A More Beautiful Question (27 page)

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 well-known 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.