A More Beautiful Question (28 page)

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 follow-up 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-but-inexperienced 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?