A More Beautiful Question

Always the beautiful answer

Who asks a more beautiful question.

—E.E. Cummings

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-the-shelf 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.