A More Beautiful Question (4 page)

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.