A More Beautiful Question (13 page)

Sometimes, he says, his naïveté gives others permission to step back and rethink in ways they might not normally be comfortable doing. In some parts of Asia, for example, rigid hierarchical structures in business and government tend to discourage questioning. “In those cultures, people sometimes welcome outsiders coming in and asking basic questions because they may be wondering about these things themselves—but they don’t want to ask because they can’t afford to look foolish or disrespectful.”

Bennett says that within IDEO, the company recognizes it’s important to create an environment where it’s safe to ask “stupid” questions. “You need to have a culture that engenders trust,” he says. “Part of questioning is about exposing vulnerability—and being okay with vulnerability as a cultural currency.” So at the firm, no question is too basic to ask; and co-workers are encouraged to support and build upon others’ questions, rather than dismissing them or giving pat answers. Bennett says, “We allow people to fall backwards and be caught by one another.”

In Silicon Valley, IDEO and other innovation-driven firms go out of their way to protect and encourage naïve questioning because they know, from experience, that it can lead to valuable insights that result in breakthrough ideas and successful products. The valley is a place where everyone, it seems, is racing nonstop to get to “what’s next.” This would seem an unlikely place for slowing down, stepping back, and asking fundamental questions. Yet a number of the best minds in the tech sector have embraced this approach, led in recent years by the late cofounder of Apple, Steve Jobs,
⁷
who was a proponent and practitioner of the Zen principle known as
shoshin
, or “beginner’s mind.”

Jobs was determined to reimagine and re-create the ways we integrate technology into our everyday lives. This required asking fundamental questions (Jobs was known to be a dogged questioner of everything from current market practices to the ideas of his employees, many of whom were subject to deconstructive interrogation). One of his tools in challenging conventional wisdom was a bit of ancient wisdom, brought to
⁸
Northern California in the 1960s by a Japanese Zen master named Shunryu Suzuki. Author of the book
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
, Suzuki immigrated to the area and taught there until his death in 1971.

In his book, Suzuki writes, “The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert.” Such a mind, he added, is “open to all possibilities” and “can see things as they are.”

Suzuki also made an important point that underscores the potential value of this way of thinking to a would-be innovator: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

Beginner’s mind, along with other Zen principles of deep thinking, mindfulness, listening, and questioning, gradually caught on with others in Silicon Valley, beyond Jobs and Apple. Les Kaye is a Zen abbot
⁹
whose Kannon Do Zen Meditation Center is located in Mountain View, California, just down the road from Google. His followers include folks from Google and Apple, as well as various tech-start-up entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists who fund them. Kaye is aware that some of these people may be motivated by the notion that a “question-everything” Zen mind-set could be used to help spark new ideas and innovations (one recent book coined the term
Zennovation
to describe the merging of Zen principles and innovation strategies).

Kaye is quick to point out, “It would be a mistake for people to think, ‘If I do Zen practice, I’ll become more creative.’ It’s not a magic pill.” Moreover, Kaye’s center cites “no striving” as a guiding Zen principle; it’s considered inappropriate to lust after material gains and business success. When I pointed out to Kaye that Steve Jobs seemed to successfully use “beginner’s mind” to envision new products as he simultaneously “strived” for greater market share, Kaye, who once studied with Jobs at the same Zen center, remarked, “Steve had an unusual relationship with Zen. He got the artistic side of it but not the Buddhist side—the art, but not the heart.”

Still, Jobs proved that, for better or worse, you can be both a questioner and a conqueror. Indeed, you can extract practical lessons from beginner’s mind, whether or not you choose to go “full Zen.” Randy Komisar, a partner in the renowned
¹⁰
Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and a Zen practitioner, says the key to adopting this manner of observing and questioning is to make an effort to become, in his word, “detached”—from everyday thoughts, distractions, preconceived notions, habitual behaviors, and even from oneself. “Basically, you begin to observe yourself as if you were a third party.” If you can achieve that sense of detachment, your thinking becomes more “flexible and fluid,” Komisar maintains, and “you find yourself in a better position to question everything.”

TED founder Richard Saul Wurman says it helps him, when approaching any new situation or subject, to think of his mind as “an empty bucket.” The job is to slowly and methodically fill that bucket, Wurman says, and you begin by asking the most basic of questions.

Beginner’s mind is akin to adopting a more childlike mind-set. That’s not as fanciful as it might sound. I mentioned previously that Joichi Ito, director of the prestigious MIT Media Lab—which has had a hand in creating everything from the Kindle electronic reader to futuristic cars that can fold in half—favors the term
neoteny
to describe the phenomenon of maintaining childlike mental attributes as an adult. Ito says one can train oneself to think this way.

The Media Lab has a “kindergarten for adults” atmosphere, where constant play is encouraged. The lab is also designed so that people from different disciplines work together, which means “we are often looking at a problem
¹¹
we’re not an expert in,” says Tod Machover, a cutting-edge musical composer and MIT professor who, in his experimental work at the lab, helped create the popular interactive video game
Guitar Hero
. Machover says it’s not uncommon for breakthrough ideas to come from people who are working outside their area of expertise because the novices are “able to see a problem with a fresh eye, forget about what’s easy or hard, and not worry about what other people in that field have done.”

For those who doubt whether “serious” adults can actually be encouraged to think more like children, a study conducted by the researchers
¹²
Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson at North Dakota State University indicates that it’s actually easy for people to “think young,” with a little nudge.

Zabelina had noticed, in previous studies, that young children tended to perform well on creativity tests because they are uninhibited. So Zabelina and Robinson took two groups of adults and instructed one group to think of themselves as “seven-year-olds, enjoying a day off from school” (the other group just thought of themselves as the adults they are). When the two groups were given a creativity test, the “think young” group came up with better, more original ideas and exhibited “more flexible, fluid thinking.”

Zabelina believes that “mind-sets are flexible. It is possible to tap into the more open way of thinking of a child.” All that’s needed, it seems, is to be given permission (by others or by ourselves) to take that step back in time.

Why did George Carlin see things the rest of us missed?

When we do step back, what do we then see?
We’re seeing essentially the same realities and situations. But with more distance, a bigger picture comes into view. We may now be able to see the overall context; we might notice the patterns and relationships between things we’d previously thought of as separate. This can change everything. Upon stepping back and reexamining something you’ve been looking at the same way for years, you might suddenly feel as if you’re seeing it for the first time.

If you’ve ever experienced this, it feels a bit like déjà vu in reverse. With déjà vu, you go somewhere you’ve never before been yet it seems oddly familiar; conversely, when you look at something familiar and suddenly see it fresh, this is a case of
vuja de
, to use a quirky term
¹³
favored by Stanford University professor and author Bob Sutton.

Sutton has argued that if we train ourselves to look at the world around us through a vuja de lens, it can open up a range of new possibilities—fresh questions to ask, ideas to pursue, challenges to tackle, all previously unnoticed because they were camouflaged in overly familiar surroundings. Adopting this view, business leaders and managers are more apt to notice inconsistencies and outdated methods—as well as dormant opportunities. Someone working on social issues or even personal ones is likely to notice more and to ask fundamental questions about what he or she notices.

It isn’t easy, Sutton notes: “It means thinking of things that are usually assumed to be negative as positive, and vice versa. It can mean reversing assumptions about cause and effect, or what matters most versus least. It means not traveling through life on automatic pilot.”

As with beginner’s mind, Sutton’s vuja de idea has resonated in various corners of the innovation sector, having been picked up by, among others, IDEO, whose general manager, Tom Kelley, has written that vuja de provides the ability to “see what’s always been there
¹⁴
but has gone unnoticed.”

But years before IDEO or even Sutton talked about vuja de, the term was mentioned, albeit briefly,
¹⁵
in a stand-up comedy routine by the American comedian George Carlin. In the midst of his act, Carlin paused, as if he’d just had an epiphany—then announced to the audience that he’d experienced vuja de, which, as he explained, was “the strange feeling that, somehow, none of this has ever happened before.”

Carlin died in 2008, but his daughter, the comedian and radio host Kelly Carlin,
¹⁶
feels the vuja de way of looking at the world—of observing mundane, everyday things as if one were witnessing something strange and fascinating—is exactly the way Carlin went through his life and got his material. “When the familiar becomes this sort of alien world and you can see it fresh, then it’s like you’ve gone into a whole other section of the file folder in your brain,” she said. “And now you have access to this other perspective that most people don’t have.”

Carlin used that perspective to develop a style of observational humor that could be thought of as the Why school of comedy. “It was observing our everyday life—baseball, dogs and cats, the way someone stands in front of the refrigerator—and asking,
Why do we do things the way we do them?
” Kelly Carlin says. George Carlin studied routine behaviors that most of us take for granted, mapping the inconsistencies, searching for some kind of rationale (and usually not finding one).
When we’ve lost our keys and are searching for them,
he wondered,
why do we keep looking in the same few places, over and over?

Kelly Carlin, who often interviews other comedians on her podcast series
Waking from the American Dream
, thinks comedians in general are more apt to have a vuja de perspective. “Most comics grew up feeling like they didn’t belong,” she says. “They were the class clowns, the outsiders—maybe the one who had the learning disability and didn’t do well in an academic setting. As outsiders, it’s natural for them to stand back and observe, and to wonder about what everyone is doing. And eventually, that’s where they get their material.”

George Carlin once said that
¹⁷
he could not help noticing the irrational behaviors, all the things that just don’t make sense—and that he sometimes wished he didn’t notice all of it because it agitated him so much.

Most of us have the opposite problem—we don’t notice enough. IDEO’s Kelley thinks it’s because we don’t generally take the time required for close observation. When people fail to see what’s right in front of them, it’s often because “they stopped looking too soon.”
¹⁸

The Dartmouth University business professor Vijay Govindarajan and
¹⁹
the consultant Srikanth Srinivas have devised an exercise that nicely illustrates what Kelley is talking about. In their seminars, they briefly show attendees the figure below:

Then, Srinivas told me, the figure is covered up and he asks, “
How many squares did you see?
”