his question—What if we could
create a simpler, faster screening test for pancreatic cancer?—without help. He
particularly needed materials and tools with which to conduct experiments—he
needed a lab. Andraka had gotten some early dissonant feedback from his own
parents and brother, who thought his idea “would never work.” But he forged
ahead anyway. He gave form to his idea by laying out a basic plan: “I wrote up a
procedure, budget, and timeline—that was really just trying to get a concrete
representation of my idea,” he said. Then he e-mailed “anyone in my area who
knew something about pancreatic cancer,” including experts at the National
Institutes of Health, at Johns Hopkins, the University of Maryland, and others.
His outreach to two hundred people brought more dissonant feedback. “Some of
them just said, ‘This won’t work.’ Others went through each and every step of
my procedure saying this was wrong and that was wrong. It was pretty harsh.”
But one professor saw an intriguing possibility in Andraka’s overarching
question, as well as his more technical one (What if I exposed a single-wall
carbon nanotube with an antibody to a protein overexposed in pancreatic
cancer?). That professor responded, “‘Yeah, sure, it might work,’” Andraka
recalled. More important, the professor opened up his lab to Andraka.
How do you fit a large golf course on a small island?
69
When pro golfer Jack Nicklaus was hired in the 1980s to design a golf course on Grand
Cayman Island, he faced a difficult challenge: The island, a mere six miles wide and twentytwo miles long, was too small to accommodate a full-size course. In his first whack at the
problem, Nicklaus and his team cleverly designed a nine-hole course that can be played twice
from different tees. Still, golfers couldn’t shorten their swings, and balls were too easily
sailing out into the surrounding water. At this point, instead of continuing to focus on the size
of the course, Nicklaus reframed the problem: What if golf balls didn’t travel as far? After
heavy testing and research, Nicklaus and the MacGregor Golf Company developed the
limited-flight “Cayman ball,” which drives half the distance of a regular golf ball with the
same amount of swing. Small island hotels and backyard duffers everywhere rejoiced.
The teenager had never been in a professional laboratory before. “I was like,
‘Wow, this is a centrifuge!’ It was like being in a candy shop.” But as Andraka
began running tests, he started to experience failures. “In the first month I blew
up the cell that I was carefully growing,” he said. “Nothing was working.”
Andraka’s success came slowly, step by step, as he broke down the overall
challenge into smaller problems and questions. With each solution, he could
proceed to the next question. The first obstacle—Andraka’s attempt to optimize
the antibody he wanted to use in his paper sensor—stymied him for three
months, but he kept tweaking the experiment until he found his antibody. Then
he started working on his carbon nanotubes. Then he had to figure out how to
combine the antibody and the nanotubes in his sensor. Finally he had to test it to
see if it could detect pancreatic cancer. After seven months, he was done.
Asked about the experience of getting through the How stage—dealing with
real-world complications, failures, lack of progress—Andraka recalled, “I would
say coming up with the question—that’s fun. Then arriving at a theoretical
solution is even more fun.” Then, as he was testing and learning in the lab, there
were extreme ups and downs, he said. “At certain points, I was starting to think,
‘Maybe all of those people are right. I’m a fifteen-year-old. What do I know
about cancer?’”
But finally getting to an answer “is the best experience you can ever have.”
Andraka used the word elegant to describe the solution he arrived at—an odd
word for something that looks like a mundane paper-strip test kit. “It’s pure
elation that you found this elegant way to solve a problem.”
How might we create a symphony together?
That a fifteen-year-old kid with a far-fetched idea for detecting cancer could
send out a batch of e-mails and thereby gain full access to a world-class lab
shows that resources exist to aid in tackling almost any problem, and that people
will help if you just ask (and ask well: Andraka had a powerful question,
buttressed by a reasonable plan).
As the New York Times observed in an article headlined “Don’t Know How?
Find Someone Who Does,” today anyone with a good idea can easily link up
with experts who can help develop the idea, build it, and, when it’s done, figure
out what to do with it. “When we think of inventors,”
70
the Times’ Nicole
LaPorte wrote, “we think of a solitary soul hunkered down in a basement lab for
weeks or months before emerging to claim an unshared victory.” However, the
reality is that “drawing on other people’s experience and resources” is often far
better than going it alone.
This shouldn’t be surprising: When looking at a challenging problem or
question, the more perspectives that can be brought to bear, the better.
According to Scott Page, author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity
Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, we all get “stuck” when
trying to answer tough questions, but “if we have people with diverse tools,
71
they’ll get stuck in different places.” As you look for potential collaborators, aim
for people with backgrounds, cultural experiences, and skill sets that differ from
your own: diversity fuels creativity.
Whereas in the past one might have been inclined to look for collaborators
locally (as Andraka did, initially), today there’s no need to put geographical
limits on your outreach. Now, for anyone looking to tackle big questions, “we all
have two amazing things
72 available to us,” said the film producer and part-time
inventor Mick Ebeling. “We have a near-infinite resource of information at our
fingertips—no other generation has had access to that. And we have this
immediacy of human connection [through social networking and the Web in
general]. You combine all of that information and that connection with people,
and what we have is a global brain to tap into.”
Ebeling himself tapped into the “global brain” when he decided to take on an
ambitious project, with the goal of helping a paralyzed artist continue to create
his art. The story began when Ebeling visited an exhibition of artwork by Los
Angeles artist Tony “TemptOne” Quan, a legend in the graffiti world. Though
Quan had once been a prolific artist, he became afflicted with ALS (aka Lou
Gehrig’s disease) and gradually lost use of his hands and legs, making it
increasingly difficult to work. At first, Ebeling thought about writing a check to
Quan and his family, but then, over a conversation with his wife at dinner, this
question surfaced: If Stephen Hawking can communicate through a machine,
why don’t we have a way for an artist like Quan to draw again?
That Why question started Ebeling on a journey that eventually led him to a
What If moment: When Ebeling learned about laser-tagging projection
technology—which uses a laser and a pointer to write graffiti on the sides of
buildings—he wondered if there might be an affordable way to enable someone
to communicate and even create art by manipulating a laser through eye
movements. Ebeling had no idea how this might be achieved, but now at least he
had a good working question: Knowing that laser technology can be used to
create art, hands-free, what if we can figure out a way for Quan to control the
laser with his eyes?
Ebeling had no expertise in any of the technology involved. He made his
challenge even more ambitious by deciding that anything he developed would
have to be extremely affordable—the idea was not to replicate a high-priced,
Hawking-like personal communication system, but rather something much
simpler and accessible even to a paralyzed person of limited financial means.
“I felt that the way to attack this was in a communal way,” Ebeling said. He
approached Graffiti Research Lab, a company that specialized in laser-tagging
technology, and asked if anyone there wanted to help him answer his question.
He also searched among his own broad network of contacts for people with
expertise in computer coding and engineering. “Today, we’re all hackers and
makers,” Ebeling said; you have to find the right mix of people to bring together
around a question that interests them all. After a year of planning and
organization, Ebeling brought together in his house a team of seven international
hackers and programmers for two and a half weeks of all-day programming
sessions. By the end, they had cobbled together the Eyewriter.
The device was remarkably simple, at least on the surface: an inexpensive pair
of sunglasses connected by wire to a small packet that incorporates ocularrecognition technology and lasers. The first true test of the system came when it
was brought to Quan, who was in the hospital at the time. Ebeling’s crew set up
outside the hospital a projector that was wirelessly linked to the Eyewriter they
gave to Quan. That night, for the first time in six years, Quan was able to create
graffiti—using eye movements to control the laser in his Eyewriter as he began
to “draw” on a building wall outside the hospital.
The DIY design and the software for the Eyewriter are downloadable for free.
“Anyone who is paralyzed now has access to draw or communicate using only
their eyes,” Ebeling announced at a recent TED Conference, drawing a standing
ovation from the crowd. (Ebeling closed his talk with two questions that he
urged audience members to ask themselves every day: “If not now, then when?
If not me, then who?”)
Ebeling is so sold on the power of collaborative inquiry that he launched a
website, Not Impossible Labs, designed to help innovators connect with each
other and find great problems to work on together. The name derives from his
belief that “it is naïve now to think that anything, any problem we might be
looking at, is impossible to solve.” Whatever ambitious question you might
come up with, people are out there with the knowledge, skills, and imagination
to help you work toward an answer—if you can connect with them.
Reaching out to potential collaborators can require a leap of faith for those
accustomed to trying to solve problems on their own. (I’m a case in point: As an
author I’ve always written books pretty much alone. But with this book, I tried a
different approach, using my blog to ask if anyone wanted to contribute ideas,
research, or thoughts on questioning. As a result, I ended up with more than a
dozen collaborators who contributed immensely to the project.) Among the
concerns/questions that may arise: Will the idea still be “mine” if I share it?
Why would anyone care enough to actually help? If I’m used to coming up with
ideas alone, will I be able to do so working with others?
Tod Machover of MIT Media Lab
73 has emerged as an advocate for, and a
master of, collaborative inquiry in his work. Machover is both an engineer and a
musical composer, whose work has ranged from creating the popular Guitar
Hero interactive music game to composing operas and symphonies in which the
audience actively participates in creating the musical performance. While almost
every large-scale project he works on ends up being a collaborative endeavor,
Machover stresses that it’s critical to find a balance between working alone on
ideas and working with others. “There are times, especially early in the creative
process, when I want to slow down and think about a challenging question by
myself,” he said. (At such times, he retreats to the solitude of a barn converted
into a music studio.) “As a composer I love the act of imagining a question—and
even a whole world—and being able to make it real in your mind over a long
period, before you share it with others.”
But there’s also a time, he said, when you must take your question “out of the
barn” and begin to work with others. The Media Lab is designed to be an ideal
collaborative environment, bringing together people from a wide range of
disciplines. “Everyone is comfortable saying to others in the lab, ‘Here’s
something I’m passionate about—would you help me to think about this
question?’”
But Machover doesn’t just collaborate with other members of the lab. On one
of his most recent projects, he was invited by the Toronto Symphony to compose
an original piece of music for them. He decided to invite the whole city of
Toronto to cocreate a symphony with him, by capturing and sharing sounds
representing everyday life in Toronto. “I wanted to see what happens when you
try to answer a question working with a lot of people,” Machover said. The
collaborative query he raised: What does Toronto sound like?
How might we cut the cord?
74
Increasingly, it’s a wireless world—so why are we still tethered to an outlet when recharging
our devices? This was the question Israeli entrepreneur Ran Poliakine asked in 2006, and his
quest to answer it led him to Nikola Tesla’s 1890s work on wireless power. Poliakine created
the “wireless charging” category with the October 2009 launch of the Duracell Powermat,
which works by magnetic induction. Separately, in 2010, astrobiologist student Meredith Perry
was searching for a way to beam power directly to electronic gadgets without using cords, and
her Google-fueled research led her to the concept of “piezoelectricity” (electricity resulting
from pressure). This dictated Perry’s next question: How do I create vibration in the air
without actually moving something? Her uBeam recharging device, which CrunchFund’s Mike
Arrington called “the closest thing to magic,” combines the fields of sound, electricity, and
battery technology, and is currently under development backed by millions of dollars in
venture capital.
For years, Machover has been exploring different variations on what is
essentially the same question: How might we turn music into a more
participatory experience? It springs from his sense that most people have
become passive consumers of music—“it’s everywhere, on everyone’s
headphones, but fewer people are studying music, making it, or participating in
the full experience of music,” he said. In the midnineties, Machover created an
experimental music event called the Brain Opera—featuring a whole orchestra
of instruments the general public could play. These “hyperinstruments” were
scattered around New York’s Lincoln Center, and as people wandered through
the collection, they were invited to play with them (the instruments created
sound in response to the user’s movements). Those sounds were then edited
together for a stage performance whose composition “was half-mine and halfcreated by the public,” Machover said. “The point was to say, ‘If you like
listening to music, you’ll like it even more if you can be part of it, touch it and
shape it.”
The idea for Guitar Hero—which also responds to body movement, enabling
nonmusicians to create their own guitar riffs just by going through the motions—
came out of the Brain Opera experiment. And the Toronto Symphony
experiment was another attempt to pose his question about collaborative music
in a fresh way. Thousands participated in the project, with many writing their
own musical vignettes (using melodies and chords provided by Machover)
incorporating the sounds of the Toronto subway, the harborfront, etc. Machover
wove the many sounds together into a single musical piece, performed by the
Toronto Symphony in 2013.
Machover was surprised at first that so many participated in the experimental
attempt to answer his question. “But what I’ve become convinced of is that if
you’re willing to lay out something in public that you care about, people will be
interested in participating. And they’re capable of remarkable things.”
Sharing a question with others is akin to issuing a challenge that a certain type
of curious-minded person may find hard to resist. Just by formulating the
question, you’ve taken a critical and difficult first step that others can now
piggyback on. As the author Clay Shirky has
75 noted in his writing, many people
are drawn to an existing idea they can join in on and help to improve or advance,
rather than starting from scratch on their own. Machover observes that in
appealing to others with a shared question, “you are involving collaborators as
equals in a project.” What may start out seeming as if it’s “your” question
quickly becomes theirs, too; questions belong to everyone.
As for the answer, it belongs to whoever gets to it first. Holding back ideas—
hoarding your beautiful questions—is usually pointless because it’s hard to make
headway on something hidden in a drawer. Better to bring a question out into the
light of day and trust that, with help from others, you’ll get something out of it—
a solution, a learning experience, an insight, a fresh perspective, a sense of
purpose—that will be yours.
While the How stage is positioned here as a third and final stage of innovative
questioning, there really is no final stage—because the questions don’t end, even
when you arrive at a solution.
Many successful questioners, having arrived at an “answer,” quickly return to
asking questions. Often, they’re questioning the very answers they found, which
may not have been definitive. There is invariably room (and the need) to find
ways to improve those solutions, to expand upon them, take them to another
level.
Van Phillips might have been content with the high-level prosthetic limb he
designed, but from his perspective, it solved a problem for some amputees—
those who could afford to pay thousands of dollars for a replacement limb—but
not others. Phillips had a vision for a high-performance replacement limb that
would sell for a hundred dollars, making it affordable to amputees in the
developing world; he was particularly focused on helping land-mine survivors.
So he began, some years ago, cycling through new Why and What If questions
on a new and affordable prosthetic, and he was deep into the How stage of this
line of questioning at the time of this writing. He’d already figured out how to
make it, but he was still working through the details of how to bring the product
to market.
Mick Ebeling, too, found himself quickly moving on to a new set of questions
about his Eyewriter. The system initially worked well for Tony Quan, who
controlled the mechanism through rapid blinking. But a new problem developed:
As his medical condition led to degeneration of Quan’s ocular muscles, it
became difficult for him to blink quickly. So Ebeling’s new question was What if
we found another way to control the laser? What if it could be done by thinking,
not blinking?
To that end, Ebeling began pulling together a new team of collaborators to
work on the Brainwriter—an advanced version of the Eyewriter. The idea is to
create a drawing tool powered by electrical brain activity, as measured by EEG.
This would seem to be even more complex and challenging than the creation of
the Eyewriter, though Ebeling insisted, “It’s very doable if you have the right
people involved.”
The notion of a need to keep moving ideas forward, to keep pursuing new
opportunities and responding to change by way of constant, cyclical questioning
is particularly relevant in today’s dynamic business environment, where
companies find that “answers” are transitory and increasingly short-lived. The
next chapter considers why constant questioning is more important to business
than ever before.
CHAPTER 4
Questioning in Business
Why do smart businesspeople screw up?
Why are we in business? (And by the way—what business are we really in?)
What if our company didn’t exist?
What if we could become a cause and not just a company?
How can we make a better experiment?
If we brainstorm in questions, will lightning strike?
Will anyone follow a leader who embraces uncertainty?
Should mission statements be mission questions?
How might we create a culture of inquiry?
Why do smart businesspeople screw up?
Clayton Christensen is today considered one of the foremost experts on business
innovation. A veteran professor at the Harvard Business School, Christensen
introduced the term disruptive innovation
1
into the business lexicon two decades
ago, and it has become both a cliché and a driving force in business ever since.
His ideas have been embraced by the likes of Intel leader Andy Grove and Apple
cofounder Steve Jobs.
But back in the late 1990s, Christensen was a relatively unknown professor
with a question he couldn’t shake—a Why question that sprang from a
phenomenon that was happening more and more in business and didn’t make
sense to Christensen. He saw that a number of successful, market-leading
companies in the tech sector and other industries were getting blindsided by
newcomers offering products or services that may not have been as good, but
were simpler, more convenient, and more affordable. Even more puzzling, the
companies suffering these sudden reversals of fortune seemed to be doing all the
right things: serving their customers better, improving their products, increasing
their profit margins. “They were doing exactly what they were taught in business
school,” Christensen says.
Christensen wondered, in particular, why the established business leaders
weren’t able to respond to these challenges. “For me, it always starts with a
question,” Christensen told me. “I knew the failure could not be attributed to
managers’ being stupid. So I framed the question as Why are the smartest people
in the world having this problem? Just thinking of it that way made me look in
different places.”
What Christensen discovered was that while most of the companies getting in
trouble were focused on innovation that aimed to make good products even
better, the real potential for breakthrough innovation was at the low end of the
market—this was true in business offerings that ranged from disk drives to
automobiles. In an increasingly technical marketplace, if you could take a
product that was expensive, complex, and exclusive and make it affordable and
accessible, you could open up a mass market and change the game—toppling the
established leaders. But why were only the newcomers seizing this opportunity?
Why weren’t the established leaders, with all their know-how and resources,
able to dominate the low end of the market as well as the high end?
Christensen came to see this as a dilemma: To pursue disruptive innovation at
the low end, companies would have to move away from all they had worked so
hard to build. As Christensen puts it, they faced this deceptively tricky question:
Should we make better products that we can sell for higher profits to our best
customers—or make worse products that none of our customers would buy, and
that would ruin our margins?
If you were a smart business leader, you naturally opted for the former. And in
making that seemingly logical choice, you sealed your company’s fate.
After Christensen published his theory in the bestselling book The Innovator’s
Dilemma, the idea of focusing on “disruptive innovation” at the low end of
markets became standard business practice, particularly in Silicon Valley, where
Christensen’s book was, for a time, a kind of innovator’s bible. While it’s a
testament to Christensen’s keen questioning ability that he was able to find and
pursue the Whys and What Ifs that led to his discovery, nevertheless one can’t
help wondering:
Why didn’t others—particularly the smart people running those companies he
studied—see the “innovator’s dilemma” themselves?
Why did it take a business professor to point out what was going on in their
businesses, their industries, under their own noses? Why weren’t they asking the
questions Christensen was asking?
Christensen has a theory on this, as well: They hadn’t been trained to question.
In business school these future chief executives were armed with management
theory that was perfectly serviceable and sensible—up to the point at which the
world changed and the old theory failed. When that point was reached, most
leaders weren’t able to step back and ask:
Why isn’t this working anymore?
What if the business market is now upside-down—and the bottom has risen to
the top? And if that’s the case . . .
How should my business respond to this new reality? How do we rewrite the
old theories?
Today, while market conditions and challenges have become even more
complex, uncertain, and subject to radical disruption across industries,
Christensen feels that business leaders, for the most part, still aren’t asking
enough questions, and especially the right kinds of questions.
Keith Yamashita, a longtime consultant to top companies such as IBM and
Coca-Cola, observes that in the business world at large “we’re coming off a
twenty-five-year
2 posteighties period of efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. I think
the unintended consequence of that entire efficiency era is that people
diminished their questions to very small-minded ones. In this quest for
incremental improvement, it became all about asking, 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” is ending. “Company
leaders are realizing that if they’re only asking the small questions, it’s not going
to advance their agenda, their position, or their brands. In order to innovate now,
they have to ask more expansive questions.”
What Yamashita is talking about is an evolution in business questions
themselves. The old, closed questions (How many? How much? How fast?) still
matter on a practical level, but increasingly businesses must tackle more
sophisticated open questions (Why? What if? How?) to thrive in an environment
that demands a clearer sense of purpose, a vision for the future, and an appetite
for change.
This affects new companies as much as the established ones. Start-ups have
always had to ask tough questions about their reason for being (Why does the
world need another company? Why should anyone care about us? How in the
world are we going to break through?), and that’s truer than ever in a market
now crowded with newcomers.
But established companies in old-line industries may need questioning even
more. Many are dealing with new threats and volatile changes that are suddenly
calling into question why they’re needed, what they do, and how they do it.
Small wonder, then, that for top
3 business consultants such as Dev Patnaik of
Jump Associates “questioning is now the number one thing I spend my time on
with clients.”
It’s not easy to bring questioning to companies; most of them weren’t built for it.
American businesses in particular, and many major post–World War II European
companies, “were designed on a military model that came out of the war, built
by people who’d been through that war, and the businesses were organized
around that mind-set,” Patnaik says. Central to that was the idea of a formal
hierarchy and chain of command that didn’t leave much room for calling into
question the accepted practices and procedures.
That old model doesn’t lend itself particularly well to a business market that
favors speed, flexibility, and collaborative inquiry. But changing that established
business model—specifically, to allow for more questioning—requires difficult
shifts in ingrained policies and approaches. For example, Eric Ries, the pioneer
of the Lean Startup movement, which teaches entrepreneurs and other
companies how to adopt more agile, flexible approaches, points out that an
incentive system has been built through the years to encourage answers, not
questions. “The industrial economy was all about
4 knowing the answer and
expressing confidence,” Ries said. “If you did your homework, you were
supposed to know. If you had unanswered questions, that meant you did a bad
job and wouldn’t get rewarded.”
Another challenge is that while rapid change makes it necessary for businesses
to question more, it also causes businesspeople to feel as if they don’t have time
to question what they’re doing. Tony Wagner, the Harvard education expert who
has studied the role of questioning in business, notes, “The pressure on shortterm results tends
5
to drive questioning out of the equation.”
For those inclined to question, the difficulty may be in knowing what to ask.
“With all the uncertainty out there,” Patnaik says, “organizations don’t even
know what they don’t know.” Figuring out the questions that are most critical for
a particular company to consider, given current challenges and market
conditions, may be the first order of business. While the key questions vary
depending on the individual business, a good place to start is at the most
fundamental level—with questions of purpose.
Why are we in business? (And by the way—what business are
we really in?)
Almost every company would acknowledge that it is in business to make money
so that it can stay in business. But most companies, if you trace their origins,
were started for more complex reasons than that. Many of the companies
featured in this book—Patagonia, W. L. Gore, Nike, Airbnb, Panera, Netflix—
started out on a quest to fill an unmet need, to make some aspect of our lives a
bit easier, more convenient, more enjoyable. Most good companies are born
trying to answer a question and solve a problem, which provides an early sense
of purpose.
But that motivating principle gets buried over time. Asking Why questions can
help to unearth it. (And if, after being dug up, that sense of purpose needs to be
revitalized, freshened up, and made relevant again, questioning can help with
that, too.)
There are different ways of thinking about purpose. A furniture retailer might
choose to think its purpose is to sell people furniture. But it could also approach
the business in a very different way. Its higher purpose might be that the
company brings a sense of style into the lives of those on a budget; or that it
enables people to express their creativity through home furnishings. Getting this
right is subtle; advertising sometimes attaches generic or artificial purposes to
companies. But if the leaders of a company think hard enough, and question well
enough, about where the company came from, what it does best, and whom it
serves, they will often uncover a more meaningful and authentic purpose in the
company’s origins.
Yamashita uses a set of questions
6 when he works with companies to try to
identify purpose. One of the main ones is fairly straightforward, if a bit grand:
What is our company’s purpose on this earth?
Yamashita acknowledges that this may sound high-minded for a company. But
the new business environment increasingly demands that companies think in
terms that go beyond mundane corporate concerns. To arrive at a powerful sense
of purpose, Yamashita says, companies today need “a fundamental orientation
that is outward looking”—so they can understand what people out there in the
world desire and need, and what’s standing in the way. At the same time,
business leaders also must look inward, to clarify their core values and larger
ambitions.
To figure out the internal values, Yamashita urges company leaders to look
back in time and consider this question:
Who have we (as a company) historically been when we’ve been at our best?
At the finest moments in a company’s history, Yamashita holds, its core values
usually came shining through. But from time to time it may be necessary to
revisit that past to reaffirm the company’s higher purpose.
Casey Sheahan, the CEO of the outdoor-apparel company Patagonia, admits
that even a company such as his—with a strong, well-defined mission that is tied
to encouraging outdoor activity and protecting the environment—has to revisit
questions about purpose and mission regularly. “There is great tension every
day
7
in the company between being successful in terms of growth, and what this
means in terms of our environmental impact.” The bigger Patagonia gets, the
more challenging this becomes. Sheahan grapples constantly with the question
How can we minimize the environmental impact of the tremendous carbon
footprint of operating a $570 million business?
What helps guide the company at all times, he said, is the knowledge of how it
began. “When the company was started by the founders, it was basically about
protecting what they loved, nature, and trying expand the sphere of influence in
order to inspire others.”
Not only is that the reason Patagonia exists—it’s also the reason people come
to work there, to this day. “It’s why they’re going up the stairs two steps at a
time to get to their jobs,” Sheahan says. The company has enjoyed strong
financial growth in recent years, but that’s not the Why factor for most people
working there. When Sheahan talks about financial results, there is mild interest;
“but when I say something like, ‘By the way, we’re sending fifty people down to
the Gulf to help with the cleanup efforts down there’—suddenly people are on
their feet cheering. That’s why they’re here.”
Not every company has a clear environmental mission like Patagonia’s, but
Sheahan maintains, “For any organization, it is galvanizing to have a strong
purpose and values, no matter what they might be.” A good way to surface that
is by looking back to when the business was founded and asking, What was that
higher purpose at the outset? And how can we rally people around that today?
At the same time, as Yamashita points out, it’s just as important to look
forward when asking big questions about purpose. He urges clients to work on
Whom must we fearlessly become? That can be a difficult challenge, he says,
because it requires “envisioning a version of the company that does not exist
yet.”
Purpose questions are important because if you can answer them, that frees up
company leaders to pursue all kinds of far-reaching opportunities and questions,
knowing all the while that they are on firm footing. “Products come and go,
leaders come and go, trends come and go,” says Yamashita, “but through all of
that, you need to know the answer to the question What is true about us, at our
core?”
Knowing that answer becomes especially critical when a company finds itself
in the midst of dramatic change. The digital revolution has forced many
companies to rebuild and rethink, sometimes pushing them into unfamiliar
territory. A company that has figured out the basic questions of identity and
purpose is in a better position to handle unsettling new questions such as What
business are we in now?
Nike provides an instructive example of
8 how a company can continually
adapt through constant questioning of its most basic approaches. The company
tends to guard its secrets closely, but a few years ago I had an opportunity to talk
to a design researcher who’d done some work with Nike and got an up-close
look at how it ventures out into the ball fields, courts, and running tracks with
athletes (both pros and the weekend jocks) to study their movements and to
detect their needs.
About a decade ago, Nike’s researchers observed a profound change that
digital technology was having on athletes such as runners. The many more ways
to measure, improve, and enrich the running experience also created
complications. Runners were fumbling with various gadgets—stopwatches, heart
monitors, music players—as they ran. Nike went into classic Why mode (Why
does this problem exist? Why hasn’t anyone addressed it?). Then, in considering
What If possibilities, the idea emerged of creating a hybrid, networked tool,
somehow connected to a Nike running shoe, that could encompass many of the
new needs a runner has: from measuring distances, to charting progress, to
getting pumped up by music, to connecting with other runners. In effect, Nike
was proposing:
What if a running shoe could run your life?
Are we really who we say we are?
10
In the mid-1990s, the premium cable channel HBO was in a creative rut when, according to
Fast Company, then-chief programmer Chris Albrecht sat down with other HBO executives
and asked the question above. Albrecht wanted his colleagues to step back and take a hard
look at the channel’s creative output—and consider whether it actually lived up to the highquality image HBO was projecting. The consensus answer to Albrecht’s question: “We’re not
quite there yet.” The group then proceeded to apply a set of additional questions to each of its
shows, asking, Is it distinctive? Is it good? They focused in on the central idea behind each
show: Was it an original and worthwhile idea? And was this show the very best realization of
that idea? Subsequently, the results of that rigorous inquiry materialized in the form of
groundbreaking series like Sex and the City and The Sopranos.
But getting to the How of this was another matter; Nike was a sneaker
company, not a digital-device maker. The company figured that the only way to
pull off something as audacious as this was through a partnership with a tech
company. Striking a collaborative deal with Steve Jobs and Apple wasn’t easy.
(According to a press report, Jobs initially berated Nike chief executive
9 Mark
Parker for trying to expand into digital; stick to the sneakers was Jobs’s message,
with a profanity or two thrown in.) But eventually, Nike won over Jobs and
produced a hybrid product, Nike+, which wirelessly connected a Nike running
shoe to an Apple iPod device, which was in turn connected to a website. A
classic “smart recombination,” it enabled the runner to program music, track
running and health data, communicate with other runners, find running partners,
share tips, and so forth.
But it did something more important for Nike—it helped them begin to think
outside the shoebox. Nike now has a line of digital products, including its highly
successful FuelBand wrist tracker. It is gradually becoming a digital company as
much as it is a shoe company. So if you ask, What business is Nike really in?,
the answer is constantly changing—though it’s grounded in the core purpose of
serving an athlete’s lifestyle needs, in whatever form they might take.
Nike isn’t the only company going through these kinds of core changes of late.
A recent article in Fast Company pointed out that a
11 number of today’s leading
companies—Nike, Apple, Netflix—have increasingly been finding success by
moving outside their primary area of expertise. The article, with the provocative
headline “Death to Core Competency,” suggests that whatever a company’s
specialty product or service might be—whatever got you to where you are today
—might not be the thing that gets you to the next level. Even newer companies
must make these kinds of major shifts:
12
In 2008, Facebook—having already
achieved remarkable early growth in terms of attracting nearly 100 million users
—brought in a new executive, Sheryl Sandberg, who reportedly posed a
fundamental question to the company’s leaders and employees: What business
was Facebook in? With all of its rapid subscriber growth, the company had yet
to settle on a model for making money. Sandberg’s question prompted internal
debate—and resulted in a new strategy that was much more advertising-focused.
It’s a sobering realization for many businesses: They can’t rest on what
they’ve already done, or what they know. The need to bring a “beginner’s mind”
to business may make it necessary to—if only temporarily—set aside all history,
and all notions of what has worked in the past, in order to ask questions from a
fresh perspective.
What if our company didn’t exist?
Early in its history, the microprocessor
13 company Intel found itself facing a
difficult decision. The company had started out making computer memory chips,
and its success with that product established Intel. But as the memory-chip
business began to slow down, Intel’s cofounders, Andrew Grove and Gordon
Moore, had to decide whether to shift the company’s focus into more promising
areas. Yet they were torn: Chips were central to their identity—and Intel
wouldn’t have gotten to where it was without them.
Then Grove posed an interesting question to his partner:
If we were kicked out of the company, what do you think the new CEO would
do?
Grove and Moore reasoned that a new leader would feel no emotional
attachment to the declining memory-chip business and would probably leave it
behind. So they did likewise, shifting Intel’s focus to microprocessors—which
set the stage for remarkable growth in the years to follow.
When companies are facing disruptive change (and these days, what company
isn’t?), old habits and traditions can sometimes get in the way of progress. One
of the things hypothetical What If questioning can do is remove those
constraints, if only briefly, to allow for more fresh thinking.
You could ask, as Grove and Moore did, What if different leaders were
brought in?, but Clay Christensen suggests a bolder version of this question:
What if the company didn’t exist? That question allows you to take a clean-slate
approach in thinking about the industry and your place in it. Christensen points
out that thinking about your company as if there were no history enables leaders
to stop focusing on preexisting beliefs and structures—“the stuff they’ve already
invested in”—and consider new possibilities. That’s particularly useful “if, at
any point in the future, you see the possibility that the core business might slow
down,” Christensen says. (While contemplating a world in which your company
did not exist, another question worth considering is Who would miss us? The
answer to that can help clarify who your most important customers are and what
your real purpose is.)
It’s not easy for a company to move away from what it has done in the past.
The consultant Jack Bergstrand of Brand Velocity thinks
14 one of the most
important questions companies should ask regularly is What should we stop
doing? Company leaders naturally tend to focus on what they should start doing.
Bergstrand notes that coming to terms with what you’re willing to eliminate is
always harder. Yet if you can’t answer that question, he maintains, “it lessens
your chances of being successful at what you want to do next—because you’ll
be sucking up resources doing what’s no longer needed and taking those
resources away from what should be a top priority.” Moreover, if you can’t
figure out what you should stop doing, it might be an early warning sign that you
don’t know what your strategy is.
Bergstrand explains that it’s difficult for most companies to stop doing things
—especially putting an end to programs or products that were once successful—
because “we don’t like to kill our babies.” In addition, corporate politics can get
in the way; individuals or groups within a company are naturally inclined to
protect their own projects. “Even asking the question about ‘what should we
stop’ makes people inside a company uncomfortable,” Bergstrand says. For that
reason, it may be necessary to adopt the What if the company didn’t exist? mindset—so that you can then be willing to cut ties with old programs, products, and
practices.
History and routine aren’t the only things that can impede a company’s forward
movement. Various real-world constraints can also inhibit a company’s ability to
adapt and innovate; for example, being overly concerned with practical issues
such as costs and budgets tends to limit the scope of creative thinking. That’s
why some business leaders (including Steve Jobs when he headed Apple) have
been known to use What If hypothetical questioning to temporarily remove
practical constraints. One such approach is to encourage teams working on
projects to ask themselves, What if money were no object? How might we
approach the project differently?
By temporarily removing these restrictions, people’s imaginations are freed up
to find the best idea, cost notwithstanding. You might end up with a
groundbreaking possibility that can then be scaled back to make it more
affordable.
What if we were to compete against ourselves?
16
In 2007, the 150-year-old Atlantic Monthly was suffering along with many other advertisingstarved magazines. Publisher David G. Bradley brought in new editorial and business teams
and, the New York Times reports, they brainstormed as if they were launching a Silicon Valley
startup whose mission was to attack the magazine, asking: What would we do if the goal was
to aggressively cannibalize ourselves? Answer: they’d launch an assault on the digital front.
Knowing that news aggregation was killing magazines, they started their own “killers,”
TheAtlantic Wire.com, TheAtlanticCities.com, and Quartz. They gradually merged the
previously separate digital and print staffs, ended the paywall for Atlantic.com readers, and
even officially dropped “monthly” from their name. By late 2012, traffic to web properties
was up 2500 percent and revenue doubled; the company was profitable for the first time in
decades. They essentially ate their own lunch, and now are dining out on that great decision.
Conversely, using What If questions to impose constraints can also be
effective. By challenging people to think about creating or achieving something
within extreme limits—What if we could only charge ten bucks for our hundreddollar service?—it forces a rethinking of real-world practicalities and
assumptions. Sometimes the fantasy becomes reality. As the business consultant
and Dartmouth University professor Vijay Govindarajan notes, hospitals in
India
15 have developed incredibly inexpensive (yet still safe and reliable)
surgical approaches to provide operations for a fraction of their cost in other
countries—in part because they were forced by market pressures to question the
prevailing assumptions about surgical costs.
What if we could become a cause and not just a company?
As businesses throw off constraints and imagine bold What If possibilities, some
may consider an ultra-ambitious one: Can a company transform itself into a
cause? And why would it want to do so?
The answer to the second question partly has to do with a new dynamic in the
relationship between consumers and business. Because of the Internet and social
media, people know more about companies and brands than ever before. And
they care more than ever about how companies are behaving, what a company’s
values are, what that company stands for.
Employees feel this even more strongly. Younger workers, in particular, have
shown they want to align themselves with companies that support principles and
values similar to their own, and companies that are contributing to a greater
good. “The modern worker is not the salary
17 worker of old,” says Tim Ogilvie
of the consulting firm Peer Insight. “Increasingly, they’re saying, ‘I want to do
something I really believe in.’” So to the extent a company can stand for
something more than just what it sells or creates, it can develop a deeper
relationship with both consumers and employees.
Keith Yamashita says companies can try to find their cause by asking, What
does the world hunger for? This may require some contextual inquiry—
venturing beyond the corporate bubble to spend time with the people who are
your customers—to figure out what they care about or feel passionate about. The
next step is to identify what may be standing in their way—an obstacle, a
problem. To the extent you can alleviate that problem, your company can be
seen as more than just a business out to make money.
A case in point is Panera Bread, the growing U.S.-based chain of
bakery/restaurants. Panera CEO Ron Shaich recalls that
18 as the company sought
to find a more meaningful role in communities, it looked for a problem that
matched up well with its capabilities and resources. At one point, Shaich had a
conversation that questioned:
What does the world need most . . . that we are uniquely able to provide?
Shaich says he wrestled with that question for a while, then worked his way to
an answer with the launch of Panera Cares—an initiative to open a number of
pay-what-you-can cafés that are identical to the chain’s other restaurants, except
customers pay what they wish or can afford (based on suggested donation
amounts).
How can we drive more ounces into more bodies, more often?
19
During the years Jeffrey Dunn was a top executive at Coca-Cola, the “unbeautiful question”
above was central to the marketing of Coke’s sugary soft drinks. Coke wasn’t alone, of course:
Author Michael Moss has revealed that companies throughout the snack food industry have
been similarly focused on ingenious questions and methods aimed at increasing consumption
of products loaded with salt, sugar, and fat—even as America’s obesity epidemic has steadily
worsened. Today, Dunn has moved on to a more healthful product, as the head of the carrot
company Bolthouse Farms (which pioneered the marketing of “baby carrots” after a local
grower, tired of throwing away misshapen or gnarly carrots, wondered, What if I peel off the
skin and cut them into perfect mini-carrots?). At Bolthouse, Dunn has been promoting baby
carrots as crunchy treats available in snack-packs—an endeavor to answer his new question,
What if we marketed baby carrots like junk food?
With so much fresh-baked bread in so many outlets, Panera has always been
“uniquely able” to provide leftover bread to people in need—and the company
has, for years, been a contributor to community food pantries. But there’s a
difference between donating to charity (something many companies do, almost
by rote), and fully committing to a cause. “We started asking ourselves, What
more can we do?” Shaich says. “I felt like, I want to put our bodies on the line.”
What gradually became clear was that Panera could provide not just bread
giveaways, but a more complete dining experience for those going hungry. That
extra level of involvement—“putting bodies on the line,” to use Shaich’s words
—made the effort bigger and more distinctive than a standard corporate charity
program.
The first Panera Cares café opened about two years ago. Now, the five cafés
around the country serve over a million people a year (and for the most part
cover costs, as high donations from some customers tend to balance out lower
ones by others).
Shaich notes that as the company was developing the Panera Cares idea and
putting it into practice (with the CEO himself working at the first café), a
number of tough choices were made to ensure the integrity of the program:
offering a full menu instead of a limited one, using donation boxes at the cafés
instead of cash registers (Shaich was concerned that the latter could create
psychological pressure on customers to pay). At each step, Shaich says, the
company had to ask, Do we want to take a shortcut on this or do it right?
As Peer Insight’s Tim Ogilvie observes, being true to a cause often requires
making tough decisions and sacrificing at times. “When you come to the point
where you can’t serve both the bottom line and the cause, one or the other must
suffer,” says Ogilvie, pointing to the Whole Foods supermarket chain, which
stopped selling live lobsters for an extended time until it found a supplier that
did humane harvesting. “Those are hard choices, but when you opt for the cause
over the bottom line, employees can see that, and then they believe in the
company and the cause even more.”
One of the challenges for marketers in becoming a cause is that while they
may be used to saying they’re “for” certain things, they rarely go the other way
and ask themselves, What are we against? As part of its stand against excess
consumerism, Patagonia went out on a limb when it considered:
What if we asked people not to buy from us?
The company decided it was willing to risk losing sales in support of a larger
cause and ran ads urging people not to buy its clothing (or at least, not to buy a
new jacket if they didn’t actually need it). Says Patagonia’s Sheahan, “Those ads
were just asking people to question their consumerism and maybe be a little
more mindful about the stuff they’re purchasing.” Still, it was a high-risk
message, though Sheahan says it actually helped the brand gain market share by
attracting more customers—who presumably admired the stand Patagonia was
taking with the ads.
How can we make a better experiment?
Questioning also has an important role in everyday business matters such as
product development. As Lean Startup’s Eric Ries points out, it is central to
testing out new ideas to see what works.
Ries believes one of the most
21
important questions businesses need to ask today
is the one above. It’s somewhat counterintuitive for most managers—who tend
to think in terms of “making products,” not “making experiments.” But as Ries
points out, anytime you’re doing something new “it’s an experiment whether
you admit it or not. Because it is not a fact that it’s going to work.”
So how do companies get better at experimenting? Ries says you start with the
acknowledgment that “we are operating amid all this uncertainty—and that the
purpose of building a product or doing any other activity is to create an
experiment to reduce that uncertainty.” This means that instead of asking What
will we do? or What will we build? the emphasis should be on What will we
learn? “And then you work backwards to the simplest possible thing—the
minimum viable product—that can get you the learning,” he says.
What is your tennis ball? (and other entrepreneurial questions)
20
Drew Houston, founder of the online storage service Dropbox, thinks all would-be
entrepreneurs should try to answer the above question. “The most successful people are
obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them,” according to
Houston. “They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball.” To enhance your prospects, “find
your tennis ball—the thing that pulls you.” PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel believes
entrepreneurs can find ideas to pursue by asking themselves, What is something I believe that
nearly no one agrees with me on? If self-examination doesn’t work, try looking around: Brian
Spaly, a serial entrepreneur in the apparel industry, advises, “Whenever you encounter a
service or customer experience that frustrates you, ask, Is this a problem I could solve?”
Lastly, don’t just focus on the mercenary question Will consumers pay for this? The startup
business coach Dave Kashen thinks the better question to ask about any new venture is, Will
this make people’s lives meaningfully better?
Just this one change—before you get to any of the more complex Lean Startup
methodology—can make a world of difference, Ries insists. For one thing, it can
help unlock the creativity that’s already there in your company. “Most
companies are full of ideas, but they don’t know how to go about finding out if
those ideas work,” Ries says. “If you want to harvest all those ideas, allow
employees to experiment more—so they can find out the answers to their
questions themselves.”
Peer Insight’s Tim Ogilvie points out that it’s also important for companies to
give people a safe place to test ideas and run experiments. To that end, he says,
companies need to be able to answer:
Where is our petri dish?
That question is really asking, Where in the company is it safe to ask radical
questions? “As an established business,” Ogilvie says, “you’ve got all these
promises you’re keeping to your current customers—you have to stay focused
on that. But that may not have a future.” So the question becomes “Where,
within the company, can you explore heretical questions that could threaten the
business as it is—without contaminating what you’re doing now?”
Company leadership needs to “provide permission and protocols for
experimentation,” he says. That means providing the time and resources for
people to explore new questions, as well as establishing methods: “How might
we?” questioning sessions, ethnography, in-market experimentation. It can also
mean cordoning off this area of the business—although a clear line of visibility
should remain between the core business and the “petri dish” part of the
company, so that each can influence the other.
Ogilvie says that yet another way to phrase this question is Where is the place
we can be a start-up again? Surprisingly, he thinks it’s a question that even
start-ups should ask themselves. “Start-ups are so desperate not to be a start-up,”
says Ogilvie (himself a former start-up CEO). “They’re so anxious to be
postrevenue and postprofit that you can almost give up what’s great about being
a start-up too soon. They get built for execution, and once they’re having
success, they’ll very quickly start thinking, ‘We’ve got to stick to our knitting.’”
All of which means they’ve outgrown their original petri dish—and might need a
new one.
If we brainstorm in questions, will lightning strike?
In the business world these days,
22 brainstorming has a mixed reputation.
Increasingly, it’s understood that people tend to do their best creative thinking—
particularly in coming up with fresh insights and random associations by way of
connective inquiry—in informal, relaxed settings, when they’re not really trying.
A brainstorming session runs counter to that: Everyone is stuck in a room
trying desperately to come up with original ideas. “There is too much pressure
and
23
too much influence from others in the group,” according to Debra Kaye,
author of the book Red Thread Thinking. “The free association done in
brainstorming sessions is often shackled by peer pressure and as a result
generates obvious responses.”
But many businesses are reluctant to walk away from brainstorming because
they recognize the critical importance of being able to tackle challenges as a
group. Collaborative thinking in problem solving is essential because it brings
together multiple viewpoints and diverse backgrounds. While it’s understood
that creativity sometimes requires solitude (“Be alone, that is when ideas are
born,” Nikola Tesla said), we also know that it flourishes when diverse ideas and
thoughts are exchanged.
One solution to this conundrum may be to shift the nature of brainstorming so
that it’s about generating questions instead of ideas. Interesting findings about
this are coming from a number of groups and individuals, working in both the
education and business sectors.
The Right Question Institute—which specializes in teaching students to tackle
problems by generating questions, not solutions—has found that groups of
students (whether children or adults) seem to think more freely and creatively
using the “question-storming” method, in which the focus is on generating
questions. The RQI’s Dan Rothstein believes that some of the peer pressure in
conventional brainstorming is lessened in this format. Answers tend to be judged
more harshly than questions.
In the business world, Hal Gregersen has been studying the
24 effectiveness of
question-storming at major corporations and has found it to be far more effective
than conventional brainstorming. “Regular brainstorming for ideas often hits a
wall because we only have so many ideas,” Gregersen says. “Part of the reason
we hit that wall is we’re asking the wrong questions.” When people in a group
are struggling with an issue and find “they’re getting nowhere, they’re stuck,”
Gregersen says, “that’s the perfect point to step back and do question-storming.”
Gregersen will typically advise group members to try to generate at least fifty
questions about the problem that’s being “stormed.” As those questions are
being written down for everyone to see, “other team members are paying
attention and thinking of a better question.” It’s usually easier to come up with
questions than ideas; we don’t have to divine a solution from the air or connect
ideas in a fantastically original manner; we just have to come at the problem
from a slightly different angle of inquiry.
After observing about a hundred Q-storm sessions around the world,
Gregersen has noted some patterns. “At around twenty-five questions, the group
may stall briefly and say, ‘That’s enough questions.’ But if you push on beyond
that point, some of the best questions come as you get to fifty or even seventyfive.”
The RQI approach to question-storming focuses less on volume and moves
more quickly to “improving” the questions generated by the group, by opening
closed questions and closing open ones. The key is to converge around the best
questions, as decided through group discussion. This gets to one of the big
problems with brainstorming in general: Many ideas are tossed out, but the
groups often don’t know how to winnow down to the best ideas. It can be easier
to winnow down questions because the best questions are magnetic—they
intrigue people, make them want to work more on those. RQI recommends
coming out of a session with three great questions that you want to explore
further.
Question-storming can be more realistic and achievable than brainstorming.
Instead of hoping that you’ll emerge from a meeting with “the answer” (which
almost never happens and thus leaves people feeling frustrated), the goal is to
come out of it with a few promising and powerful questions—which is likely to
provide a sense of direction and momentum.
As I was examining the ways some of today’s cutting-edge companies are trying
to reinvent brainstorming, an interesting trend surfaced: a specific form of
questioning using three words—How might we? It’s a simple
25 way of ensuring
that would-be innovators are asking the right questions and using the best
wording. Proponents of this practice say it is surprisingly effective—and a
testament to the importance of wording a question just right to spark creative
thinking and freewheeling collaboration.
When people within companies try to innovate, they often talk about the
challenges they’re facing by using language that can inhibit creativity instead of
encouraging it, says the business consultant Min Basadur, who has taught the
How might we? (HMW) form of questioning to a wide range of companies over
the past four decades. Basadur explains. “People may start out asking, ‘How can
we do this?’ or ‘How should we do that?’ But as soon as you start using words
like can and should, you’re implying judgment: Can we really do it? And should
we?” By substituting the word might, he says, “You’re able to defer judgment,
which helps people to create options more freely and opens up more
possibilities.”
What would Neil Patrick Harris do?
26
Andrew Rossi of the marketing firm M Booth has found that one of the best ways to stoke
creativity during brainstorming sessions is to ask people in the group to think about the
problem they’re trying to solve from an unusual perspective. So, for example, if a company is
introducing a new toothpaste, they might ask: How would IKEA tackle a challenge like this?
Another approach is to add in an odd constraint, such as What if your idea had to involve
speed dating? Rossi’s group sometimes suggests adopting the perspective of a well-known
artist or entertainer: What would Jay-Z do in this situation? How would J. K. Rowling think
about this? What might Neil Patrick Harris do? (The latter has been described as “an actor,
singer, dancer, producer, director, writer, child stardom survivor, evil genius, amateur
puppeteer, and magic enthusiast”—so he might do just about anything.)
Tim Brown, the chief executive of IDEO, says that when his firm takes on a
design challenge of almost any type, it invariably starts by asking How might
we? Brown observes that within the phrase, each of those three words plays a
role in spurring creative problem solving: “The how part assumes there are
solutions out there—it provides creative confidence. Might says we can put ideas
out there that might work or might not—either way, it’s okay. And the we part
says we’re going to do it together and build on each other’s ideas.”
Although the HMW has been used
27 at IDEO for a number of years, its origins
can be traced back fifty years to Sidney Parnes, a leading creativity expert at the
time who headed up the Creative Problem Solving Institute in Buffalo, New
York. Min Basadur studied at the CPSI during his tenure as a creative manager
at Procter & Gamble in the early 1970s, and he adapted some of Parnes’
brainstorming ideas to help P&G’s marketers—who, at the time, were working
themselves into a lather as they tried to compete with Colgate-Palmolive’s
popular new soap, Irish Spring, which featured a green stripe and an appealing
“refreshment” promise.
By the time Basadur was asked to assist on the project, P&G had already
tested a half dozen of its own copycat green-stripe bars, though none could best
Irish Spring. Basadur figured the P&G team was asking the wrong question
(How can we make a better green-stripe bar?) and soon had them asking a series
of more ambitious HMW questions, culminating with How might we create a
more refreshing soap of our own? That opened the creative floodgates, and over
the next few hours, Basadur says, hundreds of ideas were generated for possible
refreshment bars—with the team eventually converging around a theme of
finding refreshment at the seacoast. Out of that came a coastal-blue and whitestriped bar named (what else?) Coast, which became a highly successful brand.
As the Coast story suggests, there’s more to HMW methodology than just
using those three words. Basadur employed a larger process to guide people
toward the right HMW questions. This included a number of Why questions (as
in, Why are we trying so hard to make another green-striped soap?). He also
urged the P&G team to step back from their obsession with a competitor’s
product and look at the situation from a consumer perspective. For the customer,
it wasn’t about green stripes—it was about feeling refreshed.
Basadur maintains that it’s common for companies to expend efforts asking
the wrong questions and trying to solve the wrong problems. “Most
businesspeople have limited skills when it comes to ‘problem-finding’ or
problem definition,” he says. “It’s not taught in MBA programs.” To fill that
void, Basadur opened a consultancy, Basadur Applied Creativity, which
developed its own “Simplex” process of creative problem solving for business—
with HMW questioning at the core of it.
Gradually, Basadur took the How might we? approach beyond P&G to other
companies, including the tech firm Scient. One of his converts at Scient, the
designer Charles Warren, then took the methodology with him as he moved to
IDEO. IDEO’s Brown confesses that when he was introduced to the notion of
encouraging businesspeople to ask How might we?, “I was skeptical at first—it
sounds a bit Californian.” But before long, says Warren, IDEO was conducting
companywide question-storming sessions with seven hundred people asking the
question together.
When Charles Warren then moved from IDEO to Google, the infectious HMW
approach found a new host. Warren led the user-experience design team that
took on the challenge of creating Google+. “We were asking How might we?
questions every day,” he says. At Google, such questions can run the gamut from
How might we predict whether a flu outbreak is going to happen, based on
search queries? to How might we help more people feel more comfortable
sharing more of their lives in social media? Most recently, HMW was carried
from Google to Facebook by a member of the Google+ team.
HMW proponents say this form of questioning can be applied to almost any
challenge—though it works best with ones that are ambitious yet also
achievable. Brown says it doesn’t work as well with problems that are too broad
(How might we solve world hunger?) or too narrow (How might we increase
profits by 5 percent next quarter?). Figuring out the right HMW questions to ask
is a process, Brown says; “You need to find the sweet spot.”
Will anyone follow a leader who embraces uncertainty?
“The most important thing business leaders must do today is to be the ‘chief
question-asker’ for their organization,” says the consultant Dev Patnaik of Jump
Associates. However, Patnaik adds a cautionary note: “The first thing most
leaders need to realize is, they’re really bad at asking questions.”
That shouldn’t be surprising. Patnaik notes that most business execs rose up
through the ranks because “they were good at giving answers. But it means
they’ve had little experience at formulating questions.” The questions they are
accustomed to asking are more practical and interrogative: How much is this
going to cost us? Who’s responsible for this problem? How are the numbers
looking? (Or, to cite one of Patnaik’s favorite dumb questions, What’s our
version of the iPad?)
That kind of practical, give-me-the-facts questioning has its place. Such
questions can help in running a business, but not necessarily in leading it. Adam
Bryant, who writes the New28 York Times Corner Office column, featuring
weekly interviews with top CEOs, says the best leaders understand that asking
open, exploratory questions can help them figure out what’s coming and where
new opportunities lie, so that they can lead their company in new directions. Ron
Shaich of Panera observes, “When you’re leading a team, a start-up, or a public
company, your primary occupation must be to discover the future. A compelling
and even subversive question is an effective tool for navigating uncharted
terrain.”
The problem with asking questions, for some business leaders, is that it
exposes a lack of expertise and, in theory, makes them vulnerable. That many of
today’s most successful CEOs are questioners, as documented in the research of
Hal Gregersen and Clay Christensen, would seem to disprove that theory. But
the myth lingers that business leaders must be all-knowing, decisive, and in
possession of infallible “gut instincts,” all of which leaves little room for
questioning.
Randy Komisar, a leading Silicon Valley
29 venture capitalist, says the best
business leaders and entrepreneurs have a different attitude toward “answers.”
“They understand that answers are relative. You can have an answer for right
now, but it changes.”
Because change is now a constant, the willingness to be comfortable with, and
even to embrace, ambiguity is critical for today’s leaders. The consultant Bryan
Franklin has observed that effective
30
leaders today may not appear to be
entirely decisive because they are forced to reconcile conflicting forces and
paradoxes in the current marketplace. Such leaders often find themselves
“standing at the intersection between seemingly contradictory truths”: How do
you balance growth with social responsibility? How do you enrich your offering
while streamlining production? And so forth.
Why can’t everyone accept credit cards?
31
Jack Dorsey, one of the cofounders of Twitter, is a business leader who embraces the credo,
“Question everything.” Upon learning that a friend, glassworks designer Jim McKelvey, lost a
$2,000 sale because he couldn’t accept a potential customer’s credit card, Dorsey wondered,
Why is it that only companies are able to accept credit cards? Partnering with McKelvey,
Dorsey envisioned an easy-to-use alternative to clunky, expensive card-reading equipment:
What if all you needed to swipe a credit card was a smart phone or tablet? As to the “how” of
making this feasible, Dorsey and the designers at his startup, Square, devised a small plastic
plug (easily inserted into a smart phone jack) that serves as a card reader, and added a clean,
intuitive user interface, accessible via a smart phone app. The elegant simplicity of Square
(and that of Dorsey’s earlier creation, Twitter) is a product of rigorous inquiry: Dorsey
maintains that good design is about removing unnecessary features by continually asking, Do
we really need this? and What can we take away?
In the midst of such complexity, leaders need extraordinary “sensemaking”
capabilities,
32 according to Deborah Ancona, the director of the MIT Leadership
Center. Ancona defines this as “the ability to make sense of what’s going on in a
changing and complex environment.” To do this, she maintains, leaders must be
able to get beyond their own assumptions, take in vast amounts of new
information, and figure out how to apply all of that to their business, sometimes
doing that via experimentation. This adds up to a lot of Why, What If, and How
questions.
The leader needn’t, indeed shouldn’t, be asking these questions alone. “One of
the most important things to know about becoming more of a questioning leader
is that the questions don’t all have to come from you,” says Patnaik. If others are
given permission and encouraged to question, they can contribute a range of
perspectives and help raise the kinds of Why and What If questions that might
never occur to the person at the top.
A great source of questioning input can and probably should come from
outside the company—from those who have enough distance to question the
company as a naïve outsider.
The late, legendary business guru Peter Drucker
33 was known for coming into
companies with an outsider’s perspective, which enabled him to see problems
and issues that insiders might have missed. Rick Wartzman, executive director
of the Drucker Institute, says people often wonder how Drucker achieved his
stature as “the man who invented management” and the go-to adviser for half a
century for every company from GM to Procter & Gamble to Coca-Cola. The
answer can be summed up in a word: questions.
Drucker “understood that his job wasn’t to serve up answers,” according to
Wartzman. Drucker once remarked that his greatest strength was “to be ignorant
and ask a few questions.” Often those questions were deceptively simple, as in
Who is your customer? What business are you in? The clients who hired
Drucker may have started out expecting the great consultant to offer brilliant
solutions to all their problems. But as he told one client, “The answers have to be
yours.”
Today, many consultants don’t follow Drucker’s model; they’re more apt to
adopt the role of “experts” whose job is to provide answers. (And as author Dan
Ariely noted
34
in Harvard Business Review, 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.”) But as Drucker knew, an
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.
While the leader can look outside for help with questioning, certain core
leadership questions can only be answered by looking inward. When Jim
Hackett, the CEO of Steelcase,
35
first took the helm at that company, he
struggled with what his role should be as a leader, wondering, What does a CEO
look like and feel like? What’s the texture of what you’re supposed to be?
Hackett initially focused on some of the wrong questions; he was overly
concerned with what others (in particular, the family that owned the company)
wanted or expected from him. But gradually he concluded that his role as a
leader was to “look at the chaos and provide a point of view about what needs to
be done.” Today, he maintains that one of the most important things a leader can
do is project a clear and distinctive point of view that others can follow. But that
clear vision is arrived at, and constantly modified and sharpened, through deep
reflection and questioning.
Hackett told me he believes that deep thinking is a lost art in today’s business
environment. “There is an overcelebration of getting things done,” he said. “For
a long time, I have been asking myself this question:
“Where did the balance between thinking and doing get out of equilibrium?”
At Steelcase, Hackett has tried to emphasize—and even taught courses on—
the importance of doing critical thinking and questioning before taking action.
“We have to train ourselves to ask questions,” he says. “We have to discipline
ourselves to do it.”
One of the critical things a questioning leader must do is find ways—as
Hackett is doing at Steelcase—to spark and encourage questioning in others.
There are various approaches to developing a culture that encourages
questioning, as we’ll see, but some of this rests on the individual leader and the
way he/she interacts with employees. The most effective questioning leader
won’t just give answers to others (or demand answers from them via
interrogation); the better approach is to use Socratic-style questioning to
encourage deeper and more creative thinking by others.
Leaders must also know when to stop questioning. “You can question yourself
right into inaction because there are so many different potential outcomes that
you become concerned about how to move forward or even to move forward at
all,” says Casey Sheahan of Patagonia. “Questioning is critical, but at some point
you have to take action when you think you’ve found the best path.” How do
you know when to stop inquiring and start doing? “I feel it mostly in my gut,”
Sheahan declares. “As a leader, at some point I get frustrated and say, ‘Let’s get
going.’”
Should mission statements be mission questions?
The philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing
36
now and then to hang a question mark on the things you take for granted.” So
let’s apply this to the corporate mission statement—something that is often taken
for granted, ignored, occasionally ridiculed. What if we were to take the typical
mission statement and hang a question mark on the end of it?
First let’s consider why a company might want to do this. It’s assumed that a
declarative “statement” makes a company seem confident, more sure of its
mission, more determined. But mission statements tend to have a different effect.
They often sound arrogant. They come across as not quite credible. They seem
“corporate” and “official,” which also means they’re a bit stiff. Often they’re
banal pronouncements (We save people money so they can live better. —
Walmart) or debatable assertions (Yahoo! is the premier digital media company)
that don’t offer much help in gauging whether a company is actually living up to
a larger goal or purpose.
And sometimes they sound as if they’re saying the mission has already been
accomplished, and now the company is just in maintenance mode.
In these dynamic times, it seems appropriate to take that static statement and
transform it into a more open-ended, fluid mission question that can still be
ambitious (replacing, for example, We make the world a better place through
robotics! with How might we make the world a better place through robotics?).
By articulating the company mission as a question, it tells the outside world,
“This is what we’re striving for—we know we’re not there yet, but we’re on the
journey.” It acknowledges room for possibility, change, and adaptability. “I’d
rather have mission statements that start by asking How might we?” says the
consultant Min Basadur. “You don’t want the mission statement to make it
sound like you’re already there. If we say, ‘How might we be recognized as the
best car-parts manufacturer?’ it says, ‘We’re always trying and we’re willing to
open our minds to new ways of accomplishing this.’”
What if a bookstore could be like summer camp?
38
It’s no secret that local bookstores have faced a tough challenge in recent years. Independent
booksellers such as Steve Bercu, of Austin, Texas-based BookPeople, find themselves asking
fundamental questions such as What can we offer that Amazon can’t? Here’s one of Bercu’s
answers: a summer camp for kids. It started when a BookPeople staffer wondered if the store
could create a real-life version of Camp Half Blood, featured in the popular Percy Jackson
series of young-adult books. Bercu knew nothing about starting or running a camp, so he
experimented—finding a space in a local park, and offering a mix of outdoor activities with
lots of book talk. The program now is so popular that local parents line up for hours to get
their kids into the camp before it sells out. And the goodwill and local publicity generated
have helped Bercu register best-ever book sales back at the store.
Perhaps most important, a mission question invites participation and
collaboration. Tim Brown, the chief executive at IDEO,
37 points out that
questions, by their very nature, challenge people and invite them to engage with
an idea or an issue—and could therefore do likewise in engaging employees with
a company mission. Indeed, thinking of a company mission as a shared endeavor
—an ongoing attempt to answer a big, bold question through collaborative
inquiry—seems vastly preferable to having to live up to a dictum handed down
from on high.
As to how it reflects on the company (which is what a lot of mission
statements are about), which seems more impressive: a company that is striving
to answer an ambitious question—or one that claims to have figured everything
out and distilled it down to an official “statement”?
Whether or not the mission statement is phrased as a question, it should be
subject to constant questioning:
Does it still make sense today?
Are we, as a company, still living up to it (if we ever did)?
Is the mission growing and pulling us forward?
And lastly, Are we all on this mission together?
The first three of these are somewhat self-explanatory, but companies may
need to think more about the last question. Mission statements are usually
created by upper management (many of them read as if they were cobbled
together by an executive committee). But does a mission mean anything if the
people throughout the company don’t feel invested in it? One way to help people
feel more engaged with a company mission is to give them a role in shaping it or
refreshing an existing one.
Keith Yamashita observes that some companies involve many people in the
crafting of the mission, while others leave it to the leadership. “To me, there’s no
right or wrong way,” he says. But he does note that being involved in the
mission creation—“doing the introspection—gets people to more firmly and
more deeply believe in what they are doing.”
Yamashita points to the approach used by Starbucks in modernizing its
mission a few years back. CEO Howard Schultz worked with his top leaders to
rewrite every word of the mission. That team then convened the top three
hundred leaders of the company to get them to commit to it; they in turn went to
more than twelve thousand store managers, who spent four days in New Orleans
committing to the mission. “This is a great example of mission-setting, starting
with a few key leaders and ultimately rallying an entire workforce,” Yamashita
says.
A different approach by IBM under
39
then-CEO Sam Palmisano sought even
more direct input up front. Palmisano “hosted a worldwide online jam session—
using technology to elicit the ideas, thinking, and stories from IBMers about
what they most valued,” Yamashita recalls. More than eighty thousand
employees participated—and together, they wrote the company’s values, which
remain in place under current CEO Ginni Rometty.
Ron Shaich says that at Panera ideas about how to live up to the mission can
come from anywhere. For example, the Panera Cares idea originated during a
dinner conversation among Shaich and a group of franchisees—one of whom
asked how the company might expand upon its efforts to serve the community.
That got Shaich thinking about ways to elevate the company’s existing breaddonation program to a higher level.
Whether mission questions come from throughout the ranks or are posed by
leaders themselves, the point is to keep asking, What are we doing? Why are we
doing it? How might we do it better? As Shaich says, “Figuring out what you
want to accomplish is a continual search—and questions are the means to the
search.”
How might we create a culture of inquiry?
This is a critical question for business leaders to address, but first they might
well ask, Do we really want a culture of inquiry?
“I think a lot of traditional companies may not want that,” says Yamashita.
“There are plenty of corporate cultures we encounter that shut down
questioning.” Why? Because as Dev Patnaik points out, there’s a sense that if
too much questioning is going on within a company, “it’s distracting. Nature
abhors a vacuum, and companies abhor ambiguity. They want to deal in
answers. And even if they get to a point where they know they need more of a
questioning culture, they’re often unwilling to do what it takes to create that
culture.”
Inviting and encouraging more questioning creates some complications within
a corporate culture. If employees in a company are given more leeway to
question, it means policies may be challenged. Established methods and
practices might suddenly be looked at in a new light: Why are we doing it this
way? Not everyone wants to have to continually defend proven methods. To
some leaders, as well as some midlevel managers, it can be frustrating to have to
explain and rationalize.
Questioning within a business environment can also create a perceived threat
to authority. Those with expertise may resent having their learned views
questioned by nonexperts. Managers trying to keep things moving may feel they
shouldn’t have to answer a subordinate’s questions. Questioning may be seen as
slowing progress, particularly by those who believe that what the company needs
most are “answers, not more questions.”
Such concerns notwithstanding, for any company that needs to innovate or
adapt to shifting market conditions, new competition, and other disruptive
forces, a questioning culture is critical because it can help ensure that creativity
and fresh, adaptive thinking flows throughout the organization. Having a leader
serve as the “questioner in chief” is fine, but it’s not enough. Today’s companies
are often tackling complex challenges that require collaborative,
multidisciplinary problem solving. Creative thinking must come from all parts of
the company (and from outside the company, too). When a business culture is
inquisitive, the questioning, learning, and sharing of information becomes
contagious—and gives people permission to explore new ideas across
boundaries and silos.
If having a culture of inquiry is deemed appropriate, desirable, and perhaps
even critical for a company, creating and nurturing it must start at the top—with
company leadership that clearly demonstrates a willingness to ask, and tolerate,
questions about anything from mission to strategy to policy. “As a business
leader, if I’m trying to build a culture of inquiry, I have to start by asking a lot of
provocative, disruptive questions myself,” says INSEAD’s Gregersen. “I have to
walk the talk.”
The company leadership must be willing to answer tough questions, as well as
ask them—and ideally, those questions should be coming from all levels and
departments. Google has maintained a wide-open
40
(and sometimes chaotic)
questioning forum through its weekly TGIF sessions, when all employees are
invited to submit questions to the company’s top executives, Larry Page and
Sergey Brin. The questions are instantly voted up or down by others in the
company; the highest-ranking—which are also often the toughest, most
controversial ones—are then fielded on the spot by the bosses.
Charles Warren, a former top engineer at Google, told me, “It’s very fulfilling
to sit in those sessions and know that anybody in the company can ask any
question, and nothing is off-limits.” Warren said people running groups or
projects (he was one of the leaders of Google+) also are questioned by
employees throughout the company. The questioning culture at Google is not
always polite. “Questions could get personal or become attacks,” Warren noted;
if you were developing a product some didn’t like, you might be subjected to
queries like Why are you trying to ruin the company?
But the overall message that comes through at Google is that anything the
company does is subject to question from everyone—and that the questions will
actually be heard. It’s fine to tell employees they can ask whatever they wish—
but if those queries end up in a question box no one ever opens, it can be
counterproductive. Today, the updated version of the old question/suggestion
box is the intra–social network used by many companies—and they are often
“ablaze with questions,” says Steelcase CEO Jim Hackett, whose company
encourages any employee to ask anything of anyone else. The system pings
Hackett or other executives every time a question is directed at them.
While it’s critical that companies show they are willing to tolerate and respond
to questions, perhaps the bigger issue involves incentives: How do you reward
questioning?
The Lean Startup’s Eric Ries says that when a company is trying to build a
culture of inquiry, “it’s not about slogans or putting up posters on the wall, it’s
the systems and the incentives you create for people that promote the behavior.
So if you don’t like the level of questioning in your organization, and you’re in
senior management, look in the mirror.” Ries points out that at most companies
“the resources flow to the person with the most confident, best plan. Or the
person with no failures on their record.” The solution, Ries says, is that
companies must direct more budgetary resources to those who are exploring
unanswered questions, conducting promising experiments, and taking intelligent
risks. It’s a radical notion for most businesses, but “failed experiments” (which
often pave the way for subsequent innovations) should be rewarded alongside
proven successes, particularly if the experiment or the questioning provides
valuable learning.
It’s also critical for company leaders to be on the lookout for ways in which
questioning gets punished—though the punishment may not be obvious or
intentional. The operative question is If an employee asks questions at our
company, is he or she asking for trouble?
The business writer Dale Dauten has
41 described a common situation in which
people who inquire about a problem at their workplace—say, something the
company is not doing as well as it might—are then told, “You found the
problem; now it’s your job to fix it. In addition to your normal duties, of course.”
As Dauten notes, that is a surefire way to get people to stop finding problems
and asking questions, because most are not seeking to add to their workload.
The better approach is to ask the problem-finders to what extent and how they
would want to be involved in working on that problem. The understanding
should be they won’t have to go it alone; that they’ll be given as much time and
support as is feasible; and that, even if they never ultimately answer the
question, they’ve earned credit just by asking it.
In general, people need time to be able to ask and to work on difficult
questions. You can’t “step back” if you’re always rushing to get things done.
Here, policies like Google’s much-celebrated “20 percent time,” which stipulates
that employees can devote one fifth of their time to independent projects—in
effect, to work on their own questions—can really pay off. Several of Google’s
most important innovations—including Gmail and Google News—have sprung
from people using their 20 percent time to tackle a What If question that wasn’t
part of their regular workload. (Recent reports suggest that as Google has grown,
it has become increasingly difficult
42
for employees with heavy workloads to
use, or justify using, 20 percent time.) Other companies have implemented
similar programs, including LinkedIn—whose designated “Hack Days”
43
provide employees “an opportunity to spend a day and develop things that
they’re really passionate about,” according to LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner—as well
as 3M and W. L. Gore.
In Gore’s case, the program stipulates
44
that 10 percent of employee time
should go toward independent projects, and it has inspired some big
breakthroughs. The company, known for creating the popular waterproofing
material Gore-Tex, produces a wide range of products, including Elixir, a wellknown brand of guitar string. It was developed by a Gore engineer, Dave Myers,
who normally worked on medical products. As a side project, Myers wanted to
see if he could answer, Why can’t I get the gears on my mountain bike to shift
more smoothly? He eventually developed a new, plastic-coated bike-cable
product that became a successful product for Gore.
Subsequently, in a nifty bit of connective inquiry, Myers wondered, What if I
put plastic coating on guitar strings? The result (after a couple of difficult years
of technical challenges at the How stage) was a breakthrough, bestselling
product that proved more durable and less brittle than existing strings. But it
might never have happened if Myers hadn’t been afforded the time and
opportunity to step back from his normal work routine so he that he could pursue
an interesting question.
Gore has questioning embedded deeply in its culture. “We see it as critical to
growth and expansion,” company vice president Debra France remarked. “With
a culture of questioning, there’s always more possibility.”
Regarded as one of the world’s most innovative companies, Gore is also
known for its distinctive corporate structure: It is one of the flattest, least
hierarchical large companies in existence. Its founder, Bill Gore, understood that
corporate bureaucracy and hierarchy do not foster questioning or any open
communication within a company. Bill Gore once observed that at most
companies the only place where people speak freely is in the car pool. So as he
started his own company Gore was, in effect, trying to answer, How do you
make a company that’s more like a car pool?
The company was set up with no titles—ten thousand employees and not one
manager. When people are first hired at Gore, they often start out wondering,
Who’s my boss? Eventually, they realize there is no boss. The corporate structure
is built around what Gore calls the Lattice, an elaborate networking system
within the company that connects every employee to every other employee.
When a new hire joins the company, their first relationship is with a sponsor (or
mentor), “who will lend their credibility and their lattice to the new person, until
that person has built up their own lattice,” France says.
One of the most important effects of this networked, nonhierarchical structure
is that employees, from day one, are self-directed. Since no one tells you what to
do, you must use your own powers of inquiry (and help from your sponsor) to
figure things out for yourself.
Communication flows freely through the Gore network. Any questions or
ideas can be shared with anyone else. “It’s very personal,” says France. “If you
have feedback for someone, you give it to them direct.”
Gore believes so strongly in the value of inquiry that it trains everyone in the
company on how to ask good questions—providing specific instruction on
asking questions that can be applied to testing new ideas, weighing the value of
pursuing possible opportunities or innovations (Is this opportunity real? Is there
a customer who needs it?), as well as using questioning to improve collaboration
with other employees. Particular emphasis is placed on effective questioning for
sponsors to better coach/mentor new employees.
Gore’s corporate structure is unusual—and few companies could (or maybe
even should) get rid of managers and layers. But even a more traditional
corporate structure can foster an atmosphere conducive to questioning and a
culture that, in Dev Patnaik’s words, “embraces curiosity as a fundamental
value.”
Since curiosity and learning go hand in hand, one of the big questions some
companies are now working on is How do we transform a workplace into a
learn-place?
Here again, Google seems to be ahead of the pack. The company established
Google University
45 as a platform for bringing in guest lecturers, then went a
step further in creating Googler to Googler, a program in which Google
employees host in-house classes to teach other Google employees. Not
surprisingly, there are courses on technical or business skills, but the curriculum
also includes courses on public speaking and parenting. Former Google engineer
Chade-Meng Tan even teaches a course on mindfulness (useful in helping one to
step back and question).
To create a learning culture, Google uses the “company as university”
metaphor. MIT Media Lab uses both the “laboratory” and “kindergarten”
metaphors. Some companies try to create “salons” or “studios”; others position
themselves as “idea villages” or “idea cities.”
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? TED founder Richard Saul Wurman told me that
one of the best ways to stimulate curiosity among any group of people is simply
to expose them to as many original ideas and unusual viewpoints as possible.
Thus a company might not only bring in guests but have employees themselves
do TED-like presentations for the group—focusing on something interesting
they’ve learned that others might not know.
Whatever the metaphor, 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.
Amid all of that teaching, some time should be dedicated to teaching the art of
questioning. If a company is going to encourage questioning, it must teach
people to do it well—or risk being besieged by nonproductive questions.
Steelcase’s Hackett points out that because of the growing interest in sparking
more inquiry within companies, the tendency is to encourage all questioning,
including what Hackett describes as “precocious questioning”—which may be
uninformed or off-topic.
What should be encouraged, Hackett says, are “good questions”—meaning
questions rooted in deep critical thinking about the particular challenges and
issues the company faces. To that end, Steelcase has endeavored to teach
critical-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,” Hackett says. The
course presents challenging questions like What would you do if you ran the U.S.
Postal Service? and then guides the employee-students in developing their own
questions and strategies around that larger problem.
Hackett says that in creating a truly effective culture of inquiry, management
and employees must meet at a midway point. Employees need to understand that
“if you ask questions that aren’t critically thoughtful, you may end up missing
out on the opportunity that comes with the freedom to question.” What
management wants and will respond to are questions that are considered and
relevant to real problems. “You can ask precocious questions, but you might be
wasting time.” Meanwhile, Hackett says, management must understand that “the
scaffolding around problems is made up of a lot of questions, so don’t get
perturbed by the number of them or try to limit them.”
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 of
46 us are conditioned to react to
questions by trying to answer them too quickly or by countering them “devil’s
advocate” style. The more hardheaded within the group may need to be shown
that innovative questioning works best when it starts with the impractical and
works toward the practical. The “dreamers” should be given their moment to ask
big, ambitious, impractical questions; the pragmatic “implementers”
47
(to use
Min Basadur’s term) will likely hold sway during the down-to-earth How stages
of developing an idea and trying to make it real.
IDEO’s Tim Brown stresses that, for the most part, learning the art of
questioning doesn’t happen in company classrooms or conference rooms: “It’s
more about going out into the world and getting better at observing and
listening.” Contextual inquiry may be the most important questioning skill
employees can pick up, but it’s developed mostly through on-the-ground
experience. Company leaders and managers may be able to provide some basic
tips on what to look for, but the most important thing they can offer employees is
the freedom to venture outside the bubble and do their own investigation.
One of the best ways to grow and maintain a culture of inquiry is to continually
add new people who are naturally inquisitive. Ask the average company leaders
or managers whether they’re interested in hiring people who are good
questioners and they’ll likely say yes without hesitation. Yet, when they
interview prospective employees, they often make judgments based purely on
the answers given—following the “answers only” model of our test-based
education system, which does a poor job of assessing one’s ability to question,
create, and innovate. All of which raises this question:
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 followup 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.
CHAPTER 5
Questioning for Life
Why should we “live the questions”?
Why are you climbing the mountain?
Why are you evading inquiry?
Before we “lean in,” what if we stepped back?
What if we start with what we already have?
What if you made one small change?
What if you could not fail?
How might we pry off the lid and stir the paint?
How will you find your beautiful question?
Why should we “live the questions”?
When Jacqueline Novogratz was about to
1 graduate college in the early 1980s,
the school’s job-placement office informed her that the Chase Manhattan Bank
was interested in interviewing her for a job. Novogratz had no particular desire
to go into banking; she’d planned to take a brief postcollege break to tend bar
and “figure out how I would change the world.” But she dutifully went to the
interview and, to her surprise, was offered the job. She took it, in part, because it
promised an opportunity to travel around the world, working in a group that
reviewed the bank’s loans in overseas markets.
Novogratz liked the job well enough, but something bothered her: In
developing countries where Chase was doing business, Novogratz encountered
people with bright ideas and entrepreneurial dreams who didn’t qualify for loans
because they were not seen as creditworthy. Yet, it seemed to Novogratz, these
were the very people who, given a chance, might be able to build the sustainable
local businesses these countries desperately needed. Hence, Novogratz’s
question: Why weren’t loans going to the entrepreneurs who could, potentially,
solve some of these countries’ most pressing needs and biggest problems?
Chase would never take on such high-risk loans, but Novogratz began to look
around to see what others, outside the mainstream banking world, were doing
along these lines. She learned, for example, that Grameen Bank in Bangladesh,
led by an economist named Muhammad Yunus, had had considerable success in
providing microloans to poor women in that country (who, it turned out, were
reliable in paying back what they borrowed). During her research, Novogratz
also learned of a small microfinance group that had been started by several
women in New York with the aim of providing loans to women entrepreneurs
around the world. Novogratz approached the group, mostly out of curiosity, but
also to see if there might be a place there for her. There was: She was offered a
job.
Now Novogratz had to ask herself some tough questions: Did she want to
leave a secure, well-paid job in banking for a risky one in the nonprofit sector?
What was most important to her at this point in her life? And, not least among
her concerns: What would her family think if she walked away from a promising
business career?
That last question weighed heavily on Novogratz because she came from a
hardworking family of modest means; her family had been proud and excited
when she’d landed her Chase Manhattan job. As she wrote years later in her
autobiography, “I tried to imagine myself telling my uncles that I was leaving a
well-paying job on Wall Street to work for a nonprofit women’s organization
that would send me overseas. They would think I’d lost my mind. Why would I
give up my chance at making it?”
But she also had “this feeling that if I listened hard to the deepest part of
myself, there was a person in there who wanted to be adventurous. And I knew if
I didn’t jump right then, I might never jump.” She took the nonprofit job and
soon was on her way to Africa. Having answered the question about what she
wanted to do with her life, she would spend the next decade working on that
other question—about finding a way to get loans to entrepreneurs.
Novogratz did not have an easy time of it, especially in her early days in Africa.
Reflecting on it, she admits she was, like a lot of young social activists who set
out to help people in other parts of the world, naïve about the complexity of the
problems she was confronting and sometimes oblivious of cultural nuances. But
she told me her greatest asset in overcoming that was her inquisitive nature;
when she found she didn’t understand something, or that she’d gotten it wrong,
she asked a lot of Why questions. Then, eventually, she had a big What If
moment.
Novogratz knew of the growing interest in investing in the developing world,
as well as the rising spirit of social entrepreneurship, which aimed to bring
innovative approaches to global problems. She felt the best way to tap into both
of those new phenomena as well as traditional philanthropy was to try a hybrid
approach that combined venture-capital investing with philanthropy: The idea
was to create a venture fund that would back entrepreneurs trying to start new
businesses, create jobs, and solve everyday problems in the developing world.
Early on, Novogratz thought of her idea in these terms: What if we could invest
as a means and not as an end?
The investors would have every right to expect a return but also had to accept
that those returns would be plowed back into the start-ups, to keep them going
and growing—it was “patient capital,” to use Novogratz’s term. There was no
way of knowing whether it would pay off in the long run, but Novogratz
attracted enough interest in the concept to launch the nonprofit Acumen Fund in
2001.
Novogratz’s team then set out looking for funding opportunities and found
them in the form of people pursuing their own beautiful questions: What if we
could help parched small farms around the world to double their yield? Why
can’t we use solar power to create low-cost lights for the poor? Why doesn’t
India have its own 911-type ambulance system? What if we could limit the
spread of malaria in Africa—and create jobs in the process?
With Acumen’s funding, entrepreneurs could tackle the How of answering
these various questions and challenges. Some of the answers that emerged:
2 a
team of entrepreneurs with an idea for cheap solar lights has now brought light
to twenty million people in the developing world (including eight million kids in
school); a product designer has sold 275,000 irrigation-drip systems to small
farmers in dry regions in Africa; a man with a plan for ambulance service in
India now heads the largest ambulance company in Asia; and an African maker
of simple bed nets (to protect from mosquitoes and malaria) has produced
sixteen million nets and seven thousand jobs. Some of the projects have also
turned out to be good investments: Acumen’s $2 million stake in solar lights is
now worth twice that, though the returns are being put back into the company, in
hopes of bringing light to one hundred million in the next couple of years.
Convincing investors to fund these high-risk, slow-yield ventures was only
part of the challenge for Acumen. In many cases, the ambitious-butinexperienced entrepreneurs receiving the funds needed guidance, expert advice,
moral support—and sometimes a second round of funding—as they took their
Why and What If questions through the difficult How stage of bringing these
innovations to market.
Novogratz observes that when you’re trying to do something that’s never
before been done—and especially when you’re trying to do it in developing
markets, where resources may be scarce and infrastructure lacking—the key is to
learn and adapt as you go. You have to ask a lot of questions, about what’s
feasible and what isn’t, about what people actually want and need (as opposed to
what one might think they should want and need).
Outside aid groups, though well-meaning, often don’t do this kind of up-close
inquiry; they tend to try to impose solutions from an outsider perspective. When
you do that, Novogratz said, you end up foisting things on people that they aren’t
sure they want. Take the malaria bed nets: Novogratz figured people would want
them for health reasons, “but what many people actually cared about was that
they could sleep better without bugs, and also that the nets looked nice. Health
concerns were way down the list.” Having learned that, Acumen and the net
maker were able to market the product more effectively.
“You just don’t know about people and what drives them,” said Novogratz,
“until you spend time sitting on the floor, listening to someone tell you their
story.”
During a recent college commencement speech
3 Novogratz gave in
Pennsylvania, she focused a good part of her talk on urging the graduating
students to embrace uncertainty and follow their own spirit of inquisitiveness.
Quoting the famous line from the poet Rilke, she told the students to “live the
questions.”
I asked Novogratz about the speech and the questioning theme. “It’s been a
hallmark of my life to run up against walls and realize there are no easy, clear
answers,” she said. “And it took me time to learn that the best I could do was get
smarter at asking better questions. So I wanted them to learn that sooner, rather
than later.”
Novogratz referred to the students as “kids who are on a track”—much as she
was at that point in her life. “They’re trying to do all the things they think
they’re supposed to—going to the right school, working two years at an
investment bank, and so forth. And sometimes these college kids ask me, ‘Okay,
now what should I do next?’ And I say, ‘Do what your heart tells you to do’—
and I get a blank stare.”
With that in mind, Novogratz was hoping her message might shift the thinking
in some of the students—away from predetermined paths with designated next
steps, to something a bit more open, unpredictable, and uncertain. “In a rapidly
changing world, there really isn’t a step-by-step map for them anyway,” she
said. “The best you can hope to have is a good compass to guide you. The ones
who understand that—and can embrace that—are going to have the greatest
adventures.”
Why are you climbing the mountain?
Novogratz’s advice applies not just to graduating college students but to “track
kids” of all ages—which is to say, everyone who’s following a path or climbing
a ladder without necessarily knowing why; or those among us trying to do
everything—attend every conference, take every call, answer every message,
read every tweet, seize every opportunity—not so much because we want to, but
because we feel we must, just to keep up.
People have been feeling “swamped” for some time, but in the past year or two
it seems to have reached a tipping point: A mid-2013 Huffington Post conference
urged
4 people to slow down and check their ambitions lest they burn out (“The
more, more, more approach can’t last,” the conference organizers declared);
magazines ran cover stories about the importance of
5 “unplugging” from social
media and our various networked devices; interest surged in meditation and
“mindfulness” as a means of coping with a frenetic world in which people
seemed to be stressed-out, overworked, and inundated with information.
An interesting description of this current condition was recently offered up by
the Oxford University psychology professor Mark Williams,
6 who observed that
when people are “always rushing around, going from one task to another without
actually realizing what they’re doing,” the brain is on high alert—“it’s almost as
if they were . . . escaping from a predator.”
But who or what is this predator, and why is it chasing us? The assumption
might be that people are rushing around and frantically “doing” as part of a
larger plan or purpose. But is that plan or purpose clear? Jeff Weiner, the chief
executive of LinkedIn,
7 observed that he often asks prospective employees this
reasonable and fairly straightforward question: Looking back on your career,
twenty or thirty years from now, what do you want to say you’ve accomplished?
“You’d be amazed how many people I meet who don’t have the answer to the
question,” Weiner said.
What is your sentence?
10
This is a favorite question of the author Daniel Pink, though he acknowledges in his book
Drive that it can be traced back to the journalist and pioneering congresswoman Clare Booth
Luce. While visiting John F. Kennedy early in his presidency, Luce expressed concern that
Kennedy might be in danger of trying to do too much, thereby losing focus. She told him “a
great man is a sentence”—meaning that a leader with a clear and strong purpose could be
summed up in a single line (e.g., “Abraham Lincoln preserved the union and freed the
slaves”). Pink believes this concept can be useful to anyone, not just presidents. Your sentence
might be, “He raised four kids who became happy, healthy adults,” or “She invented a device
that made people’s lives easier.” If your sentence is a goal not yet achieved, then you also
must ask: How might I live up to my own sentence?
This is not just about career planning, but extends to basic questions about
identity or life goals. The filmmaker Roko Belic told me
8
that he meets many
people in his travels, and one of his standard questions when getting to know
someone is What are you all about? What makes you tick? “It’s incredible how
few people can answer that,” Belic said. “I know people are complicated and all,
but to me, that is a question that—if you can’t answer it in some way, then
you’re not paying attention to some real basic things about what it means to be
alive. To me it means they haven’t asked themselves some fundamental
questions.”
If it’s true that people are too busy doing things to actually ask why they’re
doing them, that habit seems to be forming early. The high school teacher David
McCullough,
9 son of the Pulitzer-winning historian, was reacting to the
overachieving culture of his students when he gave a graduation speech (which
later went viral on the Internet) in which he advised them, “Climb the mountain
not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air, and behold the
view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.”
McCullough’s advice about how to climb the mountain, and what to do while
you’re climbing, is sound—but not everyone wants to climb the same way.
Maybe you’re climbing because you actually do want to plant a flag. And maybe
being seen at the top is more important to you than seeing. But one can’t make
those judgments without first asking basic questions such as Why am I climbing
this mountain in the first place?
If you take the time to ask that question—and give it the consideration it
clearly deserves, given its significance—you might conclude, as Jacqueline
Novogratz did, that you’re climbing the wrong mountain. Or you might find
yourself asking other questions, such as:
What is waiting for me at the top?
What am I going to do once I get there?
Am I enjoying the climb itself? Should I slow down, speed up?
What am I leaving behind, down below?
The mountain-climbing metaphor obviously applies well to career
considerations, since advancing in a career is often about scaling the ranks and
trying to get to a higher position. There’s little inclination to step back and
question the career climb itself; to the extent we do ask career-related questions,
they’re more likely to be practical ones aimed at figuring out ways to keep
moving up. How do I improve my standing in the company and enhance my job
security? How can I angle for a promotion? Nothing is wrong with angling for a
promotion—as long as you ask the Whys and What Ifs before going straight to
the How. Too often, people get promoted out of doing what they actually like to
do or are good at doing.
The tendency to follow a predetermined path without sufficiently questioning
whether it’s the right path extends beyond career decisions. For instance, Why do
so many people long for a big house in the suburbs? It’s a great choice for some,
but not all; and the only way to know is to periodically ask whether, for instance,
you might want to live in a walkable downtown instead.
Family relationships and dynamics also tend to go unquestioned; likewise with
friendships. All of these human bonds are subject to change, and wear and tear,
over time. That we’re not questioning them suggests we’re not paying attention,
not trying to find ways to strengthen or improve them—that we may be taking
them for granted.
So why then, do we tend to avoid taking the time to ask important and
fundamental questions about our lives? As we rush around, from task to task and
from one distraction to the next, is it possible that “questioning” itself is the
predator we’re trying to escape?
Why are you evading inquiry?
Among the reasons people tend to avoid fundamental questioning of much of
what they do in their lives (especially the important things), four stand out:
• Questioning is seen as counterproductive; it’s the answers that most
people are focused on finding, because the answers, it is believed, will
provide ways to solve problems, move ahead, improve life.
• The right time for asking fundamental questions never seems to present
itself; either it’s too soon or too late.
• Knowing the right questions to ask is difficult (so better not to ask at all).
• Perhaps most significant: What if we find we have no good answers to the
important questions we raise? Fearing that, many figure it’s better not to
invite that additional uncertainty and doubt into their lives.
Since most schools teach us to prize answers over questions, while also
generally teaching that most problems have one “right” answer, small wonder
that our habit is to think that the answers we need are out there—just waiting to
be “found,” stumbled upon, looked up, acquired, purchased, or handed to us.
Whole industries are dedicated to providing off-the-shelf “answers” to people
in the form of self-help books, seminars, life coaching, and so forth. It’s natural
to want an “expert” to come along and tell us what to do. And sometimes that
outside perspective can be helpful. But the best coaches, consultants, and
therapists all emphasize there is no substitute for self-questioning—often the
most important thing that an adviser can do is guide someone toward asking the
right questions (as the business consultant Peter Drucker did when he coached
the world’s top business executives). Anyone in a coaching/advising role who
offers generic answers should be eyed warily because nobody can provide
answers that will fit your life, your particular problems or challenges.
Even wise and trusted friends can’t provide the right answers for you. The
start-up entrepreneur Kasper Hulthin discovered
11
this when he was wrestling
with tough questions about whether to take the plunge into a new business. “If
you ask people for advice,” Hulthin says, “they’ll tell you what they would do.”
But his friends’ situations and motivations were very different from his. In the
end, Hulthin had to sit at the kitchen table, alone, and work through his own
questions.
One of the volunteer researchers helping me on this book told me that part of
the reason she had gotten involved in the “beautiful question” project was
because she found that, as she was thinking about the next stage of her career,
she was inundated with career-advice books full of “answers” that seemed to
conflict with one another. “I’m finding that answers don’t cut it,” she wrote to
me in an e-mail. “I need help with the process of figuring this out for myself.”
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.
This illusion that an “answer” is out there if we can just find it extends to
everything from the dream job to larger concepts such as “happiness” or
“purpose.” Gretchen Rubin of the Happiness Project says the classic
misconception people have about happiness is that it is a state of being you
suddenly find or “arrive” at. But as Rubin and other experts on this subject tend
to concur, creating happiness is ongoing. You don’t find it, you gradually figure
it out for yourself—questioning and experimenting as you try to understand what
makes you feel happy and how to bring more of that into your everyday life.
Much the same can be said about “meaning” and “purpose.” The author and
creativity coach Eric Maisel
12 says that when people ask, How can I find the
meaning of life?, they’re asking “a completely useless question.” That classic
query is based on the flawed notion that “meaning” is an objective truth to be
found out there somewhere. Better to think of it this way, Maisel says: We have
to construct meaning in our lives, based on everyday choices—and every one of
those choices is a question. Why should I do X? Is it worth my time and effort to
do Y?
As you make those daily choices about what to spend your time on and which
possibilities to pursue, the author and consultant John Hagel suggests you ask
yourself
13
this question: When I look back in five years, which of these options
will make the better story? As Hagel points out, “No one ever regrets taking the
path that leads to a better story.”
Life coach Kelly Carlin is always
14 surprised when people she coaches come to
her with a distinct sense that many of the choices in their lives were already
determined; that they are on a given path or have developed a certain way of
living and feel it is too late to alter that. “And then, when someone points out to
them that you can, in fact, change a lot of these things, it’s a revelation,” Carlin
says.
So many of the things supposedly “decided” years ago haven’t been fully
decided by us. As in the case of the young Jacqueline Novogratz, perhaps an
opportunity drops into your lap and suddenly you’re a banker though you never
planned to be one. Those important early decisions may be influenced by what
family or friends advise, or even be based on something you read in a book or
saw in a commercial that hit you at a particularly impressionable stage. In a
discussion of how common it is for people to follow paths determined by others,
the author Seth Godin recommends considering this question:
Is there something else you might
15 want to want—besides what you’ve been
told to want?
It’s never too late to ask such questions—nor too soon. The Silicon Valley
venture capitalist Randy Komisar talks about the “deferred-life plan”—
wherein
16 ambitious young entrepreneurs devote themselves entirely to making
money in the present, so that at some later point they’ll have the means to pursue
what really matters to them (once they take the time to figure out what that is).
The same attitude can be found anywhere people are focused on building
financial security so they can be in a comfortable position when they get around
to asking what they really want to do with their lives. This harkens back to
“climbing the mountain”—with the assumption being that things will become
much clearer once we’ve reached the top.
But what about all those many critical questions having to do with the climb
itself? We ignore them at our own peril. Moreover, as Komisar notes, most of
the best-laid deferred-life plans don’t go as planned. The world changes, the big
idea fizzles, a radical midcourse adjustment is needed. Sooner or later, like it or
not, you’ll be faced with challenging questions—so why not get in the habit of
asking them sooner?
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.
Many of us, however, are not comfortable with it. The author Jonathan Fields,
who has
17 written extensively and eloquently about uncertainty, points out that
it’s common to think about the unknown and get an unsettling feeling in the
stomach. A questioner must come to terms with that sensation the way an actor
handles performance anxiety—by forging ahead despite the butterflies.
Eventually, as one does this, they become a welcome signal that you’re moving
into interesting uncharted territory, and that you might be on your way to
something exciting. Questioning is a classic case of the more you do it, the
easier it gets. Innovators tend to get better, over time, at embracing the unknown
and solving problems because they become confident, through experience, that
they’ll eventually find their way through the darkness and into the light.
Developing this level of comfort with uncertainty is worthwhile because, as
Fields points out, life is filled with it.
How many people does it take to change a light bulb for a senior citizen?
18
In her inquiry into how to improve quality of life for older people, the British social designer
Hilary Cottam found a key determining factor was “being socially connected and not having to
worry about minor things like changing light bulbs.” In 2007, Cottam’s design group spent a
year doing contextual inquiry while immersed in the lives of elderly residents in a poor
London suburb, then began testing their theories with the Southwark Circle, a neighborhood
network that combines the functions of a concierge service, self-help group, cooperative, and
social club (members pay a small fee, and may barter services as well). Creating “social
circles” for seniors lessened the need for costly at-home visits by social workers—while also
providing more of a sense of community. Interestingly, Cottam found the ideal social circle as
you get older “should include six people from very different roles,” including family, friendly
professionals, same-age peers, and young people.
For those concerned about not knowing what questions to ask, the work of the
Right Question Institute (as well as Hal Gregersen’s question-storming exercises
on page 154) shows that if you force yourself to sit with a problem or a topic and
try to think of appropriate questions, you will almost certainly come up with
many. The challenge, though, is not just to think of questions, but to then think
about those questions—culling the best ones, improving them, and figuring out
how you might begin to act on them.
Questioning should be done as a matter of habit and process—otherwise, it’s
not likely to find a place in busy schedules. In applying a rigorous system of
inquiry to everyday life, aforementioned tools and techniques such as contextual
inquiry, connective inquiry, and experimentation all can be useful. But it all
starts with slowing down, stepping back, and trying to shift perspective in order
to see your own life—and the problems, opportunities, and challenges worth
tackling—more clearly.
Before we “lean in,
” what if we stepped back?
For people geared to achieving success or just getting things done, the idea of
slowing down or, worse still, stepping back, can seem counterintuitive—and
seemingly at odds with cultural messages urging us “go for it” or “lean in” as we
pursue challenges and embrace opportunity. But while the notions of “stepping
back” and “leaning in” might seem contradictory, someone who pauses, at times,
to question and consider can also fully engage, act boldly, and seize
opportunities. Stepping back to question can actually help with leaning in by
providing a clearer sense of direction and purpose.
Finding the time and space to question, in a cultural landscape that doesn’t
encourage it, is challenging. If questioning might be considered a form of slow
thinking, we have to get away from the fast thinking that is required in everyday
life—especially in the current fast-moving, info-overloaded environment.
In one of his lectures on creativity, the comedian John Cleese talked about the
need to find one’s own “tortoise enclosure”—that
19 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. Cleese discusses this as a
means of enabling oneself to write or engage in other creative activities, but
going to the tortoise enclosure can also enable deep questioning (which is a form
of creative thinking).
In today’s world, stepping back or retreating to one’s creative shell may
require unplugging from the Internet. While the Web is a great source for quick
answers to practical questions, it’s more apt to keep you skimming the surface
and jumping from one idea to another, as opposed to focusing, without
distraction, on one deep question. The Internet also bombards you with other
people’s thoughts, ideas, and expertise—which may leave little room for your
own creative thinking. And it’s a source of endless interruptions, with every email or tweet providing an excuse to stop thinking.
One of the current proponents of “unplugging”
20
is the filmmaker Tiffany
Shlain. A very plugged-in person (she specializes in Web-based films and has a
large presence in social media), Shlain drew attention when she wrote about
adopting a “tech Shabbat,” on Saturdays, so that she and her family could have
more time for reflection and quiet pleasures.
“It’s completely changed my life,” Shlain told me, referring to the weekly
disconnect. “I find I’ve saved certain thinking for that day—big-picture thinking.
While I love the kinetic thinking that happens when you’re on the Internet, I also
really value having a thought and not being able to act on it. It’s great to just let
that thought marinate and grow on its own.”
Shlain said one of the benefits is that she is almost forced to grapple with her
own questions instead of automatically going online to seek out answers. “On
Saturday, when I’m stopped from doing that, I get to just sit with a question in a
different way than I normally would,” she told me. (One of the big questions
she’s “sitting with” these days involves our “love/hate relationship with
technology. We’re so enamored of it that we’re not asking questions like What is
all of this technology taking away from us?”.)
In the current environment, it may be necessary to develop a routine and a
habit that allows for quiet detachment and provides an opportunity to think
deeply. This may start with logistical questions such as:
Where is my tortoise enclosure?
When is my tech Shabbat?
Having the time and a place to question is only part of it; discipline is required
to “sit with a question,” to create mental space for it by pushing aside the
mundane “small thoughts,” as Eric Maisel calls them. Such thoughts “steal
neurons” when we’re trying to think deeply. Practical questions (What should I
have for lunch later on? What time do I need to pick up the kids?) have no place
inside the tortoise enclosure, where the focus should be on larger Why and What
If questions. The author William Deresiewicz has written, “Thinking means
concentrating on one thing
21
long enough to develop an idea about it . . . It’s
only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts
of my brain come into play, that I arrive at an original idea.”
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. This is important because self-questioning can easily drift toward
dissatisfaction, regret, feelings of helplessness: Why don’t I have more money, a
better job, a bigger circle of friends?—and so forth. What is missing or lacking
can point to opportunities for progress and improvement, but such questions can
also evoke negative feelings, and as appreciative inquiry guru David Cooperrider
points out, people are more likely to take constructive action when they feel
hopeful and recognize all they have going for them already.
Happiness researchers such as Tal Ben-Shahar,
22 author of Happier and Being
Happy and a professor at Harvard University, believe it’s important to “cultivate
the habit of gratitude.” Simply by asking, at the end of each day, What am I
grateful for? and writing down the answers in a “gratitude journal,” people tend
to be “happier, more optimistic, more successful, more likely to achieve their
goals,” according to Ben-Shahar.
Ben-Shahar’s point was echoed by the filmmaker Roko Belic, who believes
that “gratitude is a shortcut to happiness.” Belic has spent years trekking around
the world and trying to answer his own questions about why some people are
happier than others and whether it’s possible for someone to become happier.
The answer to his questions can be found in his documentary film Happy, but
one of the key findings is that people who value and appreciate the basics—
family and friends, a sense of belonging to a community, the simple pleasure
that comes with engaging in a hobby or learning something new—tend to be a
lot happier.
Belic’s questions about happiness had been percolating for some time prior to
his making the film. His first Why moment came at age eighteen, when he
traveled to Africa as part of a group raising funds for refugees of the
Mozambique civil war. “These were people who had suffered tremendously,”
Belic said, “but when we got there, we didn’t find people who were miserable or
angry. We found people who were just beaming with life, ecstatic at the smallest
and tiniest things: seeing a ballpoint pen, looking at a magic trick, seeing us run
around carrying each other on our shoulders. They had a genuine spark of joy
that seemed to be missing in a lot of my friends back home.” So Belic’s question
at that time was:
Why is it that people who have so little and have suffered so much seem to be
happier than other people who are more fortunate?
Years later, when Belic was working in Hollywood, a similar question was
raised by a friend of Belic’s, the Hollywood director Tom Shadyac. Shadyac had
read an article about how Americans, despite being relatively prosperous, tended
to be less happy than people in other, poorer countries. “Tom said to me, ‘I know
this personally because I’ve been surrounded by talented, good-looking, lucky,
healthy movie stars who are not as happy as the gardeners who tend my
garden.’” So the new version of Belic’s question became:
If being a beautiful, talented, wealthy movie star doesn’t make you happy, then
what does?
He and Shadyac joined forces to try to find an answer by way of their film.
The journey to make it took Belic all over the world, including impoverished
locales in India, Africa, and China. Regardless of circumstance, Belic found that
“community and connectedness” formed the common thread among the happiest
people. “It does not mean that to be happy you have to be very social or
outgoing or have a million friends,” he said. But the happiest people he
encountered —including some living extremely modestly—had a strong
connection to those around them. “They laughed and really enjoyed being
around the people they love.”
This link between happiness and strong relationships is hardly a startling
revelation. Yet, as Belic points out, “most of us spend more of our time working
to make money—often to support a lifestyle that involves bigger houses or nice
cars and clothes—than the time we spend with our friends.” Belic believes
“these simple questions, like, What is important to you? can lead you to realize
that you might want to do some shifts that could actually increase your
happiness just by having your lifestyle reflect your values a little bit more.”
When Belic examined his own life, he realized that he, too, had failed to
devote enough time to being with friends and doing simple things that he truly
enjoyed doing. “I always thought that as I got older, I would see my friends
more; we would play more; we would go on adventures even more. But by the
time I was in my thirties, I was seeing my best friends maybe once or twice a
year. I was trying to be a responsible adult and devote myself to my career. I’d
accepted this idea that kids play and adults work. As part of that, I’d stopped
surfing, which is something I used to love doing with friends.” The lessons
learned in the film prompted Belic to ask how he might strengthen human
connections and enhance simple pleasures in his own life—and spurred him to
resume surfing with a close friend.
Belic’s self-questioning led to other changes, as well. For example, he began
to ask, Why don’t I know more of my neighbors? Belic knew, from his film
research, that in the happiest communities, “everybody knows each other,” yet in
his West Coast neighborhood, people tended to stay in their comfortable houses
and keep to themselves. Belic wondered, How might I find that sense of
community and connectedness I experienced in those small villages in Africa
and India? When he visited a friend at
23 an upscale trailer park in Los Angeles
—where front doors opened into shared areas and neighbors practically couldn’t
help engaging with one another—Belic promptly pulled up stakes and moved
there.
To make changes in his own life, Belic asked, in effect, What has worked for me
before—and how can I bring more of that into my life now? Appreciative inquiry
is usually focused on building upon current strengths, but sometimes by looking
into the past, you can glimpse what might improve your life in the present and
future.
Gretchen Rubin of the Happiness Project and the life coach Eric Maisel each
suggest that we ask ourselves some version of the question What did I love doing
as a child?
“The things we loved at age six or eight are probably still the things we love,”
says Maisel. He suggests drawing up a list of favorite activities and interests
from childhood—“and see what still resonates with you today. And then it’s a
process of updating those loves. You may have loved something that doesn’t
even exist now, or doesn’t make sense in your life now—but you may be able to
find a new version of that.”
This needn’t be limited to childhood. Belic looked back at his young-adult
years to rediscover the importance of surfing with friends. He was inspired by an
even more recent experience when he decided to try to re-create that sense of
community he had experienced in his travels for the film.
Jacqueline Novogratz has her own spin
24 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.’”
Novogratz maintains, “It’s important to think about that time and place and
activity where you shine, where you feel most alive. I get all kinds of different
answers—when I’m solving a problem, when I’m creating, when I’m connecting
with someone, when I’m traveling.” Whatever it is, Novogratz says, you need to
identify it and appreciate it—and if possible, find a way to do more of it.
Sometimes we’re not aware of the things we’re meant to do, the things we’re
good at—which is another reason it’s important to step back and look at one’s
activities and behaviors from a detached, inquisitive perspective. “Ask yourself,
What do I find myself doing?” recommends Gretchen Rubin. “What you spend
time doing can also tell you what you should do. Because sometimes the things
we do without thinking really are things we naturally enjoy or are good at.”
Author Carol Adrienne shares this question, which can be helpful in
identifying
25 one’s natural interests: When you’re in a bookstore, what section
are you drawn to? The things we care about, that we love doing and do well,
provide great starting points for questioning. We might, for example, ask the
following:
Why do I seem to “shine” when doing certain things? (What is it about those
activities/places that brings out the best in me?)
What if I could find a way to incorporate these interests/activities, or some
aspect of them, into my life more? And maybe even into my work?
How might I go about doing that?
Actually doing something about the answers you come up with is harder—
though approaching change as a series of modest experiments can help.
What if you made one small change?
The word experiment may conjure up images of lab coats and microscopes.
Maybe it brings back uncomfortable memories of the dissection of frogs. But
experimentation can be thought of as, simply, the ways you act upon questions.
You wonder about something new or different; you try it out; you assess the
results. That’s an experiment.
The psychologist and computer scientist Roger Schank has written, “In school
we learn that experimentation
26
is boring, is something done by scientists and
has nothing to do with our daily lives.” But as Schank points out, we’re often
experimenting without necessarily thinking of it in those terms—“when we take
a new job, or try a new tactic in a game we are playing”—and we should be
doing it even more than that because “every aspect of life is an experiment that
can be better understood if it is perceived in that way.” If you randomly try
things in life, it can lead to haphazard results; but if you bring thought to trying
new approaches or experiences—if you take time to consider why they might be
worth trying, and what might be the best way to test them out, and then assess
whether the trial was a success and worth following up on—it’s a more practical
way to bring change into your life.
When I was thinking about this theme of experimenting in life as a way to act
on questions, a friend referred me to the writer
27 A.J. Jacobs. “He lives his
whole life as one experiment after another,” the friend told me. I was familiar
with Jacobs’s humorous first-person essays in Esquire magazine, but I didn’t
have a full appreciation of the “experimental” nature of his work.
Jacobs is an intensely curious man
28 who often finds himself wondering why
some people live their lives in a particular way. He then speculates, What if I
tried that myself? Then he jumps right into the How stage, as he starts to live the
experience. For example, Jacobs found himself wondering about people who
say, “I follow everything in the Bible.” “And my question was “Yeah, they say
that, but what if you really lived by everything in the Bible?” So Jacobs did that,
for a year (the experience was chronicled in his book The Year of Living
Biblically). He grew a large, bushy beard, wore flowing robes, and prayed
constantly. Following the Bible’s message about being thankful, Jacobs
expressed his thankfulness hundreds of times a day. “When I turned on the
lamp,” Jacobs told me, “I was thankful for the light coming on. When I pressed
the elevator button, I was thankful that the elevator came, and then thankful it
didn’t plummet to the basement and break my collarbone. You realize, doing
this, that there are hundreds of things that go right every day and yet we focus on
the three or four that go wrong.”
One of Jacobs’s other experiments was
29
reading all thirty-two volumes of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica from cover to cover (because he wondered what it
would be like to “know” everything in there); another came about when he
noticed that “outsourcing” was all the rage in business and he wondered, What if
I outsourced my life? He then hired a team of people in India to do everything
from answering his e-mails to reading bedtime stories to his son—“they even
argued with my wife for me,” he says.
As a humorist, Jacobs gravitates toward extreme experiences that yield offbeat
surprises. But he also conducts small, everyday experiments that offer interesting
lessons on taking the first small steps toward change.
In one of Jacobs’s more practical projects, which began as an Esquire article
called “The Rationality Project,”
30 he set out to catalog everything he did during
his days and ask himself why he made each decision, no matter how small. Why
did he use Crest toothpaste? Thinking about it, he realized, “It was because I had
some friends at camp when I was twelve years old who used to tell me it was a
cool toothpaste. That’s literally why I’ve used it for thirty years.” Such was the
case with many of his daily activities and choices: “You discover that we do so
many things by rote.”
Jacobs believes every now and then one should go through one’s day, from
waking up until bedtime, questioning and reexamining everything. “One of my
thoughts is that all of this is like when you’re skiing and the skis create ruts and
it becomes easier to just follow those,” he says. But if you keep changing things
up, “it keeps you from staying in these ruts and allows you to see the world in
different ways.”
The small changes could be in the route you take to work. It could be
something done around the house, such as the way you make the bed. Cooking is
a great opportunity for experimentation; the chef Chris Young told me that he
tries to remind people, “You have a wonderful lab in
31 your home that’s ideal for
experimenting—it’s called the kitchen.” The small change could be in the way
you dress, the way you fix your hair: Why do it the same old way? What if you
tried something different? Jacobs told me about an Orthodox Jewish woman he
interviewed who said that on the Shabbat she always tries to find small things
she could do in a slightly different way—“so instead of putting her lipstick on
clockwise, she would put it on counterclockwise. Just being more aware of what
you’re doing, more mindful—there’s something wonderful about that.” When
you change one small thing
32 and it works, it can help breed the confidence to
change other things—including bigger ones.
Jacobs offers another tip on small changes: If necessary, fake it until you make
it. Or, to put it another way, Jacobs quotes Habitat for Humanity founder Millard
Fuller, who said, “It’s easier to act your way
33
into a new way of thinking than
to think your way into a new way of acting.”
Jacobs has found this to be true in his own small-change experiments: “If you
just go ahead and do something differently, and you do it enough times, it will
change your mind. If you force yourself to smile, you trick your brain and then
you start to become happier.” Jacobs has tried this “act as if” approach with
everything from changing his posture to behaving as if he were more confident
than he is. When he finds that he’s doubting himself on a project, Jacobs asks,
What would an optimistic, confident person do? That person would probably
cast aside those doubts and forge ahead, so Jacobs tries to do likewise.
Experimentation can and should be applied to big shifts as well as small
changes. Career change is a good example: According to Herminia Ibarra, a
professor of organizational
34 behavior at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and
author of Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your
Career, the best way to find a new career is to keep asking, and quickly acting
upon, the question What if I try this?
This is somewhat counterintuitive, Ibarra points out; most people assume that
you should devote extensive time, research, and planning to figuring out the
perfect new career before taking any action. The typical career change, she
notes, often involves poring over self-help books, talking to people who can
offer advice, and waiting for the epiphany that shows you your “true self”—at
which point you can strike out confidently in a new direction. That’s all wrong,
says Ibarra; “We need to act.” Through her research, Ibarra learned that most
real-life career transitions take about three years, and they rarely happen in a
linear path. It’s a series of trials and errors, and where we end up often surprises
us. But the main thing is to get the testing and learning under way as soon as
possible.
A key first step to a successful career change, according to Ibarra, is crafting
experiments. She advises looking for temporary assignments, outside contracts,
advisory work, and moonlighting to get experience or build skills in new
industries; executive programs, sabbaticals, and extended vacations can be
valuable in providing opportunities to experiment. She concludes, “We learn
who we are—in practice, not in theory—by testing reality.”
Eric Ries of the Lean Startup has led a rapidly growing movement
encouraging companies to do exactly what Ibarra is talking about for individuals
—i.e., to experiment as a business, try lots of new ideas to see what works, and
introduce new products and services quickly in order to “test and learn.”
Ries feels the Lean Startup approach and philosophy can be applied to one’s
life, as well. The basic principles hold up; if you’re starting a new career or even
just embarking on a creative project or some other type of initiative, you’re in
“start-up” mode—and the “lean” rules apply. Ask yourself a lot of What If
questions to come up with new possibilities that you can try out; give form to
those ideas quickly and put them out into the world; get feedback on what works
and what doesn’t. In a word, experiment.
What if you could not fail?
One of the hallmarks of a powerful question is that it gets passed around, and
that has certainly been the case with the question above. It was popularized a
couple of decades
35 ago by the American pastor Robert Schuller. The full
version of his question was What would you attempt to do if you knew you could
not fail?
In the past few years, the question has had another surge in popularity that
seems to have been jump-started by the former DARPA director Regina Dugan,
who used it in a widely circulated TED speech.
36 The question has also been
picked up and championed by the influential Google X founder Sebastian Thrun,
who has quoted it on Reddit and elsewhere.
What if a TV drama could inspire real-life change?
37
When the gritty television series The Wire ended in 2008, lead actress Sonja Sohn wasn’t
ready to say good-bye to urban Baltimore, where the show was set. Sohn’s own hard-knock
upbringing had given her empathy for the troubled lives depicted in The Wire; she wanted to
help in some way. So she asked: What if we took The Wire into schools, dissected how
characters negotiated their environment—and got kids to talk about how they did the same in
their lives? Could that help them step outside themselves and see how they were making
decisions and what they might do differently? Sohn founded the community-based nonprofit
ReWired for Change in 2009, and was gratified to find that episodes of The Wire (along with
other exercises and life skills lessons) did indeed prompt hard-case kids to open up about their
lives, while teaching them critical thinking about morality, cause and effect, decisions, and
consequences.
But even though the question has some mileage on it—and even though some
people believe it’s a flawed question—it exemplifies a beautiful question in its
ability to inspire and spark the imagination. And it’s an appropriate follow-up to
the “make one small change” recommendation. While that’s about encouraging
modest actions, this question is about giving yourself permission to think big.
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.
When I asked Sebastian Thrun why the What if you could not fail? question
resonated with him, he responded, “People mainly fail because they fear failure.”
A central tenet of Thrun’s approach to bringing about radical change, whether
that involves reinventing cars or college courses, is “the willingness to fail fast
and celebrate failures.” Thrun added, “Innovators have to be fearless.”
That was the message Dugan conveyed in her TED speech featuring the couldnot-fail question. “If you really ask yourself this question,” she told the
audience, “you can’t help but feel uncomfortable,” because it becomes clear that
fear of failure “keeps us from attempting great things . . . and life gets dull.
Amazing things stop happening.” But if you can get past that fear, Dugan said,
“Impossible things suddenly become possible.”
The notion that we should embrace failure has been a popular credo in Silicon
Valley, though more recently the “failure is good” message has gone
mainstream,
38 showing up in, for example, a 2013 commencement speech by
Oprah Winfrey. In fact, the sudden ubiquity of this idea prompted a minibacklash from a writer on the website Big Think, who used the term failure
fetish
39
to describe the trend. The writer pointed out that failure, despite all its
current good press, is in reality often painful and sometimes devastating.
Nonetheless, many are pushing the “embrace failure” message. The writer
Peter Sims pointed out
40
that fear of failure has been drummed into us, starting
early in life: “Your parents wanted you to achieve, achieve, achieve—in sports,
the classroom, and scouting or work. Your teachers penalized you for having the
‘wrong’ answers,” Sims wrote in Harvard Business Review. And if anything, it
only got worse as you moved into the business world, where, Sims noted,
“modern industrial management is still predicated largely on mitigating risks and
preventing errors.”
Meanwhile, in the more entrepreneurial and creative sectors, failure has come
to be recognized and appreciated as an unavoidable—and often highly useful—
step on the road to creativity and innovation. Mick Ebeling, the Eyewriter
inventor, observes, “When we hit failure, I start
41
to laugh. It’s almost like
checking off a box—great, we got that out of the way. Now we’re that much
closer.”
Experienced creators have always known this. The poet John Keats wrote,
“Failure is, in a sense, the highway
42
to success, inasmuch as every discovery of
what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true.” Those not comfortable
enough to laugh at failure might start by questioning its nature, and how we
perceive it. What does failure mean to me: Do I see it as an end state, or a
temporary stage in a process? How do I distinguish between an acceptable
failure and unacceptable one? (Not all failures are equal—and not all help you
to move forward; some can shut everything down.) Can I use productive “small
failures” as a means of avoiding devastating “big failures”?
The author, blogger, and serial entrepreneur Jonathan Fields has known his share
of setbacks and more than his share of successes; along the way, Fields has
developed some interesting ideas about the questions we should ask ourselves
about the possibility of failure.
Fields doesn’t particularly like the What if you could not fail? question. “It
proposes a fantasy scenario,” he told me. “I’m more interested in taking people
through a series of questions that will actually empower you to take action in the
face of the reality that you might fail.”
Fields thinks that as we embark on a new endeavor, we should begin by
confronting that possibility of failure via this question:
What if I fail—how will I recover?
Often when we think about failure, Fields says, we do so in a vague,
exaggerated way—we’re afraid to even think about it clearly. He suggests that
anyone undertaking something with an element of risk start by visualizing what
would actually happen if it failed and what would be needed to pick up the
pieces from that failure.
This tends to clarify that failure in any endeavor is rarely total. There is a way
back from almost anything, and once you acknowledge that, you can proceed
with more confidence. The psychologist and author Judith Beck told me she
43
uses a similar question with patients—If the worst happens, how could I cope?—
because, as she explained, “people’s anxiety goes down once they realize they
will live through their worst fear, and that they have internal and external
resources that will help them get through it.”
Another important question Fields thinks we should ask:
What if I do nothing?
This underscores that when we undertake an important change, it’s often
because we need to change—and if we don’t go ahead with it, we’re likely to be
unhappy staying put. Whatever problem or restlessness already exists may get
worse. “There is no sideways,” Fields says; generally, in life, if you’re not
moving forward, you’re moving back.
Lastly, Fields says, ask yourself:
What if I succeed?
“That’s important because the way our brains are wired, we tend to
automatically go toward the negative scenario,” Fields says. “So in order to give
your mind a chance to latch onto something positive, something that will
actually fuel action rather than fuel paralysis, it’s helpful to create some level of
clarity around what success in this endeavor would look like.”
In other words, give yourself a strong incentive to want to risk failure. The
blogger Chris Guillebeau put yet
44 another spin on the Schuller question.
“Instead of thinking about what you would do if you knew you wouldn’t fail,”
Guillebeau writes, “maybe a better question is . . . What’s truly worth doing,
whether you fail or succeed?”
How might we pry off the lid and stir the paint?
Considering Guillebeau’s question of what’s worth doing even at the risk of
failure, the challenges that may be particularly worthy of that kind of investment
are those that spark imagination, speak to the heart—and bring people closer
together. The late Fran Peavey, a social activist, excelled
45 at what she called
“strategic questioning,” which I would characterize as questioning with an open
mind and a caring heart. Peavey’s questioning left a mark in various far-flung
corners of the world: in the slums of Bangkok, in war-torn Bosnia, in the water
of India’s Ganges River, and in her adopted hometown of Oakland, California.
Peavey (who died in 2010) was, to put it mildly, a character. An oversize,
exuberant woman (a journalist who interviewed her wrote that when she
laughed, “her flesh wobbles . . . her chest heaves,
46 her ears bob”), she was a
sometime absurdist comedian as well as a full-time activist. When she traveled,
she brought with her a handheld sign, which she’d hold up as she sat in train
stations and other crowded gathering spots, reading american willing to listen.
It was an odd come-on, but it worked—people would approach Peavey,
sometimes warily, to find out what she was up to. Over a couple of decades, she
conducted thousands of interviews this way. “I refined my interviewing
technique,”
47 she told the Melbourne Age, “asking open-ended questions that
would serve as springboards for opinions and stories—questions such as How
would you like things to be different in your life?”
Peavey believed that by employing the right kinds of questions—open,
curious, slightly provocative at times, but never judgmental—one could have a
meaningful dialogue with people who are very different from you, culturally,
politically, temperamentally. Such questions could slip under and around the
barriers between people; they could help identify common ground and shared
concerns. And eventually, if the questioning and the discussion went deep
enough, they might begin to resolve conflicts and problems.
Peavey used her “strategic questioning” to work with people on all manner of
problems. As one news report noted, she helped Thai prostitutes who were
facing eviction from their neighborhood; worked on a program to feed the
homeless in Osaka; got a botanic garden replanted in the Croatian city of
Dubrovnik; and even helped California skateboarders who were being chased off
their favorite skating places. One of her more interesting projects
48 was a public
awareness campaign about cleaning up the Ganges River. She used a series of
questions to gain a better understanding of the issue, asking local residents
questions such as:
How do you feel about the condition of the river?
How do you explain the condition of the river to your children?
Peavey said she chose her language carefully, trying not to use the word
pollution (which might offend people who believed the river to be holy) and
instead framing the questions and the discussion around “taking care of the
river.” She could tell that people were daunted by the enormity of the task—so
she began to focus the questions on a more long-term, ongoing objective:
How are you preparing your children to clean up the river?
When Peavey asked that question, people were forced to admit they weren’t
doing anything in this regard. “Their love of the river, their love for their
children, and the void in their answers to that question could not long exist in the
same minds,” Peavey wrote. “The dissonance was too great.”
Parents responded by organizing a poster-painting contest for the children,
around the theme of the health of the river. The plan was to hang the paintings in
public venues so that “adults will see what the children see and be embarrassed.”
In the years that followed, the contest became a large annual event. But as
Peavey writes, the idea didn’t come from her—it came from the residents
themselves—though it seems to have been sparked by Peavey’s question.
To Peavey, a question could serve as the lever to pry open the stuck lid on a can
of paint. “If we have a longer lever, or a more dynamic question,” she wrote, it
can also be used to “really stir things up.” In this metaphor, what’s being stirred
are the ideas and potential answers that people already have in their heads; they
just need a little mixing to help those thoughts come together. But Peavey’s
approach to questioning also aimed to break down the “separation” between
people based on differing cultures or views—which seems highly relevant in
these polarized times.
When people are looking at issues from very different perspectives, it becomes
problematic if one side tries to impose an answer on the other. Conversation
either becomes argument or shuts down altogether. Perhaps the only way to
break the stalemate on even the most divisive questions is to put the declarative
statements on hold and try working on the following:
If we don’t agree on an answer yet, can we at least come to terms on a
question?
What would you do to reach yourself?
50
As a pastor of a bible church in a drug-riddled Philadelphia neighborhood known as the
Badlands, Joel Van Dyke was determined to reach the youth of that community—but for years
had no luck figuring out how to do so. Then, after stumbling upon the E. E. Cummings line
about “beautiful questions,” Van Dyke decided to use questioning as an outreach tool. Instead
of trying to tell local youths that he knew what they needed, “I decided to ask, ‘What would
you do to reach yourself?’” Van Dyke’s willingness to immerse himself in the community and
ask that question led to a surprising conversation. Community youths (including gang leaders)
told him they very much wanted a place to play handball, but had been locked out of the local
facilities. “Throw a big handball tournament,” they told Van Dyke, “and we’ll bring all our
friends.” Van Dyke’s church went on to sponsor four tournaments a year, which also provided
a venue to share the ministry’s message.
Former-adman-turned-activist Jon Bond,
49 along with his wife, Rebecca,
recently formed an anti-gun-violence movement called Evolve in response to the
2012 school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. The group is working to
reframe the conversation around gun control to focus on the larger question How
can we save lives?
“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.”
As both Peavey and Bond have noted, those questions must be culturally
aware, insightful, respectful, and inviting. This may require contextual inquiry
on the part of those doing the questioning. The approach used by Peavey, as well
as another expert boundary-crosser, Novogratz, shows that there’s no substitute
for journeying into the world of people who hold different views from yours,
“sitting on the floor with them,” and trying to see the various issues from that
perspective.
Short of doing that, at the very least we should heed the advice of
51 Facebook
cofounder Chris Hughes, who, in a recent commencement speech, urged
graduating students to “create some habit that makes it easier to get out of your
bubble. Follow someone you disagree with on Twitter.”
Hughes would no doubt agree that we should also question the views of those
with whom we disagree—yet with an open, curious mind:
Why might they see the issue this way? Why do I see it differently? What
assumptions are we each operating under?
In this vein, one other question comes highly recommended
52
from Michael
Corning, a top engineer at Microsoft, who said he has relied on this in both his
work and his life:
What are the odds I’m wrong?
As Corning points out, just pausing every once in a while to ponder this
question can provide a check on our natural tendency to be overly certain of our
own views. Plus, Corning adds, it can help to avoid all manner of trouble around
the home, such as lengthy arguments that begin with a false accusation about
who moved the car keys.
The empathetic questioning that can help in “reaching across the chasm” on
divisive issues can also be useful in “reaching across the room” to better connect
with those closest to you—a close friend, neighbor, co-worker, brother, sister-inlaw, eldest son, whomever. Questioning can be applied in various ways to get a
better understanding of relationship challenges and to begin testing out possible
remedies. If we take that hypothetical question raised earlier—Why is my fatherin-law so difficult
53
to get along with?—it should be checked for faulty
assumptions by “questioning the question” (Is it true? Is he really hard for
everyone to get along with?). If he gets along just fine with some people,
including, say, another son-in-law about your age, then the better Why question
is Why is it difficult for my father-in-law to get along with me?
One might also inject a few other Whys into the mix, as part of contextual
inquiry:
Why, exactly, do I feel as if we’re not getting along?
Why do I want to try to change that?
Why does the relationship with the other son-in-law seem to work better
(and can I learn anything from that)?
The answers to these early questions can feed the next set of hypothesis
questions (Considering we only see each other at chaotic family gatherings,
what if we could arrange to meet in a more relaxed setting?) and How strategies
(How might I lure him to such a meeting—perhaps by inviting him to watch the
ball game on my new big-screen TV?). Through inquiry, you can begin to dissect
the nature of a relationship problem, see things from the other person’s point of
view, and use tactical questioning to delicately float possible ideas and solutions.
Finding common ground with anyone is the key to connecting. With your
family as a whole, it may require asking questions together. Bruce Feiler, author
of The Secrets
54 of Happy Families, dramatically improved communication in
his family just by making time for regular weekly meetings—during which the
same three questions were considered each time by the group:
What went well in the family this past week?
What could we do better?
What things will we commit to working on in the coming week?
Updating an idea that originated with the author Stephen Covey, Feiler also
suggests families create their own “mission statements,” similar to those used by
companies. The idea of having a shared sense of familial purpose is a good one
—but perhaps a “mission question” might be more engaging than a “statement.”
A family mission question could be How might we, as a family, better serve the
community? Or How might we carry on the tradition of our forebears?
Part of the rewarding experience is figuring out, together, what might be the
most meaningful, enjoyable, and promising question to pursue as a group. When
searching for such a question—whether as a group or as an individual—you
don’t want to make the choice lightly.
How will you find your beautiful question?
When Doug Rauch came to the end
55 of a successful career as the president of
the Trader Joe’s supermarket chain in 2008, he could simply have retired and
played golf. But like a lot of people, Rauch wasn’t comfortable with the
traditional concept of retirement. “I think most of us find purpose when we
engage with something bigger than ourselves,” Rauch said. “If you’re lucky in
life, maybe you get to move from one area of significance—your career—to
another.”
But how would he find that new “area of significance”? Rauch wasn’t sure,
but as he began his search, he heard about a Harvard fellowship program formed
to encourage retired business executives to take on worthy causes and projects,
on the assumption that savvy, capable retired people are looking for big
questions to pursue. The Harvard program was set up to provide coaching and
university resources to the enrolled retirees as they tried to identify specific
challenges of interest, but each individual in the program, Rauch included, had
to figure what issue he or she wanted to tackle.
“I started looking at lots of challenges but I kept coming back to the idea of
‘go with what you know,’” Rauch recalls. “And what I know is food.”
Something else he knew: “There are fifty million Americans who are hungry.”
As Rauch began to think about this problem, he cycled through various Whys,
What Ifs, and Hows (he was no novice when it came to questioning—he had
practiced and honed the art at Trader Joe’s based on his belief that “questioning
is the heart of innovation”).
He started with Why do we have a situation in this country wherein one in six
people is hungry?
Compounding the mystery were other questions Rauch began to explore as he
did his contextual inquiry into the nature of the problem. As he observed that
hunger and obesity sometimes exist together in this country, he found himself
asking, How can an obese person be hungry? In working through that one,
Rauch had to get past some basic assumptions, one being that hunger is a
shortage of calories. The reality is, people of limited means may tend to fill up
on empty calories because that’s more affordable. “If all you have is three
dollars, you can consume a lot more calories with chips and soda,” he said. But
from a nutritional standpoint, you’re still starving.
The most maddening question sprang from the realization “that 40 percent of
what we grow in this country is never consumed,” Rauch said. “And of course
this causes you to wonder, Why does so much good food end up in landfills?”
What came next was a nice little bit of connective inquiry on Rauch’s part:
“You start to put the pieces together, then you think, What if you could use one
problem to solve the other?”
Being a supermarket guy, he knew one place where there was plenty of food—
on store shelves—which led to How do we get that food from the supermarket to
the food desert?
Rauch eventually came up with a potential solution—create an operation that
would buy unused food at deep discounts from the supermarkets and from other
producers, repackage it as convenient and nutritious take-home meals, and offer
it for pennies on the dollar in a large, indoor farmers’ market in Boston.
By mid-2013, Rauch was well on the way to turning the idea into a reality. He
had raised the funds needed to launch the enterprise and he had a space picked
out, with plans to give it a neighborhood feel with murals and community art on
the walls. Rauch wants the food market to capture some of the allure of Trader
Joe’s, the sense that you’re getting quality food at a bargain price. Why not give
the food away? Rauch worked through that question and decided it’s not
sustainable, businesswise, nor is it what people necessarily want. Many tend to
eye food giveaways with suspicion; but all people like to think they’re getting a
deal. This realization sparked one of Rauch’s hypothetical questions: What if we
offer a bargain instead of a handout?
The ending of Rauch’s story is still to be determined—he was in the midst of
the always-difficult How stage as of this writing (How do we do the launch?
How do we get people in the door? How do we make the numbers add up?). But
his story offers a good example of how one can come at the challenge of finding
a beautiful question to pursue.
Rauch was bold and ambitious in staking out his question—he took on one of
the biggest, thorniest issues around. He did so at a stage of life when, according
to conventional wisdom, we should be pulling back from the hard and the new,
to settle into a life more comfortable and familiar. In seeking out his question, he
looked to others (the Harvard fellowship program) for help and counsel. He also
looked around to see what was most needed in the world. But he looked inside
himself as well—to inquire about what he was good at and how he might apply
those skills in a fresh and meaningful way.
Finding that one big, beautiful question to pursue isn’t easy. So—starting as
always with Why—let’s first consider why it makes sense to do so. 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.
Should we retire the concept of “retirement?”
56
The aging of the Baby Boomers raises the question, Can we still afford to have so many
people retire in their sixties? Moreover, Is retirement really the most satisfying, productive
way to spend one’s later years? Marc Freedman, founder of Encore.org, looks at the growth of
the over-sixty population and asks: Why can’t we turn this dependence into abundance?
Freedman thinks older workers have a wealth of experience and knowledge that could be used
in “encore careers” with nonprofits, charities, and schools, all of which have a growing need
for high-level skills. Freedman’s Encore.org movement offers support, job leads, fellowships,
handbooks, and classes, readying millions of longer-living boomers to be a vital workforce for
change. He also believes we should encourage people of all ages to plan for the “encore” stage
of life by setting up Individual Purpose Accounts (patterned after IRA’s) to help cover the
inevitable costs of transitioning and retooling.
Articulating a personal challenge in the form of a question has other benefits.
It allows you to be bold and adventurous because anyone can question anything.
You don’t have to be a recognized expert; you just have to be willing to say, I’m
going to venture forth in the world with my question and see what I find. As you
do this, you’re in a strong position to build ideas and attract support. Because,
whereas people are more likely to ignore or challenge you when you come at
them with answers, they almost can’t resist advising or helping you to answer a
great question. All of this helps to build momentum. Questions (the right ones,
anyway) are good at generating momentum, which is why change-makers so
often use them as a starting point.
You may wonder, Why would I want to limit myself to one? And if I did, how
would I figure out the right one for me? It can be worthwhile to zero in on a
particularly significant question (or, at most, a couple of them) so that you can
focus on it long enough to make some progress with it. The innovators I studied
are full of great ideas; each has a hundred things he/she would like to achieve.
But they tend to devote themselves to one question at a time.
Google’s Sebastian Thrun likens each of
57 his projects to climbing a mountain.
You must start by picking a mountain and be sure it’s a mountain you like, “not
just one you want to be on top of”—because, with any luck, “you’re gonna be
stuck with it for the next couple of years,” Thrun says.
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. (Not that you have
to find an answer to all beautiful questions; the string theorist Witten, for
instance, has never fully answered his biggest questions about the nature of the
universe, but he told me that the pursuit of those questions has led him to many
other interesting discoveries along the way.)
As some of the stories in this book have shown, people find meaningful
questions in many ways and in various places. You can happen upon a great
question by an unfortunate accident, as Van Phillips did. Or, as with Edwin
Land, the question may be handed to you as an unexpected gift from an
inquisitive child. Or the question can spring from trying to come to terms with a
mundane problem: paying the rent, getting out of bed in the morning. An
interesting thing about beautiful questions is that you may not have to search
very far for them. They’re often right in front of you—in your local community,
your company, or maybe in the palm of your hand. The trick is to be able to see
them, which may require stepping back, shifting perspective, exercising your
powers of vuja de.
You can also find beautiful questions outside of your familiar environs. Gary
White’s ongoing effort to answer
58 big questions about water, via his nonprofit
group Water.org, all started when, as a student from the Midwest, he took a trip
to Guatemala and saw that people in the slums lacked clean water. “It struck me
that here I was, just a short plane ride from the U.S., with all we have—and here
were these kids walking through sewage to collect contaminated water that could
kill them. So I just couldn’t help asking, Why do so many lack this really basic
thing that the rest of us take for granted?” Once that question formed in his
head, White was hooked.
There’s no shortage in today’s world of wicked problems wrapped around
beautiful questions—meaning that somewhere deep inside that thorny issue,
embedded at the core, lies an undiscovered question of great value. If those
questions can be brought to the surface, we may be able to see the essence of the
problem more clearly.
Think of a complex social issue—questioners are likely hard at work
reframing it. Health care, hunger, protecting the environment, providing better
care for the aging—all of these issues and many more cry out for new and better
approaches that may only come to light via better questioning. Then, too, there is
education, which is at the center of the questioning conversation. Think of the
fundamental questions that need asking, by teachers, students, by education
innovators such as the Right Question Institute, but also by parents—because we
know that parents who take the time and trouble to inquire, How can I
encourage questioning in my child?, are more likely to raise inquisitive kids who
grow up to be resourceful, problem-solving adults. That makes it a beautiful
question worth pursuing.
On the other hand, maybe your beautiful question will focus on creating a more
fulfilled, more curious, more interesting you. When I asked Paul Bennett of
IDEO to share his own, personal beautiful question, he responded, “The question
I constantly ask myself is How do I stay inspired?”
Bennett feels it’s part of his job to do so: “As creative chief of six hundred
people, you need to keep them inspired, but I can only do that if I keep myself
inspired.” He has trained himself to constantly notice and appreciate the
inspiration that’s all around. “You can’t do it all the time, but there are moments
in my day when I’ll say, ‘Stop—take a snapshot of this moment with your mind,
remember this.’ I think you need to be a good self-censor of the madness in the
crowd and be able to pause and see something in the midst of all that—
something interesting, something that matters, that you can share with others.”
Bennett culls all of these bits
59 and shares the best of them with the people at
IDEO, or with a larger audience on his blog, The Curiosity Chronicles.
For many of us, the beautiful question that calls to us is some variation of what
Bennett is talking about: How do we continually find inspiration so that we can
inspire others?
That question must be asked and answered fresh, over and over. There is no
definitive answer, at least not for the creative individual who wants to keep
growing, improving, innovating. To say, I’ve figured it out—this is what I do
and how I do it, is to play it safe and thereby risk everything.
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.”
It’s interesting that the beautiful questions about work—Why do the work we
do? What if we could take it to a different place and another level? How,
exactly, might we do that?—persist even for many of those who’ve “made it.” I
was intrigued to see a 2012 New York Times interview with the
61
film actor Jake
Gyllenhaal in which he was asked about taking a detour from films to tackle a
demanding role in a live-theater production. Gyllenhaal indicated that his
previous run of star turns in big films—for all the success it had brought—had
somehow failed to answer some deeper question for him. “I wasn’t really
listening to myself about the project I wanted to do,” he said. “I had to figure out
what kind of actor I wanted to be and feel confident going for that.” (He also
said that it was hard for young film actors to do this kind of introspection
because “asking questions isn’t always a welcome thing in Hollywood, where
everyone seems like they know what they’re doing.”) The actor-turned-director
Ben Affleck
62 seems to have had a similar questioning moment as he was
embarking on his award-winning film Argo. He’d already directed two films;
he’d proven himself, up to a point. “After that,” Affleck told an interviewer, “the
question became ‘Okay, you can do it. Now what do you want to say?’”
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?
When you find your beautiful question, stay with it. If it’s a question worth
pursuing, it will likely also be confounding, frustrating, exhausting. If you find
yourself stuck, follow the advice of Acumen’s Novogratz—“just try to get to the
next question.” Break your big question into smaller ones and work on those.
Keep cycling through Whys, What Ifs, and Hows, subjecting everything—even
your being stuck—to a fresh set of queries.
Don’t be afraid to change your question—even to ratchet it down a notch. You
may also wish to expand it, broaden it, or possibly add pieces onto it, turning it
into a compound question (which can be a clunky yet beautiful thing). Be sure to
take your question for walks, and to the museum. Create the time and space for
inspiration, which, as Van Phillips observes, comes in unexpected waves. As an
innovator, “you’re like a surfer waiting patiently for that wave to come in,” says
Phillips (yes, he surfs, as well as runs, on that foot he made). You don’t know
when the wave will come in—when those unpredictable connections in the
nether regions of the brain will happen—but you must prepare and be ready for
it. If you haven’t sufficiently thought about your question—if you haven’t even
asked it—the connections are unlikely to happen and the wave will never
materialize.
You may discover, as many questioners do when they begin to burrow into a
problem, that there is much more to know than you could have imagined at the
outset. Don’t be put off by learning how much you don’t know. That darkness
was always out there, surrounding you; you just had no idea how vast it was
until you began probing with your question flashlight. Questioners learn to love
that great unknown—it’s the land of opportunity, in terms of creativity and
innovation. The author Stuart Firestein thinks we should all learn to see it
likewise and offers up this beautiful question: What if we cultivated ignorance
instead
63 of fearing it?
If we did that, we would need some cultivating tools—including one, in
particular, that could help us dig, uncover, plant, tend, and grow.
What if it turned out that tool had been right there in our back pocket, ever
since childhood?
Acknowledgments
I’d first like to thank the editor of this book, Bloomsbury’s George Gibson. It
seems to be increasingly rare these days (unfortunately) for book editors to really
get involved in editing, beyond making a few general suggestions and flagging
typos. George warned me at the outset that he is an “activist editor” and it’s true.
He went through every line of the manuscript, tightening, clarifying, questioning
—and the book is much better for it. Thanks also to my agent Jim Levine, who
believed in the “question” idea and offered valuable input as I was shaping the
book proposal. Jim also connected me with George, so I’m grateful for that, too.
This book started as a website, AMoreBeautifulQuestion.com, and on that site
I asked for volunteers to help me work on the book. To my delight, many people
responded and offered their help as members of my research team, including
Harvey Richards, Philip Howell, Justin Hamilton, Larry Rubin, Katie Orthwein,
Lana Rimboym, Chuck Appleby, Dinesh Balasubramaniam, and Sid Ramnarace.
I want to especially thank a handful of people from that group who really went
the extra mile in terms of tracking down stories and sharing ideas: Nikhil Goyal,
Dave Baldwin, Daisy Azer, Theresa Garcia, Bill Welter, Damon Taylor, and
Dan McDougall.
With regard to tracking down “question stories,” I got special help from the
outstanding researcher Susan O’Brien.
I want to thank all the people who granted interviews. I’ve been a
magazine/newspaper journalist and I’ve been a book author and there is an
important difference that manifests itself during the research process: When
you’re calling from the New York Times or Wired magazine, people tend to
respond because they want the publicity. But when you call and say, “I’m
writing a book”—well, then you are dependent on the kindness of strangers.
There’s not much in it for the interviewee; they have no idea if the book will
ever get written or if anyone will read it once it comes out. So I think they do the
interview primarily because they have a genuine interest in the idea you’re
pursuing, and they want to be of help.
With that in mind, I’m grateful to all who took the time to talk about
questioning, including: Dr. Ken Heilman, Gretchen Rubin, Irene Au, John
Bielenberg, Sebastian Thrun, Jack Andraka, Jonathan Fields, Chen Bo Zhong,
Doug Rauch, Tiffany Shlain, David Cooperrider, John Seely Brown, Roko Belic,
Chris Young, A. J. Jacobs, Stephen Tobolowsky, Water.org’s Gary White, and
the Acumen Fund’s Jacqueline Novogratz.
Also Robert Burton, Srikanth Srinivas, Dominic Randolph, Josh Aronson,
Stewart Mostofsky, Eric Maisel, Mick Ebeling, Michael Corning, Jon Bond,
Steve Bercu, Edward Witten, Colum McCann, and Kelly Carlin.
At the MIT Media Lab, thank you to Tod Machover and Joichi Ito, as well as
to the former director Frank Moss. From Harvard University, my thanks go to
Tony Wagner, Paul Harris, Paul Bottino, and Clayton Christensen. Representing
Yale, the brilliant writer William Deresiewicz was an immense help. Stanford
University’s Bob Sutton provided inspiration with his ideas about vuja de.
There were a number of companies that helped greatly, starting with IDEO:
thank you Tim Brown, Paul Bennett, and Fred Dust. I am also indebted to David
Sherwin at Frog Design, and to the former Frog creative director Luke Williams.
Also W. L. Gore’s Debra France, Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia, Steelcase’s Jim Hackett,
Patagonia’s Casey Sheahan, Panera’s Ron Shaich, and IBM’s Eric Brown.
Special thanks to the outstanding business consultants and “master
questioners” Keith Yamashita, Eric Ries, Dev Patnaik, Tim Ogilvie, Jack
Bergstrand, and the Peter Drucker Institute.
I’m grateful to the following people for the significant time spent talking to me
for this book: the inspirational Min Basadur, the remarkable Van Phillips,
Charles Warren, David Kord Murray, Randy Komisar, Gauri Nanda, Deborah
Meier, and Hal Gregersen.
And I want to mention a few people who shared their time and didn’t get
quoted: Geoff Deane of Intellectual Ventures, Naomi Simson, Dennis Bartels of
the Exploratorium museum, and Oliver Burkeman.
I’d like to give special mention here to the Right Question Institute, and the
two people who created it, Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana. I believe the work
they’re doing on behalf of teaching the art of questioning is unquestionably
valuable.
And I should also acknowledge and thank some people who provided
inspiration at the formative stages: the designer Bruce Mau, whose “Ask Stupid
Questions” principle was a starting point for me; the designer Brian Collins, who
first suggested that “stupid questions” can also (in some cases) be thought of as
“beautiful questions”; and TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, who was the
first “master questioner” I interviewed (and who, in the process, questioned most
of my questions).
My thanks to Fast Company and Harvard Business Review for running some
of my early posts/articles about questioning. I also want to cite several
publications/websites that were extremely valuable in terms of providing some
of my raw material: Fast Company, which does a such great, exhaustive job of
covering innovation; Brain Pickings, Maria Popova’s amazing site for anyone
interested in creativity; Wired magazine; and, of course, the New York Times,
where a number of the “question stories” in the book were first reported (and
special thanks to the Times’s Adam Bryant, whose “Corner Office” column
provided many great leads on CEOs who question).
Thank you to the “Marmaduke Writing Factory,” a New York–based writers’
collective of which I am a founding member. I appreciate the support of fellow
writers Bob Sullivan, Deborah Schupack, Kate Buford, Marilyn Johnson, Mary
Murphy, and Irene Levine (thanks also to Irene’s husband, Jerome, for snapping
a great author photo). Thank you to John Krysko and Nancy Rosanoff, who own
the beautiful restored mansion where we write. And I’m indebted in particular to
two members of the writers’ group, Joseph Wallace and Benjamin Cheever, who
were there to offer advice or just to listen.
Thank you to the Berger family and to the Kelly family for their support and
encouragement. And above all, thank you to Laura E. Kelly, my creative partner
in work and in life. She was incredibly involved in this book at each step of the
journey—helping to shape the idea as well as the writing, applying her sharp
editing skills, and doing a marvelous job creating the AMBQ website. When the
book was finished, she used her new media/marketing savvy to help me to
launch it into the world. She did everything, it seems—and I didn’t even have to
ask.
Notes
Introduction: Why Questioning?
1 That changed during my work . . . The articles appeared in Wired, Harvard Business
Review, and Fast Company; the book was Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your
Business, Your Life, and Maybe Even the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2009).
2 a company that “runs on questions” . . . This Eric Schmidt quote has appeared in many
articles, including an interview of the business consultant/author Paul Sloane by Vern
Burkhardt, IdeaConnection newsletter, July 25, 2009.
3 “Ask yourself an interesting enough question . . .” Maria Popova, “Chuck Close on
Creativity, Work Ethic, and Problem-Solving vs. Problem-Creating,” BrainPickings,
December 27, 2012, http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/12/27/chuck-closeon-creativity/. The Chuck Close quote originally appeared in the book Inside the
Painter’s Studio, by Joe Fig (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009).
4 he reckoned that if he had an hour . . . As I noted, this may or may not have been said
by Einstein. It is widely attributed to him in various articles and posts on the Internet.
However, my researcher Susan O’Brien was unable to trace the quote back to Einstein.
She also noted that another version of this quote is floating around, in which Einstein
says he’d spend the first fifty-five minutes making sure he was “solving the right
problem.” However, we do know, from many other things he said, that Einstein was a
firm believer in the importance of questioning. “The important thing,” he said, “is not to
stop questioning.” For more on this subject see my post on
AMoreBeautifulQuestion.com “Einstein and Questioning: Exploring the Inquiring Mind
of One of Our Greatest Thinkers,” http://amorebeautifulques tion.com/einsteinquestioning/.
5 A recent study found the average . . . Telegraph staff, “Mothers Asked Nearly 300
Questions a Day, Study Finds,” Telegraph, March 28, 2013,
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9959026/Mothers -asked-nearly-300-questions-aday-study-finds.html. (Though the headline says “nearly 300 questions,” when the study
focused on four-year-old girls, the number of questions rose to 390 per day.)
6 The business-innovation guru Clayton Christensen . . . From my interview with
Christensen, January 8, 2013.
7 rather, it has “turbocharged” it . . . From my interviews with Gregersen, January and
April of 2013. The research conducted by Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen was
conducted over six years, involving more than three thousand business executives. It
showed “questioning” to be one of five key characteristics (and in some ways the most
important) associated with being a successful, creative business leader. The results
appeared initially in the Harvard Business Review in December 2009 and later in Dyer,
Gregersen, and Christensen’s The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of
Disruptive Innovators (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).
8 The neurologist John Kounios observes . . . From my interview with Kounios,
November 2012.
9 “We’ve transitioned into always transitioning” . . . The general principle of constant
transitioning was discussed in my interview with Brown, March 4, 2013. However, this
particular quote appeared in Heather Chaplin’s interview “John Seely Brown on InterestDriven Learning, Mentors and the Importance of Play,” spotlight.macfound.org, March
1, 2012.
10 The esteemed physicist Edward Witten . . . From one of several e-mail exchanges I had
with Witten in February 2013. He also said something similar in the article “Physics’
Sharpest Mind Since Einstein,” CNN, July 5, 2005.
11 on Google, some of the most popular queries . . . Quentin Hardy and Matt Richtel,
“Don’t Ask? Internet Still Tells,” New York Times, November 21, 2012.
Chapter 1: The Power of Inquiry
1 Back in 1976, long before there . . . From my interviews with Van Phillips, beginning in
2009, and most recently in December 2012. I also quoted several lines from Phillips’s
speech at the 2011 Cusp Conference in Chicago. Other source material included Martha
Davidson, “Artificial Parts: Van Phillips,” Smithsonian, March 9, 2005; and Carol
Pogash, “A Personal Call to a Prosthetic Invention,” New York Times, July 2, 2008.
2 “stopped thinking because he ‘knows’” . . . I came across this quote in Maria Popova,
“Frank Lloyd Wright’s Thoughts on Learning,” Atlantic, June 8, 2012; excerpted from
Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture, Nature, and the Human
Spirit: A Collection of Quotations (Portland, OR: Pomegranate, 2011).
3 Mark Noonan, who once, after suffering . . . From my 2009 interview with Noonan,
originally for the book Glimmer.
4 “We think someone else—someone smarter . . .” From Regina Dugan’s March 2012
TED talk, “From Mach 20 Glider to Humming-bird Drone,”
http://www.ted.com/talks/regina_dugan_from_mach_20_glider_to_humming_bird_drone.html.
5 “are the engines of intellect . . .” David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a
Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). Thank you to Bill
Welter for bringing this to my attention.
6 “shine a light on where you need . . .” I am greatly indebted to the cofounders of the
Right Question Institute, Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana. Most of the quotes from them
come from my interviews with them in February and March of 2013. I also drew
information from Rothstein and Santana’s book, Make Just One Change: Teach Students
to Ask Their Own Questions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2012).
7 The late Frances Peavey, a quirky . . . The quote is from Fran Peavey, By Life’s Grace:
Musings on the Essence of Social Change (New Society Publishers, 1994). I found this
quote in an excerpt from Peavey’s book that was reprinted in “Creating a Future We Can
Live With” (IC#40), published in spring 1995 by Context Institute.
8 Paul Harris, an education professor . . . From my interview with Harris, November
2012; I also drew information from Harris’s book Trusting What You’re Told: How
Children Learn From Others (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012).
9 “I know more about my ignorance . . .” From my interviews with Wurman, April 2008
and fall of 2012. Wurman has a chapter devoted to questioning in his book Information
Anxiety 2 (Indianapolis: QUE, 2001).
10 The author Stuart Firestein, in his . . . Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How it Drives
Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); the book came to my attention when it
was featured on BrainPickings, April 2, 2012, in a post that also highlighted Firestein’s
line “enthralled with answers,”
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/02/stuart-firestein-ignorance-science/.
11 Harvard Business Review writer Polly LaBarre . . . Polly LaBarre, “The Question That
Will Change Your Organization,” Harvard Business Review, November 10, 2011.
12 How might we prepare during peacetime to offer help in times of war? . . .
Information from The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
website at http://www.ifrc.org/en/who-we-are/history.
13 The neurologist and author Ken Heilman . . . From my interview with Heilman,
November 2012. He expands on this in his book Creativity and the Brain (Psychology
Press, 2005).
14 “You don’t have to hold a position . . .” LaBarre, “Question That Will Change.”
15 “blend of humility and confidence” . . . From Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton M.
Christensen, The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).
16 “In our culture, not to know . . .” Robinson’s quote, from his “School of Life” talk,
appeared in BrainPickings, April 17, 2012, in Maria Popova, “Sir Ken Robinson on How
Finding Your Element Changes Everything,”
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/17/sir-ken-robinson-school-of-life/.
17 according to David Cooperrider . . . From my interview with David Cooperrider,
December 2012. Cooperrider is the author of many articles and books on appreciative
inquiry, including Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change, coauthored
with Diana Whitney (San Francisco: Berrett-Kohler, 2005).
18 “to organize our thinking around . . .” This quote first appeared in Leon Nayfakh’s
excellent article “Are We Asking the Right Questions?,” Boston Globe, May 20, 2012.
However, the quote was originally attributed in that article to Dan Rothstein of RQI;
Rothstein informed me that the line actually originated with his colleague at RQI, Steve
Quatrano, and Quatrano confirmed that with me.
19 Sebastian Thrun, the engineer/inventor . . . From my e-mail exchanges with Thrun,
February 2013.
20 Reed Hastings, was reacting to one . . . The Netflix story has appeared in various
interviews with Hastings, including Matthew Honan, “Unlikely Places Where Wired
Pioneers Had Their Eureka Moments,” Wired, March 24, 2008.
21 to Pixar (Can animation be cuddly?) . . . Anthony Lane, “The Fun Factory,” New Yorker,
May 16, 2011.
22 New York Times recently characterized . . . Shaila Dewan, “To Stay Relevant in a
Career, Workers Train Nonstop,” New York Times, September 21, 2012.
23 Thomas Friedman has written extensively . . . For example, see Thomas L. Friedman,
“It’s a 401(k) World,” New York Times, April 30, 2013.
24 Joichi Ito, the director of the . . . From my interview with Ito, April 2013.
25 “Right now, knowledge is a commodity” . . . From my interview with Tony Wagner,
January 2013.
26 “the value of explicit information is dropping” . . . Tony Wagner, Creating Innovators:
The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World (New York: Scribner, 2012). I
also discussed this directly with Bottino in my interview with him, April 1, 2013.
27 The glut of knowledge has another . . . Firestein, Ignorance.
28 What if we could paint over our mistakes? . . . From the Her Story Network website
http://www.herstorynetwork.com/?s=Bette+Nesmith; and Jessica Gross, “Liquid Paper,”
New York Times Magazine, June 7, 2013.
29 The author Seth Godin is . . . Godin quotes are from his free e-book Stop Stealing
Dreams, self-published in 2012,
http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/stopstealingdreamsscreen.pdf.
30 To navigate in today’s info-swamp . . . Botstein’s quote appeared in Julie Flaherty,
“What Should You Get out of College?,” New York Times, August 4, 2002.
31 “Computers are useless—they only give . . .” According to the website Quote
Investigator, a version of this quote appeared in William Fifield, “Pablo Picasso: A
Composite Interview,” Paris Review, Summer–Fall 1964.
32 The potential is mind-boggling . . . This is from my visit to IBM’s research facility in
Yorktown Heights, New York, where the original Watson system is housed. I
interviewed several people from IBM during my visit, primarily the engineer Eric
Brown.
33 A reporter doing an interview concludes . . . This story is well traveled and appeared
recently in an interview of Tiffany Shlain by Patt Morrison in the Los Angeles Times,
November 26, 2011.
34 Why did my candy bar melt? (And will my popcorn pop?) . . . Drawn from the website
Massmoments.org, which drew from “Percy Spencer and His Itch to Know,” by Don
Murray in Readers’ Digest (August 1958); “Raytheon: A History of Global Technology
Leadership” (Early Days link); and “Who Invented Microwaves?” from Gallawa.com.
35 Sugata Mitra, made just this point . . . Mitra’s TED talk was “Build a School in the
Cloud,” February 27, 2013,
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html. Also, see the
article “Is Education Obsolete? Sugata Mitra at the MIT Media Lab,” posted on the blog
MIT Center for Civic Media, May 16, 2012; as this post shows, the idea of “knowing”
being obsolete was suggested by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte, in a class discussion
following Mitra’s lecture at MIT.
36 “when someone looks at the way things . . .” David Pogue, “A Simple Swipe on a
Phone, and You’re Paid,” New York Times, September 29, 2010.
37 Gretchen Rubin showed how simple . . . From my interview with Rubin, February 20,
2013.
38 the business consultant Min Basadur . . . I am greatly to indebted to Basadur for a series
of interviews he did with me in 2012, both on the phone and at Basadur Applied
Creativity headquarters in Burlington, Ontario. During my visit, Basadur and his team
gave me a crash course in the firm’s question-based creativity training methods.
39 Why aren’t the players urinating more? . . . Douglas Martin, “J. Robert Cade, the
Inventor of Gatorade, Dies at 80,” New York Times, November 28, 2007. Also adapted
from the website http://www.cademuseum.org/museum/history.
40 For example, current theories of “design thinking” . . . For more on design thinking,
see my book Glimmer as well as Tim Brown, Change by Design (New York:
HarperBusiness, 2009).
41 “even when you don’t know what . . .” This was said to me by the designer and designthinking teacher Bruce Mau during my interviews with him in 2008 and 2009 for
Glimmer.
42 What if a car windshield could blink? . . . Bob Kearns bio info comes from John
Seabrook’s “The Flash of Genius,” New Yorker, January 11, 1993; story of Mary
Anderson comes from Catherine Thimmesh, Girls Think of Everything: Stories of
Ingenious Inventions by Women, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
Chapter 2: Why We Stop Questioning
1 Louis C.K. can be seen performing “Why?” on YouTube at, among other uploads,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJlV49RDlLE.
2 research shows that a child asks about . . . This research appears in Harris’s book
Trusting What You’re Told and in Nayfakh’s Boston Globe article “Are We Asking the
Right Questions?”
3 some of the lab’s work is featured . . . Shlain’s ten-minute film, Brain Power: From
Neurons to Networks, can be seen at http://letitripple.org/brain-power/.
4 As the children’s neurologist Stewart Mostofsky . . . From my interview with
Mostofsky, January 17, 2013.
5 Why is the sky blue? . . . Drawn from Nicholas Christakis’s essay in John Brockman’s
book This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World
Works (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013).
6 The physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson talks . . . From the YouTube clip “Kids Are Born
Scientists,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ACkc4POpaU.
7 A recent University of Michigan study . . . “When Preschoolers Ask Questions, They
Want Explanations,” Science Daily press release, November 13, 2009.
8 they immediately begin to ask fewer . . . Lory Hough, “Why Do Kids Believe in God but
Not Harry Potter?” Ed., the Magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
May 2012.
9 The child psychologist Alison Gopnik has . . . Alison Gopnik, “New Research Shows
That Teaching Kids More and More, at Ever-Younger Ages, May Backfire,” Slate,
March 16, 2011; Gopnik’s quote about kids being the R&D division of the human
species is from her appearance on ABC’s Nightline, April 2, 2010; her views on
similarities between children’s learning and scientific learning appear in her paper
“Scientific Thinking in Young Children,” published at the University of California,
Berkeley, and also appearing on the website of Science, September 28, 2012,
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6102/1623.abstract.
10 In 2010, Professor Kyung-Hee Kim . . . Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, “The
Creativity Crisis,” Newsweek, July 10, 2010. Also, Andrew Grant and Gaia Grant, “The
7 Biggest Creativity Killers,” Fast Company, June 12, 2012.
11 The chart on the decline of questioning as children age was provided by the Right
Question Institute, based on data on question-asking gathered by the National Center for
Education Statistics for the 2009 “Nation’s Report Card,”
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/main2009/2011455.pdf.
12 When the engagement level of students . . . The Gallup Student Poll surveyed nearly a
half million students in grades five through twelve from more than seventeen hundred
public schools in 2012. More on the study can be found in the Gallup blog post “The
School Cliff: Student Engagement Drops with Each School Year,” January 7, 2013,
http://thegallupblog.gallup.com/2013/01/the-school-cliff-student-engagement.html.
13 The author Daniel Pink asked . . . Daniel Pink, “Does the ‘school cliff’ matter more than
the fiscal cliff?” Daniel H. Pink blog, January 7, 2013,
http://www.danpink.com/2013/01/does-the-school-cliff-matter-more-than-the-fiscalcliff/.
14 “I have so many state standards . . .” Amy Harmon, “May Be a Sputnik Moment, but
Science Fairs Are Lagging,” New York Times, February 5, 2011.
15 Dominic Randolph . . . uses the corporate term . . . From my interview with Randolph,
December 2012.
16 Susan Engel of Williams College did . . . Susan Engel, “Children’s Need to Know:
Curiosity in Schools,” Harvard Educational Review, Winter 2011.
17 Why do we want kids to “sit still” in class? . . . Susan Saulny, “Students Stand When
Called Upon, and When Not,” New York Times, February 24, 2009.
18 “Our grandfathers and great grandfathers . . .” Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams.
19 “It seems the main rule that . . .” Jamie Angell, “Explaining Groening—One on one with
the sultan of fun,” Simpsons Illustrated 1, no. 9 (Summer 1993).
20 New York’s Harlem neighborhood in . . . I am greatly indebted to Deborah Meier for
doing a series of interviews with me in late 2012 and early 2013. Material was also
drawn from Meier’s blog, Deborah Meier on Education, http://deborahmeier.com/.
21 Meier opened the first of her schools . . . In my description of Central Park East schools,
I quoted and drew heavily from Seymour Fliegel’s excellent article “Debbie Meier and
the Dawn of Central Park East,” City Journal, Winter 1994.
22 “an astonishingly rich educational program” . . . Ibid.
23 But such schools still represent just . . . From my interviews with Nikhil Goyal, April
2013; for more, see Goyal’s book, One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student’s Assessment of
School (Bravura Books, 2012).
24 alumni have become known as the Montessori Mafia . . . Peter Sims, “The Montessori
Mafia,” Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2011.
25 Marissa Mayer—now the head of Yahoo! . . . Steven Levy, “Larry Page Wants to
Return Google to Its Startup Roots,” Wired, April 2011.
26 Dan Meyer, a high school math teacher . . . Meyer gave his talk, “Math Class Needs a
Makeover,” at TEDxNYED, March 2010.
27 Why do movie tickets cost the same for hits or duds? . . . Robert H. Frank, “How Can
They Charge That? (and Other Questions),” New York Times, May 11, 2013.
28 Dennie Palmer Wolf, a professor . . . Dennie Palmer Wolf, “The Art of Questioning,”
Academic Connections, Winter 1987.
29 What is a flame? . . . Kenneth Change, “A Challenge to Make Science Crystal Clear,”
New York Times, March 5, 2012. Also from articles on the Center for Communicating
Science website, http://www.centerforcommunicatingscience.org/the-flame-challenge2/about-the-challenge/.
30 Joshua Aronson of New York University . . . From my interview with Aronson,
November 2012.
31 A recent study of fourth- and fifth-grade . . . Jessica McCrory Calarco, “Middle-Class
Children: Squeaky wheels in training,” Indiana University study (press release posted on
Eurekalert!), August 19, 2012.
32 One of the “master questioners” I . . . Jack Andraka interview, February 12, 2012.
33 When the Boston high school teacher . . . Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana, Make Just
One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions (Cambridge. MA: Harvard
Education Press, 2012).
34 Luz Santana knew from firsthand experience . . . From my interview with Santana.
35 They found that their questioning techniques . . . These case studies are cited on the
website of the Right Question Institute.
36 “seems to unlock something for them” . . . Rothstein and Santana, Make Just One
Change.
37 The social critic Neil Postman wondered . . . Neil Postman, Building a Bridge to the
18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future (New York: Knopf, 1999).
38 William Deresiewicz, the acclaimed author . . . From my interview with Deresiewicz,
January 30, 2013.
39 “He had a young person’s ability . . .” Deresiewicz’s description of his college professor
is from his essay “A Jane Austen Education,” Chronicle Review, May 1, 2011,
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Jane-Austen-Education/127269/.
40 How might parents make their kids better questioners? . . . Hal Gregersen’s quote is
from my interview with him; Isidor Isaac Rabi’s quote has circulated widely, recently
appearing on Signals vs. Noise, an online publication of 37signals.com
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3424-my-mother-made-me-a-scientist-without-ever;
Clayton Christensen’s quote is from my interview with him; David Kelley’s quote from
his interview with Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes, airdate January 6, 2012.
41 Thrun and one of his partners . . . From my interview with Au, as well as my e-mail
exchanges with Thrun. I also drew on an article profiling Thrun, Tom Vanderbilt, “How
Artificial Intelligence Can Change Higher Education,” Smithsonian magazine, December
2012.
42 One college professor recently observed . . . Thomas Friedman, “Revolution Hits the
Universities,” New York Times, January 26, 2013.
Chapter 3: The Why, What If, and How of Innovative
Questioning
1 Edwin Land was a brilliant inventor . . . In recounting the Polaroid story, I relied on a
number of sources, starting with Life magazine’s cover story, “A Genius and His
Camera,” October 27, 1972. In the article, Land explains, in his own words, how his
daughter asked him why she couldn’t see the photograph right away. A good roundup on
the Polaroid story also appears in Harry McCracken, “Polaroid SX-70: The Art and
Science of the Nearly Impossible,” Technologizer, June 8, 2011,
http://technologizer.com/2011/06/08/polaroid/. Another good source was “Polaroid
Corporation,” International Directory of Company Histories, vol. 93 (Detroit: St. James
Press, 2008). I first learned about the Polaroid question story from Mike Brewster, “The
Great Innovators: Instant Photos, Lasting Fame,” Business Week, June 29, 2004. Several
good books have been written about Land and Polaroid, including Victor K. McElheny,
Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
But I am particularly indebted to the Christopher Bonanos book Instant: The Story of
Polaroid (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). See also Bonanos, “The
Man Who Inspired Jobs,” New York Times, October 7, 2011. Bonanos is slightly
skeptical about the veracity of the “daughter’s question” story, whether Land
embellished his own tale; nevertheless I choose to accept Land’s story as truth—if not a
literal one, then a larger one.
2 “it wouldn’t do to have a tank . . .” Bonanos, Instant.
3 While everyone else nodded . . . From my interviews with George Lois in 2008 and 2009,
for Glimmer.
4 “Why does it pay to swim with dolphins?” . . . The story about Marc Benioff’s question
was told in Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s DNA:
Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators (Cambridge: Harvard Business
Review Press, 2011). The quote about “turning the software industry on its head” is from
Jon Swartz, “Salesforce CEO leads charge against software,” USA Today, July 24, 2007.
5 Robert Burton, a neurologist and . . . From my interview with Burton, November 2012.
Burton’s theories about certainty also appear in his article “The Certainty Epidemic,”
Salon, February 29, 2008; as well as in Burton’s book, On Being Certain: Believing You
Are Right Even When You’re Not (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008).
6 A nice description of this phenomenon . . . Maura O’Neill, “Disruptive Innovation Often
Comes from Unexpected Places,” Huffington Post, January 25, 2013.
7 the late cofounder of Apple, Steve Jobs . . . Jobs’s interest in shoshin and other Zen
principles has been chronicled in a number of places, including Walter Isaacson’s
biography Steve Jobs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011); as well as Daniel Burke,
“Steve Jobs’ Private Spirituality Now an Open Book,” USA Today, November 2, 2011;
and my own article for Fast Company, “What Zen Taught Steve Jobs (and Silicon
Valley) about Innovation,” April 9, 2012, http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669387/whatzen-taught-silicon-valley-and-steve-jobs-about-innovation.
8 a bit of ancient wisdom, brought to . . . As explained to me by Randy Komisar, in my
interviews with him in the spring and fall of 2012. For more on Shunryu Suzuki, see his
book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice
(Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2011).
9 Les Kaye is a Zen abbot . . . From my interview with Kaye, April 2012, for my Fast
Company article “What Zen Taught Steve Jobs.”
10 Randy Komisar, a partner in the renowned . . . From a series of interviews with
Komisar in 2012 (for Fast Company and this book). For more from Komisar, see his
book The Monk and the Riddle (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001).
11 “we are often looking at a problem . . .” From my interview with Tod Machover on
April 12, 2013.
12 a study conducted by the researchers . . . From my interview with Darya Zabelina,
December 5, 2012.
13 vuja de, to use a quirky term . . . Bob Sutton wrote about vuja de in his book Weird Ideas
That Work: 11½ Practices for Promoting, Managing and Sustaining Innovation (New
York: Free Press, 2002). The concept was also discussed in “Anthropologists in Pursuit
of Vuja De,” Fast Company, October 17, 2005. Also, see the post on my website “The
Power of Vuja De,” A More Beautiful Question, September 16, 2012,
http://amorebeautifulquestion.com/power-of-vuja-de/.
14 “see what’s always been there . . . ” Tom Kelley, The Ten Faces of Innovation (New
York: Doubleday, 2005).
15 the term was mentioned, albeit briefly . . . George Carlin’s vuja de bit can be seen on
YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7LBSDQ14eA.
16 the comedian and radio host Kelly Carlin . . . From my interview with Kelly Carlin,
April 10, 2013.
17 George Carlin once said that . . . Stephen Sherrill, “Oh, Happy Day,” New York Times
Magazine, June 3, 2001.
18 “they stopped looking too soon” . . . Kelley, Ten Faces of Innovation.
19 business professor Vijay Govindarajan and . . . Vijay Govindarajan and Srikanth
Srinivas, “What’s the Connection Between Counting Squares and Innovation?,” Harvard
Business Review, April 1, 2013.
20 “shifting our focus from objects or . . . ” Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work.
21 Why can’t computers do more than compute? . . . Tim Berners-Lee details from Peter J.
Denning, “Innovating the future: from ideas to adoption: futurists and innovators can
teach each other lessons to help their ideas succeed” The Futurist, January–February
2012; Mary Bellis, “Tim Berners-Lee,” About.com
http://inventors.about.com/od/bstartinventors/p/TimBernersLee.htm; and Academy of
Achievement website http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/ber1bio-1.
22 “How were we going to pay” . . . From my series of interviews with Joe Gebbia, April
2013.
23 “No one would want to stay in . . .” Barney Jopson, “Dotcom Prodigy Builds Business
From Airbed,” Financial Times, July 29, 2011.
24 Consider, for example, that the average power . . . Jessica Salter, “Airbnb: The Story
behind the $1.3bn Room-letting Website,” Telegraph, September 7, 2012.
25 “it creates dissonance,” notes Paul Bottino . . . From my interview with Bottino.
26 Why can’t India have 911 emergency service? . . . From my interview with Jacqueline
Novogratz of the Acumen Fund; plus, Shaffi Mather’s November 2009 TED Talk, “A
New Way to Fight Corruption.”
http://www.ted.com/talks/shaffi_mather_a_new_way_to_fight_corruption.html
27 The five whys methodology originated . . . Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System:
Beyond Large-Scale Production (Portland, OR: Productivity Press, 1988). Also, Eric
Ries, The Lean Startup (New York: Crown Business, 2011).
28 IDEO example of five whys . . . From the company’s “Method Cards,” published by
William Stout, November 2003.
29 character actor and author Stephen Tobolowsky . . . From my interview with
Tobolowsky, February 17, 2013.
30 Why isn’t the water reaching the people who need it? . . . From my interview with Gary
White; also, Ellen McGirt, “Can This Man Save This Girl?” Fast Company, July/August
2011.
31 “only to end up in ‘incubator graveyards’” . . . Madeline Drexler, “Looking Under the
Hood and Seeing an Incubator,” New York Times, December 16, 2008.
32 In the business world, IDEO has . . . From my interviews with IDEO executives, from
2008 through 2013, including Tim Brown, David Kelley, Jane Fulton Suri, Paul Bennett,
Fred Dust, and others.
33 One classic example involved a hospital . . . From my interview with IDEO’s Bennett,
who also tells the hospital story in his July 2005 TED talk, “Design Is in the Details,”
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_bennett_finds_design_in_the_details.html.
34 The Acumen Fund’s Jacqueline Novogratz . . . From my interview with Novogratz at
Acumen’s New York office, March 14, 2013.
35 Eric Maisel calls a “productive obsession” . . . From my interview with Maisel, fall
2013. From more on productive obsession, see Vern Burkhardt’s interview with Maisel,
“Your Brain Will Thank You, Part 1,” IdeaConnection blog, December 5, 2010.
36 Before he changed the way many . . . The Pandora section relied on several articles about
the company, as well as speeches and online interviews with Tim Westergren, including
Rob Walker, “The Song Decoders,” New York Times Magazine, October 18, 2009; Bill
Moggridge’s interview with Westergren for Moggridge’s book/DVD Designing Media
(the interview was posted online February 3, 2011, on the Cooper-Hewitt Museum
website, http://www.cooperhewitt.org/conversations/2011/02/02/designing-media-timwestergren; Westergren’s Chicago Ideas Week speech in October 2011,
http://www.chicagoideas.com/videos/53; and Rocco Pendola, “A Conversation with
Pandora’s Tim Westergren,” The Street, February 12, 2013.
37 “In order for imagination to flourish . . .” Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown,
“Cultivating the Imagination: Building Learning Environments for Innovation,”
Teachers College Record, February 17, 2011.
38 What if we combine three snacks into one? (And then add a prize?) . . . Gary
Satanovsky, “Prizes Inserted into Cracker Jack Boxes,” Famous Daily, February 19,
2012; Manny Fernadez, “Let Us Now Praise the Great Men of Junk Food,” New York
Times, August 7, 2010.
39 to use a term that seems to have . . . Thackara talks about “smart recombinations” in his
book In the Bubble (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
40 “The creative act is no longer . . .” Jason Tanz, “Remix Culture: Humanities,” Wired,
September 27, 2010.
41 The book’s author, Seth Grahame-Smith . . . Michael Cieply, “The Great Emancipator,
Vampires on His Mind,” New York Times, May 20, 2011.
42 David Kord Murray, a former rocket scientist . . . From a series of interviews I did with
Murray in spring 2013; I also relied on Vern Burkhardt’s interview with Murray, “Search
and Combine Ideas,” IdeaConnection, November 7, 2010. Murray explores the
“connections” idea at length in his book Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business
Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others (New York: Gotham, 2010).
43 it’s a form of divergent thinking . . . From my interview with Heilman.
44 More obvious mental connections and associations . . . From my interview with
Kounios.
45 Chen-Bo Zhong, a professor at the . . . From my interview with Zhong, November 2012;
from more on his research, see Chen-Bo Zhong, “The Role of Unconscious Thought in
the Creative Process,” Rotman magazine, Winter 2010.
46 What if dots and dashes could sort the world? . . . Margalit Fox, “N. Joseph Woodland,
Inventor of the Bar Code, Dies at 91,” New York Times, December 12, 2012.
47 Google’s scientist-in-residence Ray Kurzweil . . . Kurzweil told this to Thea Singer, “6
Beautiful Minds,” O, the Oprah Magazine, June 2007,
http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Modern-Day-Geniuses-The-Worlds-Brightest-Minds.
48 Sam McNerney pulled together a number . . . Sam McNerney, “Unconscious Creativity:
Step Back to Step Forward,” Big Think blog, May 24, 2012; also, Sam McNerney,
“Relaxation & Creativity—the Science of ‘Sleeping on It,’” Big Think blog, May 8,
2012; and Annie Murphy Paul, “Why Daydreaming Isn’t a Waste of Time,” Mind/Shift
blog, from KQED Public Media for Northern California, June 1, 2012.
49 “Museums are the custodians of epiphanies” . . . Hugh Hart, “Seven Pieces of ‘Damn
Good’ Creative Advice from 60s Ad Man George Lois,” Fast Company, March 23,
2012. This quote originated in Lois’s book Damn Good Advice (for People with Talent)
(New York: Phaidon Press, 2012).
50 This idea’s roots can be found . . . I have discussed thinking wrong in my interviews with
Bielenberg (February 2013); Sagmeister (multiple interviews in 2008, for Glimmer); and
with Luke Williams, formerly of Frog Design (spring 2012).
51 you “jiggle the synapses” in the brain . . . Barbara Strauch, “How to Train the Aging
Brain,” New York Times, January 3, 2010.
52 John Bielenberg, a designer best known . . . From my interview with Bielenberg.
53 I attended a workshop run by the creativity consultant Tom Monahan, who teaches an
exercise he calls 180-degree thinking.
54 Luke Williams, a former creative director . . . From my spring 2012 interview with
Williams; also from his book Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in
Your Business (FT Press, 2011).
55 What if prisons had no walls? . . . Graeme Wood, “Prison Without Walls,” Atlantic,
September 2010.
56 She was having trouble getting out . . . From a series of interviews I did with Nanda,
starting in 2009 (for Glimmer) and concluding in spring 2013.
57 Nanda’s quirky project drew the attention . . . Gizmodo,
http://gizmodo.com/036052/clocky-rolling-alarm-clock, and Engadget both wrote about
Nanda and the Clocky in 2005, when the product was still being developed.
58 “The important thing about telling everyone . . .” Sam Potts, “My Six Point Plan for
Doing Projects,” GOOD.is, June 3, 2013.
59 “If you want everyone to have . . .” Clive Thompson, “Think Visual: Why the best way
to solve complicated problems might be to draw them,” Wired, October 2010.
60 “A prototype is a question, embodied” . . . This line, along with lots of other interesting
thoughts on prototyping, can be found on Rodriguez’s bog Metacool,
http://metacool.typepad.com/metacool/2009/04/4-prototype-as-if-you-are-right-listen-asif-you-are-wrong.html.
61 “enabling a class of ordinary people . . . J. Paul Grayson’s quote appeared in Ashlee
Vance, “A Technology Sets Inventors Free to Dream,” New York Times, September 14,
2010.
62 “How might we roll it instead of lugging it?” . . . Joe Sharkey, “Reinventing the Suitcase
by Adding the Wheel,” New York Times, October 4, 2010.
63 As the writer Peter Sims noted in . . . Peter Sims, “The Number One Enemy of
Creativity: Fear of Failure,” Harvard Business Review, October 5, 2012; see also, Peter
Sims, “Daring to Stumble on the Road to Discovery,” New York Times, August 7, 2011.
64 At Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg has . . . Zuckerberg published his manifesto
“The Hacker Way” as part of his letter to investors during Facebook’s IPO in early 2012.
Wired reprinted the complete letter, http://www.wired.com/business/2012/02/zuckletter/.
65 “the trick is to go from one failure . . .” This quote is worded differently depending on
where you find it. On the site Lifehack, it reads, “Success is the ability to go from one
failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm,” http://quotes.lifehack.org/winstonchurchill/success-is-the-ability-to-go-from/.
66 How do you make a hard-boiled egg’s shell disappear? . . . Amy Wallace, “You Bring
an Idea and They’ll Do the Rest,” New York Times, June 12, 2011.
67 Stanford University’s Bob Sutton says that . . . Robert I. Sutton, “Learning from
Success and Failure,” HBR.org, June 4, 2007.
68 “If you keep making the same . . .” Ibid.
69 How do you fit a large golf course on a small island? . . . Adapted from Steven
Feinberg, “Seeing: How to create advantages through ‘tactical shifting,” Conference
Board Review, Winter 2011, and Bruce Anderson, “A Golf Ball that Won’t Carry as Far
Enabled Jack to Build a Minicourse,” Sports Illustrated, July 23, 1984.
70 “When we think of inventors” . . . Nicole LaPorte, “Don’t Know How? Find Someone
Who Does,” New York Times, November 27, 2011.
71 “if we have people with diverse tools . . .” Claudia Dreifus, “A Conversation with Scott
E. Page: In Professor’s Model, Diversity = Productivity,” New York Times, January 8,
2008. See also Page’s book The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better
Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
72 “we all have two amazing things . . .” From my interview with Mick Ebeling, April
2013. I also drew from Ebeling’s TED talk, “The Invention That Unlocked a Locked-In
Artist,” March 2011. The speech was featured in April 2013 on the Huffington Post,
http://www.ted.com/talks/mick_ebeling_the_invention_that_unlocked_a_locked_in_artist.html.
73 Tod Machover of MIT Media Lab . . . From my interview with Machover.
74 How might we cut the cord? . . . Details about Ran Poliakine’s question comes from
Erica Swallow’s “How Powermat Is Leading the Charge for Wireless Electricity,”
Mashable.com, October 20, 2011, http://mashable.com/2011/10/20/powermat-wirelesscharging-tech/. Meredith Perry’s details from Alyson Shontell’s “Open Letter to
Meredith Perry and uBeam,” on Businessinsider.com, July 12, 2012,
http://www.businessinsider.com/open-letter-to-meredith-perry-and-ubeam-2012-
7#ixzz2dUyhhiEI.
75 As the author Clay Shirky has . . . The appeal of collaborative endeavors is discussed at
length in Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody (New York: Penguin Books, 2009).
Chapter 4: Questioning in Business
1 Christensen introduced the term disruptive innovation . . . The section on Clayton
Christensen is from my interview with Christensen, plus the following sources:
Christensen’s online interview on the HBR Channel’s The Idea, posted on
www.claytonchristensen.com; Brad Wieners, “Clay Christensen’s Life Lessons,”
Bloomberg BusinessWeek, May 3, 2012; Lahrissa MacFarquhar, “When Giants Fail,”
New Yorker, May 14, 2012; and Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 1997).
2 “we’re coming off a twenty-five-year . . .” From my interviews and e-mail follow-up
with Keith Yamashita, January and February 2013.
3 Small wonder, then, that for top . . . From my interview with Dev Patnaik, December
2012.
4 “The industrial economy was all about . . .” From my interviews with Eric Ries, January
and May 2013.
5 “The pressure on short-term results tends . . .” From my interview with Wagner.
6 Yamashita uses a set of questions . . . Yamashita’s questions appeared in my post “The 5
Questions Every Company Should Ask Itself,”Fast Company, February 4, 2013,
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671756/the-5-questions-every-company-should-askitself.
7 “There is great tension every day . . .” From my interview with Casey Sheahan,
February 12, 2013.
8 Nike provides an instructive example of . . . The Nike+ story appears in, among other
places, Mark McClusky, “The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the
Power of Personal Metrics,” Wired, June 22, 2009.
9 Jobs initially berated Nike chief executive . . . This anecdote appeared in Ellen McGirt’s
profile of Parker, “Artist. Athlete. CEO,” Fast Company, September 2010.
10 Are we really who we say we are? . . . Polly LaBarre, “Hit Man,” Fast Company, August
31, 2002.
11 Fast Company pointed out that a . . . Austin Carr, “Death to Core Competency,” Fast
Company, February 14, 2013.
12 Even newer companies must make these kinds of major shifts . . . Sheryl Sandberg’s
question-driven initiative was described by Kurt Eichenwald, “Facebook Leans In,”
Vanity Fair, May 2013.
13 Early in its history, the microprocessor . . . This famous story from Intel’s early history
appears in many articles and sites, but I came across it on the website for the Center for
Applied Rationality, http://rationality.org/rationality/.
14 Jack Bergstrand of Brand Velocity thinks . . . From my interview with Bergstrand,
January 2013.
15 Vijay Govindarajan notes, hospitals in India . . . Kaihan Krippendorff, “Hurricane
Sandy, a Drenching Reminder That Tough Times Inspire Innovation,” Fast Company,
November 1, 2012.
16 What if we were to compete against ourselves? . . . The story of the Atlantic’s
reinvention comes from numerous sources, including Jeremy W. Peters, “Web Focus
Helps Revitalize The Atlantic,” New York Times, December 12, 2010; Lauren Indvik,
“Inside ‘The Atlantic’: How One Magazine Got Profitable by Going ‘Digital First,’”
Mashable.com, December 19, 2011, http://mashable.com/2011/12/19/the-atlantic-digitalfirst/; and David Carr, “Covering the World of Business, Digital Only,” New York Times,
September 24, 2012.
17 “The modern worker is not the salary . . .” From my interview with Tim Ogilvie,
January 4, 2013.
18 Panera CEO Ron Shaich recalls that . . . From my interview with Shaich, March 8,
2013.
19 How can we drive more ounces into more bodies, more often? . . . Michael Moss, “The
Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” New York Times Magazine, February
20, 2013 (adapted from Moss’s book, “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked
Us.”); also, Douglas McGray, “How Carrots Became the New Junk Food,” Fast
Company, March 22, 2011.
20 “What is your tennis ball? (and other entrepreneurial questions)” . . . Drew Houston’s
comments excerpted from his commencement speech at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, June 7, 2013; Brian Spaly quote from “How Entrepreneurs Come Up With
Great Ideas,” Wall Street Journal Reports, April 29, 2013; Peter Thiel question from
Trevor Gilbert, “Peter Thiel’s Pointed Questions to Ask Startups,” PandoDaily, April 19,
2012, http://pandodaily.com/2012/04/19/peter-thiels-pointed-questions-to-ask-startups/;
Dave Kashen, “The Values-Driven Startup,” Gigaom.com, December 17, 2011,
http://gigaom.com/2011/12/17/kashen-values-driven-startup/.
21 Ries believes one of the most . . . Ries’s question also appeared in my previously cited
Fast Company post “The 5 Questions Every Company Should Ask Itself.” See also
Ries’s book The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation
to Create Radically Successful Businesses (New York: Crown Business, 2011).
22 In the business world these days . . . For example, see Cliff Kuang, “The Brainstorming
Process Is BS, but Can We Rework It?,” Fast Company, January 31, 2012,
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1668930/the-brainstorming-process-is-bs-but-can-werework-it.
23 “There is too much pressure and . . .” Debra Kaye, “Why Innovation by Brainstorming
Doesn’t Work,” Fast Company, February 28, 2013.
24 Hal Gregersen has been studying the . . . From my interview with Gregersen. He also
discusses the effectiveness of Q-storming, including the “stalling at twenty-five
questions” part, in the online video “Question Storming Versus Brainstorming,” posted
in Vimeo in September 2012, http://vimeo.com/48200106.
25 How might we? It’s a simple . . . The How might we? story comes from my interviews in
September 2012 with Min Basadur, Charles Warren, and Tim Brown, for my Harvard
Business Review post “The Secret Phrase Top Innovators Use,” September 17, 2012,
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/09/the_secret_phrase_top_innovato.html. Hat tip to Charles
Warren, who first talked about the Basadur/How might we? story in this video:
http://vimeo.com/21316624.
26 What would Neil Patrick Harris do? . . . From my interview with Andrew Rossi of M
Booth; the description of Neil Patrick Harris from Hillary Busis, “No big opening
number at this year’s Emmys—and more hints from Neil Patrick Harris,” Entertainment
Weekly’s Inside TV blog, September 6, 2013, http://insidetv.ew.com/2013/09/06/neilpatrick-harris-emmys-interview/.
27 Although the HMW has been used . . . Prior to Basadur’s use, the phrase How might we?
was being used as part of the Creative Problem Solving Process, developed by Sid
Parnes.
28 Adam Bryant, who writes the New . . . Adam Bryant, “Distilling the Wisdom of CEOs,”
New York Times, April 16, 2011. See also Bryant’s book The Corner Office:
Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed (New
York: Times Books, 2011).
29 Randy Komisar, a leading Silicon Valley . . . From my interviews with Komisar, fall
2012.
30 Bryan Franklin has observed that effective . . . From Franklin’s TEDxSinCity talk,
“The Most Dangerous Question on Earth,” uploaded May 27, 2011,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tClHDEoje6Y.
31 Why can’t everyone accept credit cards? . . . David Pogue, “Card Reader on a Phone
Pays Off,” New York Times, September 30, 2010; Issie Lapowsky, “The Man Who Made
the Cash Register Obsolete,” Inc. Magazine, May 2013; Dorsey’s views on simplicity
taken from “6 Questions with Jack Dorsey,” Detroit Free Press, September 16, 2012;
also, Daniel Terdiman, “Square’s Jack Dorsey to Tech Founders: Question Everything,”
C/NET, September 10, 2012.
32 leaders need extraordinary “sensemaking” capabilities . . . Sangeeth Varghese, “The
Four Capabilities Behind Great Leadership,” Forbes, September 7, 2010.
33 The late, legendary business guru Peter Drucker . . . From my conversation with Rick
Wartzman, as well as from his post “How to Consult Like Peter Drucker,” Forbes,
September 11, 2012.
34 And as author Dan Ariely noted . . . Dan Ariely, “Why Businesses Don’t Experiment,”
Harvard Business Review, April 2010.
35 When Jim Hackett, the CEO of Steelcase . . . From my interview with Hackett, though I
also relied on Hackett quotes in Adam Bryant, “Leadership Never Looks Prepackaged,”
New York Times, August 19, 2012.
36 “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing . . .” Bertrand Russell’s quote appears in many places,
including “26 Fantastic Thoughts and Quotes by Bertrand Russell,” on the Vivsingh
quotations site, http://www.vivsingh.com/4161/great-minds-genius-people-quotesquotations/26-fantastic-quotes-thoughts-bertrand-russell.
37 Tim Brown, the chief executive at IDEO . . . From my interview with Brown, April 21,
2013.
38 What if a bookstore could be like summer camp? . . . From my interview with
BookPeople’s Steve Bercu; also, Yvonne Zipp “The Novel Resurgence of Independent
Bookstores,” Christian Science Monitor, March 17, 2013.
39 A different approach by IBM under . . . As told to me by Keith Yamashita, who has
consulted for IBM.
40 Google has maintained a wide-open . . . Google’s TGIF sessions are well-known, but an
insider’s description of them was provided to me by former Google engineer Charles
Warren.
41 The business writer Dale Dauten has . . . Vern Burkhardt, “Interview with Dale Dauten,”
IdeaConnection, March 21, 2011.
42 As Google has grown, it has become increasingly difficult . . . Christopher Mims,
“Google’s 20% time, which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead,”
Atlantic.com’s Quartz blog, August 16, 2013. (An update to the post suggested that the
program was still alive, though not used as much as in the past, for various reasons.)
43 LinkedIn, whose designated “Hack Days” . . . From Bob Jeffrey’s interview with
LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner, “Innovating From Within,” posted on Jeffrey’s Worldmakers
blog, June 24, 2013.
44 In Gore’s case, the program stipulates . . . The section on W. L. Gore comes primarily
from my interview with Gore’s Debra France, February 2013; another great source of
information on the company, including the story about guitar strings, was Alan
Deutschman, “The Fabric of Creativity,” Fast Company, December 1, 2004.
45 The company established Google University . . . Sarah Kessler, “Here’s a Google Perk
Any Company Can Imitate: Employee-to-Employee Learning,” Fast Company, March
26, 2013.
46 This is necessary because many of . . . The problem with playing devil’s advocate in
brainstorming sessions is well described in Tom Kelley, The Ten Faces of Innovation
(New York: Doubleday, 2005).
47 the pragmatic “implementers” . . . From my interviews with Min Basadur and my visit
to his company in December 2012. The term implementers is one of the four Basadur
uses to categorize people in creative/brainstorming sessions: generators, implementers,
optimizers, and conceptualizers.
Chapter 5: Questioning for Life
1 When Jacqueline Novogratz was about to . . . From my interview with Novogratz at
Acumen, March 14, 2013.
2 Some of the answers that emerged . . . Acumen success stories as told to me by
Novogratz, though they are described in more detail in her book The Blue Sweater:
Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (Rodale, 2009).
3 During a recent college commencement speech . . . Novogratz at Gettysburg College,
2012, http://www.gettysburg.edu/commencement/2012/novogratz.dot. Hat tip to Maria
Popova’s BrainPickings site, which featured the speech in the post “Live the Questions:
Jacqueline Novogratz’s Advice to Graduates,” May 29, 2012.
4 A mid-2013 Huffington Post conference urged . . . Alina Tugend, “A Budding
Movement to Redefine the Successful Life,” New York Times, June 14, 2013.
5 Magazines ran cover stories about the importance of . . . Among those was Fast
Company, which featured the “#Unplug” theme as its cover story in July/August 2013.
6 Oxford University psychology professor Mark Williams . . . Mark Williams, “Stress
and Mindfulness: A Primer,” Mindful.org, November 2, 2012.
7 Jeff Weiner, the chief executive of LinkedIn . . . Adam Bryant, “In Sports or Business,
Always Prepare for the Next Play,” New York Times, November 10, 2012.
8 The filmmaker Roko Belic told me . . . I am greatly indebted to Roko Belic, whom I
interviewed at length in February 2013. Belic’s film Happy was released in 2011 by
Wadi Rum Films and Shady Acres, www.TheHappyMovie.com.
9 The high school teacher David McCullough . . . The speech, at Wellesley High School,
was widely covered at the time; both text and video of the speech were posted June 5,
2012, on Wellesley High’s blog, The Wellesley Report,
http://theswellesleyreport.com/2012/06/wellesley-high-grads-told-youre-not-special/.
10 What is your sentence? . . . Drawn from Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About
What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009).
11 The start-up entrepreneur Kasper Hulthin discovered . . . Kasper Hulthin, “Why Every
Entrepreneur Must Learn to Ask the Right Questions,” Under30CEO, March 22, 2013.
12 The author and creativity coach Eric Maisel . . . From my interview with Maisel.
13 John Hagel suggests you ask yourself . . . From Hagel’s September 2012 post “The
Labor Day Manifesto of the Passionate Creative Worker,” Edge Perspectives,
http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2012/09/the-labor-daymanifesto-of-the-passionate-creative-worker.html.
14 Life coach Kelly Carlin is always . . . From my interview with Carlin, wherein we talked
about her father, George, but also discussed her experiences as a life coach.
15 Is there something else you might . . . Godin’s question was posed in his October 2012
interview with Jonathan Fields for the Good Life Project,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwANZNEOAoY.
16 Randy Komisar talks about the “deferred-life plan” . . . From Komisar’s book The
Monk and the Riddle.
17 The author Jonathan Fields, who has . . . From my interview with Fields, March 4,
2013. Fields explores this subject at length in his book Uncertainty (New York:
Portfolio/Penguin, 2011).
18 How many people does it take to change a light bulb for a senior citizen? . . . From my
interviews with Hilary Cottam in 2009; plus, Alice Rawsthorn, “A New Design Concept:
Creating Social Solutions for Old Age,” New York Times, October 26, 2008; Jonathan
Freedland, “The Perfect Gift? How About An End to Loneliness—and Not Just at
Christmas,” Guardian, December 22, 2009.
19 need to find one’s own “tortoise enclosure” . . . Cleese has discussed this in speeches on
creativity, as noted in Chris Higgins, “John Cleese: Create a Tortoise Enclosure for Your
Mind,” Mental Floss, November 11, 2009, http://mentalfloss.com/article/23240/johncleese-create-tortoise-enclosure-your-mind.
20 One of the current proponents of “unplugging” . . . From my March 2013 interview
with Shlain. She also discusses this in her article “Tech’s Best Feature: The off switch,”
Harvard Business Review, March 1, 2013.
21 “Thinking means concentrating on one thing . . .” William Deresiewicz, “Solitude and
Leadership,” October 2009 graduation lecture, U.S. Military Academy at West Point,
printed in American Scholar, Spring 2010.
22 Happiness researchers such as Tal Ben-Shahar . . . From Tal Ben-Shar’s video
interview on Big Think, “Five Steps for Being Happier Today,” November 17, 2010,
http://bigthink.com/videos/five-steps-for-being-happier-today.
23 When he visited a friend at . . . Belic’s trailer park was featured in Vanessa Grigoriadis,
“Bohemian Cove,” Vanity Fair, March 2011.
24 Jacqueline Novogratz has her own spin . . . From my interview with Novogratz; her
question was also discussed in Adam Bryant, “When Humility and Audacity Go Hand in
Hand,” New York Times, September 29, 2012.
25 Author Carol Adrienne related to identifying . . . From the interview of Adrienne by
Nancy Rosanoff for the online talk show Listening Place, January 5, 2012,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flsxwnSilGI.
26 “In school we learn that experimentation . . .” From Schank’s essay “Experimentation,”
Edge, http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_2.html#schank. He was one of a number of
leading thinkers writing in response to a question posed in 2011 by Edge: “What
scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” The essays are
compiled in John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter (New York: HarperPerennial,
2012).
27 a friend referred me to the writer . . . The friend was multimedia producer Gordon Platt.
28 Jacobs is an intensely curious man . . . The section on A.J. Jacobs is based on my
interview with him, February 6, 2013.
29 One of Jacobs’s other experiments was . . . Jacobs wrote about this in his book The
Know-It-All (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). He also wrote The Year of Living
Biblically (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007); My Life as an Experiment: One Man’s
Humble Quest to Improve Himself by Living as a Woman, Becoming George
Washington, Telling No Lies, and Other Radical Tests (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2010); and Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2012).
30 Esquire article called “The Rationality Project” . . . A.J. Jacobs, “The Rationality
Project: One Man’s Quest to Ignore His Gut Instinct,” Esquire, November 2008.
31 “you have a wonderful lab in . . .” From my interview with Chris Young, February 6,
2013.
32 When you change one small thing . . . I am indebted to a friend, the art director and
illustrator Jaye Medalia, for sharing this observation (based on her own experiences) in
conversation.
33 “It’s easier to act your way . . .” Fuller’s quote appears in various places, including the
post “Millard Fuller: A Home for Everyone,” Mark of a Leader,
http://www.themarkofaleader.com/library/stories/millard-fuller-a-home-for-everyone/.
34 Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational . . . Herminia Ibarra, “Managing
Yourself: How to Stay Stuck in the Wrong Career,” Harvard Business Review,
December 2002.
35 It was popularized a couple of decades . . . The quote appears in Schuller’s Possibility
Thinking: What Great Thing Would You Attempt . . . If You Knew You Could Not Fail?
(Nightingale Conant, 1989).
36 in a widely circulated TED speech . . . This is the same TED speech by Dugan cited in
chapter 1.
37 What if a TV drama could inspire real-life change? . . . Phil Zabriski, “After ‘The
Wire’ ended, actress Sonja Sohn couldn’t leave Baltimore’s troubled streets behind,”
Washington Post, January 27, 2012; and the RewiredforChange.org website.
38 “failure is good” message has gone mainstream . . . Richard Pérez-Peña,
“Commencement Speakers: In Looser Tone, a Call to Take Risks and Be Engaged,” New
York Times, June 16, 2013.
39 who used the term failure fetish . . . Daniel Altman, “The Failure Fetish,” Big Think,
June 11, 2013
40 The writer Peter Sims pointed out . . . Peter Sims, “The No. 1 Enemy of Creativity: Fear
of Failure,” Harvard Business Review, October 5, 2012.
41 “When we hit failure, I start . . .” From my interview with Ebeling.
42 “Failure is, in a sense, the highway . . .” Manoranjan Kumar, Dictionary of Quotations
(APH Publishing, 2008).
43 author Judith Beck told me she . . . From my e-mail exchanges with Judith Beck, April
2013.
44 The blogger Chris Guillebeau put yet . . . From Guillebeau’s post “What Would You Do
If You Knew You Would Not Fail?” from his blog, The Art of Non-Conformity, October
21, 2010, http://chrisguillebeau.com/3x5/what-would-you-do-if-you-knew-you-wouldnot-fail/.
45 Fran Peavey, a social activist, excelled . . . For the section on Peavey, I relied on
Peavey’s book By Life’s Grace: Musings on the Essence of Social Change, excerpted in
the Context Institute’s “Creating a Future We Can Live With”; David Leser, “Good Will
Hunting,” Melbourne Age, May 30, 1998; and Sharon Ede’s post “Strategic Questioning:
Asking Questions That Make a Difference, Cruxcatalyst, May 21, 2012,
http://www.cruxcatalyst.com/2012/05/21/strategic-questioning/#sthash.PnMnHmlg.dpbs.
46 “her flesh wobbles . . . her chest heaves . . .” From Leser’s Melbourne Post profile.
47 “I refined my interviewing technique . . .” Ibid.
48 One of her more interesting projects . . . Peavey’s account of this project is from her
book By Life’s Grace.
49 Former-adman-turned-activist Jon Bond . . . From my e-mail exchanges with Bond,
April 2013. Bond’s initiative was also covered in Joe Nocera, “Changing Minds After
Newtown,” New York Times, March 2, 2013.
50 What would you do to reach yourself? . . . From the Calvin Institute of Christian
Worship’s website article “Dare to Ask a Beautiful Question,”
http://worship.calvin.edu/resources/resource-library/dare-to-ask-a-beautiful-question/.
51 we should heed the advice of . . . This is from Chris Hughes’s 2013 commencement
speech at Georgia State University, as featured in Pérez-Peña, “Commencement
Speakers.”
52 one other question comes highly recommended . . . From my interview with Michael
Corning, December 2012.
53 Why is my father-in-law so difficult . . . Just want to make clear that this is a hypothetical
scenario—I have no problem getting along with my father-in-law, who is a terrific guy
and great questioner in his own right—and who provided a number of excellent ideas
and tips for the book.
54 Bruce Feiler, author of The Secrets . . . From A.J. Jacobs interview with Bruce Feiler,
Amazon.com, February 2013; also from Bruce Feiler, “The Stories That Bind Us,” New
York Times, March 15, 2013.
55 When Doug Rauch came to the end . . . From my series of interviews with Rauch, spring
2013. The Harvard program Rauch enrolled in is also covered in Glenn Ruffenach,
“Tools to Help the World,” Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2012.
56 Should we retire the concept of “retirement?” . . . Adapted from Marc Freedman’s “A
New Vision for Retirement: Productive and Meaningful,” HBR.org blog, February 25,
2013, http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/02/a-new-vision-for-retirement-pr/; and also from the
website www.encore.org.
57 Google’s Sebastian Thrun likens each of . . . From Thrun’s 99U speech, “On the
Universal Law of Innovation: Build It, Break It, Improve it,” April 2013,
http://99u.com/videos/15737/sebastian-thrun-on-the-universal-law-of-innovation-buildit-break-it-improve-it.
58 Gary White’s ongoing effort to answer . . . From my interview with White in New York
City, February 11, 2013.
59 Bennett culls all of these bits . . . Bennett’s blog, The Curiosity Chronicles, can be found
at http://curiositychronicles.tumblr.com/.
60 Keep yourself away from the answers . . . The quote written on Colum McCann’s wall
was mentioned in a profile of McCann by Joel Lovell, “The World Still Spinning,” New
York Times Magazine, June 2, 2013. I wrote to McCann to ask him about it; his quotes
are from our e-mail exchanges, June 20/21, 2013.
61 New York Times interview with the . . . Patrick Healy, “Now, the Next Stage,” New York
Times, August 26, 2012.
62 The actor-turned-director Ben Affleck . . . George Clooney, “George Clooney on Ben
Affleck,” Entertainment Weekly, December 7, 2012.
63 What if we cultivated ignorance instead . . . From Firestein’s book Ignorance.
Index of Questions
Why are we doing this particular thing in this particular way?, 2
With so much evidence in its favor and with everyone from Einstein to Jobs in its corner, why, then, is
questioning under-appreciated in business, under-taught in schools, and under-utilized in our everyday
lives?
Why does a 4-year-old girl begin to question less at age 5 or 6? And what are the ramifications of that, for
her and for the world around her?
If, as Einstein tells us, questioning is important, why aren’t we trying to stem or reverse its decline by
finding ways to keep questioning alive?
Why do some keep questioning, while others stop? (Was it something in the genes, in the schools, in the
parenting?)
If we look at the questioners versus the non-questioners, who seems to be coming out ahead?
If we know (or at least strongly suspect) that questioning is a starting point for innovation, then why doesn’t
business embrace it?
Why don’t companies train people to question, and create systems and environments that would encourage
them to keep doing so?
If companies were to train people to question, and create systems and environments that encourage them to
do so, how might they go about it?
How can we develop and improve this ability to question?
Can we rekindle that questioning spark we had at age four?
If facts are entitled to an index, then why not questions?
Why are we here, How does one define ‘good,’ Is there life after death? (questions not covered in this book)
What is the fresh idea that will help my business stand out?
What if I come at my work or my art in a whole different way?
How might I tackle a longstanding problem that has affected my community, my family?
If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they make a decent foot?, (Van Phillips’ big question)
Why don’t they come up with a better snow shovel?
I wonder if this prototype will hold up better than the last one?
How might we prepare during peacetime to offer help in times of war?
What if this change represents an opportunity for us? How might we make the most of the situation?
Why are we falling behind competitors?
Who is to blame?
What business are we in now—and is there still a job for me?
Now that we know what we now know, what’s possible now?
Why should I have to pay these late fees?, (the question behind Netflix)
How am I going to explain these late fees to my spouse?
What if a video rental business were run like a health club?
Why do we have to wait for the picture? (the question that led to Polaroid)
Can animation be cuddly?
With all that’s changing in the world and in our customers’ lives, what business are we really in?
I established myself over the years—so why should I have to start over?
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?
Are questions becoming more valuable than answers?
What if we could paint over our mistakes? (the question behind Liquid Paper)
What is the agenda behind this information? How current is it? How does it connect with other information
I’m finding?
Can technology help us ask better questions?
Why did my candy bar melt? (and will my popcorn pop?)
Could the energy from radio waves be used to cook food?
Is “knowing” obsolete? (Sugata Mitra’s big question)
Why does it all begin with Why?
If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t I (not “they”) make a decent foot?
Why did a prosthetic foot have to be shaped like a bulky human foot? Did that even make sense?
Why was there so much emphasis on trying to match the look of a human foot? Wasn’t performance more
important?
Why did this have to happen to me?
Why am I not happy with my life as it is?
Why is my career not advancing in the way I’d hoped? Or if it is advancing, and I’m still not happy, why is
that?
Why aren’t the players urinating more? (the question that led to Gatorade)
Why is my product or service failing to connect with customers who ought to love it?
How do you move from asking to action?
Are we too enthralled with answers?
Are we afraid of questions, especially those that linger too long?
What if a car windshield could blink? (the question that led to windshield wipers)
Why can’t a wiper work more like my eyelid, blinking as much (or little) as needed?
What if you could somehow replicate a diving board’s propulsive effect in a prosthetic foot?
What if a human leg could be more like a cheetah’s?
How do I actually get this done?
How do I decide which of my ideas is the one I’ll pursue?
How do I begin to test that idea, to see what works and what doesn’t?
If/when I find it’s not working, how do I figure out what’s wrong and fix it?
Why does it have to cost so much? What if the design were tweaked in some way—through new materials,
different processes—so as to make this accessible to more people? How might I make that work?
How did “master questioners” come to be that way? And why aren’t more people like that?
Why do kids ask so many questions? (And how do we really feel about that?)
Papa, why can’t we go outside?
Why is the sky blue?
Why does questioning fall off a cliff?
Is the ‘student cliff’ even scarier than the fiscal cliff?
Do kids stop questioning because they’ve lost interest in school, or do they lose interest in school because
their natural curiosity (and propensity to question) is somehow tamped down?
Why do we want kids to “sit still” in class?
If schools were built on a factory model, were they actually designed to squelch questions?
Why are we sending kids to school in the first place?
What kind of preparation does the modern workplace and society demand of its citizens? What kind of
skills, knowledge, capabilities are needed in order to be productive and thrive?
What if our schools could train students to be better lifelong learners and better adapters to change, by
enabling them to be better questioners? How might we create such a school?
Can a school be built on questions?
Is a test-driven education the most likely path for producing an inventive and feisty citizenry?
What would it look and sound like in the average classroom if we wanted to make ‘being wrong’ less
threatening?
What might the potential for humans be if we really encouraged the spirit of questioning in children, instead
of closing it down?
How do we know what’s true or false? What evidence counts?
How might this look if we stepped into other shoes, or looked at it from a different direction?
Is there a pattern? Have we seen something like this before?
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?
Isn’t there anything better than this?
What’s interesting to me?
Why do movie tickets cost the same for hits or duds?
How long is it going to take the water tank to fill up?
Who is entitled to ask questions in class?
What is a flame? (Alan Alda’s lingering question)
How do you make science enjoyable for kids?
What is time?
Do we really want 300 million people who actually think for themselves?
Would students who are battling against stereotypes be less inclined to interrupt lessons by asking questions
—which might reveal to the rest of the class that they don’t know something?
If we’re born to inquire, then why must it be taught?
Why is torture effective? How do you define torture? Can torture make you happy? Does torture have
anything to do with justice? Who are mostly to be tortured? How can someone’s pain be the price for the
outcome you want? (questions asked by schoolchildren using the RQI method)
What can the people thinking about social problems or making social policy learn from the people who are
actually affected by those problems?
What if we could find a way to help parents ask better questions at school meetings?
What if we take the adult question-formulation program and adapt it for school-age kids?
Is it not curious, then, that the most significant intellectual skill available to human beings is not taught in
schools?
Can we teach ourselves to question?
How might parents make their kids better questioners?
Again, why do we have to wait for the picture?
What if you could somehow have a darkroom inside a camera?
How would one print a positive? How would you configure both negative film and positive paper in the
back of the camera?
Why can’t the camera be easier to use?
Why does stepping back help us move forward?
In a world that expects us to move fast, to keep advancing, and to just ‘get it done,’ who has time for asking
why?
Why does it pay to swim with dolphins?
Why aren't all enterprise software applications built like Amazon and eBay?
Why am I not happy? (And what if I were to do something about that?)
What does it mean to be convinced?
Why did George Carlin see things the rest of us missed?
When we step back, what do we then see?
Why do we do things the way we do them?
How many squares do you see?
Why can’t computers do more than compute? (the question that helped “invent the Internet”)
Why should you be stuck without a bed if I’ve got an extra air mattress? (Airbnb’s formative question)
Why can’t we find a place for out-of-towners to crash for a night or two? What if we provide more than just
a mattress to sleep on?
What if we could create this same experience in every major city?
What if we take this idea on the road, and test it in another city?
How would those visitors, and the people with space to rent, learn about Airbnb?
What if you could pay online?
Why are we limiting this to the US? What if we go global?
Why should we, as a society, continue to buy things we really don’t need to own?
What if we spent the next hundred years sharing more of our stuff? What if access trumped ownership?
Why can’t India have 911 emergency service?
How can we get those with money to pay more?
What if the ambulance doctors also carried the cots?
Why should we settle for what currently exists?
Why should I believe you when you tell me something can’t be done?
What makes you think you know more than the experts?
Why must we ‘question the question’?
Why did I come up with that question?
What are the underlying assumptions of my question?
Is there a different question I should be asking?
Why am I asking why?
Why do you exercise? Why is it healthy? Why is that important? Why do you want to burn calories? Why
are you trying to lose weight? (example of “the 5 Whys”)
Why isn’t the water reaching the people who need it?
What if local communities could have the means to create their own sources of water?
Before we try to do this thing worldwide, how might we make it work in our own backyard?
Why is my father-in-law difficult to get along with? Is my father-in-law difficult to get along with? (closing
an open question)
How can we get more incubators to the places that need them?
Why aren’t people in developing countries using the incubators they have?
What if we could provide incubators that were easy to maintain and fix?
How can we make an incubator out of car parts?
How do we make gadgets that fit into people’s lives?
What is our patient experience really like?
Why is this my problem? And if it’s not my problem, why should it be?
Why do some people act on a question?
What if we could map the DNA of music? (Pandora’s big question)
Why can’t good musicians find the audience they deserve?
What if there was a way to use music profiling to somehow connect Aimee Mann with an audience inclined
to like the kind of music she makes?
What if there was a radio station that could know what songs you would like before you knew?
What if we combine three snacks into one? And then add a prize?
What can be added to Cracker Jack to make it even more appealing?
How can we combine this money-making thing with that money-making thing to make even more money?
What if this amusement park could be like a movie, brought to life?
What if we combine A and B? Or A and Z? Or better yet, A and 26?
What if I put this together with that? (connective inquiry)
What if your brain is a forest, thick with trees? And what if the branches touch?
What if dots and dashes could sort the world?
What if Morse code, with its elegant simplicity and limitless combinatorial potential, could be adapted
graphically? (the question that led to bar codes)
What if you sleep with a question? Will you wake with an answer?
Why isn’t there a fast, inexpensive test for pancreatic cancer?
What if I combine these different ideas to solve this one problem?
What if I dispersed a single wall carbon nanotube with an antibody to a protein overexposed in pancreatic
cancer? (Jack Andraka’s complex question)
How am I actually going to make this thing real… and affordable… and reliable?
What if your bank was run by the makers of Sesame Street? Would there be puppets in place of tellers?
What if some company started selling socks that didn’t match?
What if prisons had no walls? What if they could be turned inside out, with the convicts released instead of
incarcerated?
What if we could start with a blank page?
What if we could not fail?
How can we give form to our questions? (constructive inquiry/prototyping)
Why am I oversleeping—why isn’t my alarm clock getting me up?
What if it was harder to turn off the alarm clock? What if your alarm clock forced you to get out of bed and
chase after it?
What if an alarm clock had wheels?
How do we gear up production? How do we handle the orders? How do we launch a full-fledged business?
How might we roll it instead of lugging it?
What if I put wheels on these suitcases? (the question behind the Rollaboard)
How do you build a tower that doesn’t collapse (even after you put the marshmallow on top)?
What does an offbeat test involving marshmallows and kindergartners mean to those of us operating in the
real world?
How do you make a hard-boiled egg’s shell disappear?
What if you could boil an egg in a hard-boiled egg shape, but with the shell off?
How can you learn to love a broken foot?
How do I learn to learn from failure?
Why did the idea/effort fail? What if I could take what I’ve learned from this failure and try a revised
approach? How might I do that?
Am I failing ‘differently’ each time?
Do you find this question as interesting as I do? Want to join me in trying to answer it? (collaborative
inquiry)
How do you fit a large golf course on a small island?
What if golf balls simply traveled too far?
How might we create a symphony together?
If Stephen Hawking can communicate through a machine, why don’t we have a way for a paralyzed artist
like Quan to draw again?
Knowing that laser technology can be used to create art, hands-free, what if we can figure out a way for
Quan to control the laser with his eyes?
If not now, then when? If not me, then who?
How might we cut the cord?, 131 (box)
Why are we still tethered to an outlet when recharging our devices?
How do I create vibration in the air without actually moving something?
What does Toronto sound like?
How might we turn music into a more participatory experience?
Why does the limb I created cost so much to produce? What if I could use different materials, a new design,
a simpler manufacturing process to lower the cost?
What if we found another way to control the laser? What if it could be done by thinking, not blinking?
Why are the smartest business people in the world having this problem?, (Clayton Christensen’s question)
Why were only the newcomers seizing this opportunity? Why weren’t the established leaders, with all their
know-how and resources, able to dominate the low end of the market as well as the high end?
Should we make better products that we can sell for higher profits to our best customers—or make worse
products, that none of our customers would buy, and that would ruin our margins?
Why didn’t others see the “innovator’s dilemma” themselves? Why did it take a business professor to point
out what was going on in their businesses, their industries, under their own noses?
What if the business market is now upside-down—and the bottom has risen to the top? How should my
business respond to this new reality? How do we re-write the old theories?
How can we save a little bit of money, make it a little more efficient, where can we cut costs?
Why does the world need another company? Why should anyone care about us? How in the world are we
going to break through?
Why are we in business? (And by the way—what business are we really in?)
Who have we (as a company) historically been, when we’ve been at our best?
How can we minimize that [environmental] impact given that there is a tremendous carbon footprint
operating a $570 million business?, (Patagonia’s enduring question)
What was our higher purpose at the outset? And how can we rally people around that today?
Who must we fearlessly become?
What is true about us, at our core?
Are we really who we say we are?, (HBO’s big question)
Was it an original and worthwhile idea? And was this show the very best realization of that idea?
What if a running shoe could run your life?
What business is Nike really in?
If we were kicked out of the company, what do you think the new CEO would do?, (Intel’s big question)
What if our company didn’t exist?
Who would miss us?
What should we stop doing?
What if we were to compete against ourselves?
What would we do if the goal were to aggressively cannibalize ourselves?, (The Atlantic’s big question)
What if money was no object? How might we approach the project differently?
What if we could only charge ten bucks for our hundred dollar service?
What if we could become a cause and not just a company?
What does the world hunger for?
What does the world need most… that we are uniquely able to provide?, (Panera’s big question)
How can we drive more ounces into more bodies, more often?, (Coca Cola’s “unbeautiful” question)
What if I peel off the skin and cut them into perfect mini-carrots?
What if we marketed baby carrots like junk food?
Do we want to take a shortcut on this, or do it right?
What are we against?
What if we asked people not to buy from us?
How can we make a better experiment?, (Eric Ries’ central question)
What is your tennis ball?, (Dropbox’s Drew Houston)
What is something I believe that nearly no one agrees with me on?, (Peter Thiel’s question for startups)
Is this a problem I could solve?
Will this make people’s lives meaningfully better?
How do companies get better at experimenting?
What will we learn?
What is our Petri dish?
Where in the company is it safe to ask radical questions?
Where, within the company, can you explore heretical questions that could threaten the business as it is—
without contaminating what you’re doing now?
Where is the place we can be a startup again?
Does a brainstorm produce more lightning when it’s raining questions?
What would Neil Patrick Harris do?
How would IKEA tackle a challenge like this?
What if your idea had to involve speed dating? Or puppets?
What would Jay-Z do in this situation? How would J.K. Rowling think about this?
How might we create a more refreshing soap of our own?
Why are we trying so hard to make another green-striped soap?
How might we predict whether a flu outbreak is going to happen, based on search queries?
Will anyone follow a leader who embraces uncertainty?
Why can’t everyone accept credit cards? Why is it that only companies are able to accept them?, (Jack
Dorsey’s question)
What if all you needed to swipe a credit card was a smart phone or tablet?
Do we really need this? What can we take away?, (Dorsey on simplicity)
What does a CEO look like and feel like? What’s the texture of what you’re supposed to be?
Where did the balance between thinking and doing get out of equilibrium?
Should mission statements be mission questions?
What if we were to take the typical mission statement and hang a question mark on the end of it?
What if a bookstore could be like summer camp?
What can we offer that Amazon can’t?
Does the mission still make sense today?
Are we, as a company, still living up to it (if we ever did)?
Are we all on this mission together?
Does a mission mean anything if the people throughout the company don’t feel invested in it?
How might we create a culture of inquiry?
Do we really want a culture of inquiry?
Why are you trying to ruin the company?
How do you reward questioning?
If an employee asks questions at our company, is he/she asking for trouble?
Why can’t I get the gears on my mountain bike to shift more smoothly?
What if I put plastic coating on guitar strings?
How do you make a company that’s more like a car pool?, (W.L. Gore’s question)
Who’s my boss?
Is this opportunity real? Is there a customer who needs it?
How do we transform a workplace into a learn-place?
What if we could create the experience of a TED conference, every day, within the company?
What would you do if you ran the U.S. Postal Service?
How much will it cost? Who’s going to do all this new work? What happens if the idea fails?
What if a job interview tested one’s ability to ask questions, as well as answer them?
Why should we ‘live the questions?’
Why weren’t loans going to the entrepreneurs who, potentially, could solve some of these countries’ most
pressing needs and biggest problems?
Did Novogratz want to leave a secure, well-paid job in banking for a risky one in the nonprofit sector?
What was most important to her, at this point in her life? What would her family think if she walked away
from a promising business career?
What if we could invest as a means and not as an end?, (Jacqueline Novogratz’s question)
What if we could help parched small farms around the world to double their yield?
Why can’t we use solar power to create low-cost lights for the poor?
What if we could limit the spread of malaria in Africa—and create jobs in the process?
Who or what is this predator, and why is it chasing us?
What is your sentence?
How might I live up to my own sentence?
Looking back on your career, 20 or 30 years from now, what do you want to say you’ve accomplished?
What are you all about? What makes you tick?
Why am I climbing this mountain in the first place?
What is waiting for me at the top? What am I going to do once I get there? Am I enjoying the climb itself?
What am I leaving behind, down below?
How do I improve my standing in the company and enhance my job security? How can I angle for a
promotion?
Why do so many people long for a big house in the suburbs?
Why do we tend to avoid taking the time to ask important and fundamental questions about our lives?
As we rush around, from task to task and from one distraction to the next, is it possible that “questioning,”
itself, is the predator we’re trying to escape?
What if we find we have no good answers to the important questions we raise?
How can I find the meaning of life? (cited as example of a “worthless question”)
When I look back in five years, which of these options will make the better story?
Is there something else you might want to want—besides what you’ve been told to want?
Sooner or later, like it or not, you’ll be faced with challenging questions—so why not get in the habit of
asking them sooner?
How many people does it take to change a light bulb for a senior citizen?
Before we “lean in,” what if we stepped back?
What is all of this technology taking away from us?
Where is my tortoise enclosure?
When is my tech Shabbat?
What should I have for lunch later on? What time do I need to pick up the kids? (examples of “small
thought” questions) , 190
What if we start with what we already have?
Why don’t I have more money, a better job, a bigger circle of friends?
What am I grateful for?
Why is it that people who have so little and have suffered so much seem to be happier than others who are
more fortunate?, (Roko Belic’s question)
If being a beautiful, talented, amazing movie star doesn’t make you happy, then what does?
What is important to you?
Why don’t I know more of my neighbors?
How might I find that sense of community and connectedness I experienced in those small villages in
Africa and India?
What did I love doing as child?
What has worked for me before—and how can I bring more of that into my life now?
What are you doing when you feel most beautiful?
When you’re in a bookstore, what section are you drawn to?
Why do I seem to “shine” when doing certain things? What if I could find a way to incorporate these
interests/activities, or some aspect of them, into my life and my work?
What if you made one small change?
What if you really lived by everything in the Bible?
What if I outsourced my life?
Why did A.J. Jacobs use Crest toothpaste?
Why do it the same old way? What if you tried something different?
What would an optimistic, confident person do?
What if a TV drama could inspire real-life change?
What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?
What if cost wasn’t an issue—how might we do things differently?
What does failure mean to me: Do I see it as an end-state, or a temporary stage in a process? How do I
distinguish between an acceptable failure and unacceptable one?
Can I use productive “small failures” as a means of avoiding devastating “big failures?
If I fail, how will I recover?
If the worst happens, how could I cope?
What if I do nothing?
What if I succeed?
What’s truly worth doing, whether you fail or succeed?
How might we pry off the lid and stir the paint?
How do you feel about the condition of the river? How do you explain the condition of the river to your
children?
How are you preparing your children to clean up the river?
What would you do to reach yourself?, (Joel van Dyke’s question)
If we don’t agree on an answer yet, can we at least come to terms on a question?
Do you care about gun violence? Are you for gun responsibility?
Why might they see the issue this way? Why do I see it differently? What assumptions are we each
operating under?
What are the odds I’m wrong?
Why, exactly, do I feel as if we’re not getting along? Why do I want to try to change that?
Considering we only see each other at chaotic family gatherings, what if we could arrange to meet in a more
relaxed setting?
What went well in the family this past week? What could we do better? What things will we commit to
working on in the coming week?
How might we, as a family, better serve the community? How might we carry on the tradition of our
forebears?
How will you find your Beautiful Question?
Why do we have a situation in this country wherein 1 in 6 people is hungry?
How can an obese person be hungry?
Why does so much good food end up in landfills?
What if you could use one problem to solve the other?
How do we get food from the supermarket to the food desert?
Why not give the food away?
How do we do the launch, how do we get people in the door, how do we make the numbers add up?
What if we offer a bargain instead of a handout?
Should we retire the concept of ‘retirement?’
Can we still afford to have so many people retire in their 60s?
Is retirement really the most satisfying, productive way to spend one’s later years?, (Marc Freedman’s
question)
Why can’t we turn this dependence into abundance?
Why would I want to limit myself to one beautiful question? And if I did, how would I figure out the right
one for me?
Why do so many lack this basic thing that the rest of us take for granted? (the question behind water.org)
How can I encourage questioning in my child?
How do I stay inspired?
How do we continually find inspiration so that we can inspire others?
Why do we do the work we do, and what if we could take it to a different place and another level? How,
exactly, might we do that?
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
been done before?
What if we cultivated ignorance instead of fearing it?, (Stuart Firestein’s question)
What if it turned out the tool with which to cultivate ignorance had been right there in our back pocket, ever
since childhood?
A Note on the Author
Warren Berger has studied hundreds of the world’s leading innovators,
entrepreneurs, and creative thinkers to learn how they ask questions, generate
original ideas, and solve problems. His writing and research on questioning and
innovation have appeared in Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and
Wired. He is the author of the internationally acclaimed book Glimmer, an indepth analysis of creative thinking that was named one of BusinessWeek’s Best
Innovation and Design Books of the Year. Berger has appeared on NBC’s Today
Show, ABC’s World News, CNN, and NPR’s All Things Considered. He lives
with his wife, Laura E. Kelly, in Westchester, New York. Visit his website at
www.AMoreBeautifulQuestion.com.
Copyright © 2014 by Warren Berger
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in
any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
For information address Bloomsbury USA, 1385 Broadway,
New York, NY 10018.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data
Berger, Warren.
A more beautiful question : the power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas /
Warren Berger.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN 9781620401460
1. Creative ability in business. 2. Entrepreneurship. 3. Inquiry-based learning.
I. Title.
HD53.B448 2014
658.4’03—dc23
2013036021
First U.S. edition 2014
Electronic edition published in March 2014
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