A More Beautiful Question (12 page)

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.”