A More Beautiful Question (2 page)

But when we want to shake things up and instigate change, it’s necessary to break free of familiar thought patterns and easy assumptions. We have to veer off the beaten neural path. And we do this, in large part, by questioning.

With the constant change we face today, we may be forced to spend less time on autopilot, more time in questioning mode—attempting to adapt, looking to re-create careers, redefining old ideas about living, working, and retiring, reexamining priorities, seeking new ways to be creative, or to solve various problems in our own lives or the lives of others. “We’ve transitioned into always transitioning,”
⁹
according to the author and futurist John Seely Brown. In such times, the ability to ask big, meaningful, beautiful questions—and, just as important, to know what to
do
with those questions once they’ve been raised—can be the first steps in moving beyond old habits and behaviors as we embrace the new.

How can we develop and improve this ability to question?
Can we rekindle that questioning spark we had at age four?
During my conversations and visits with more than a hundred business innovators, scientists, artists, engineers, filmmakers, educators, designers, and social entrepreneurs, they shared methods of asking questions and solving problems. Some shared stories of how questioning guided their careers or their businesses. Others recounted how a particular question helped change their life. Many offered insights, techniques, and tips on the art of inquiry.

Based on their experience—while also borrowing ideas and influences from existing theories of creativity, design thinking, and problem solving—I devised a three-part Why–What If–How model for forming and tackling big, beautiful questions. It’s not a formula, per se—there is no formula for questioning. It’s more of a framework designed to help guide one through various stages of inquiry—because ambitious, catalytic questioning tends to follow a logical progression, one that often starts with stepping back and seeing things differently and ends with taking action on a particular question.

A journey of inquiry that (hopefully) culminates in change can be a long road, with pitfalls and detours and often nary an answer in sight. That’s why it can be helpful to approach inquiry systematically, as a step-by-step progression. The best innovators are able to live with not having the answer right away because they’re focused on just trying to get to the next question.

This book is structured around questions, with one leading to another. Forty-four questions divide up sections within the chapters, and lots more questions are embedded within each section. The thirty “question sidebars” scattered throughout the book tell stories of breakthrough ideas, innovations, or new ways of thinking that began with a powerful (and sometimes offbeat) question. A “Question Index” is at the back of the book—because
if facts are entitled to an index, then why not questions?

As to what, exactly, constitutes a “beautiful question”: When I first launched the idea behind this book as the blog A More Beautiful Question, I laid out the following entirely subjective definition:

A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something—and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.

That definition makes clear that this book is
not
about grand philosophical or spiritual questions—
Why are we here? How does one define “good”? Is there life after death?
—all of those great questions that spark endless, impassioned debate. I am not particularly qualified to discuss such questions, nor do they fit within the category of what I would call actionable questions.

The focus here is on questions that can be acted upon, questions that can lead to tangible results and change. The esteemed physicist Edward Witten
¹⁰
told me that in his work he is always searching for “a question that is hard (and interesting) enough that it is worth answering and easy enough that one can actually answer it.”

We don’t often ask such questions; they’re not the kind of queries typically typed into the Google search box. While it could be said that ours is a Golden Age of Questioning—with all the online resources now available for getting instant answers, it’s reasonable to assume people are asking more questions than ever before—that distinction would be based purely on volume, not necessarily on the quality or thoughtfulness of the questions being asked. Indeed, on Google, some of the most popular queries
¹¹
are which celebrity is or isn’t gay. In many cases, our Google queries are so unimaginative and predictable that Google can guess what we’re asking before we’re three words into typing it.

This book is more concerned with questions that Google cannot easily anticipate or properly answer for you—questions that require a different kind of search.
What is the fresh idea that will help my business stand out?
What if I come at my work or my art in a whole different way?
How might I tackle a long-standing problem that has affected my community, my family?
These are individualized, challenging, and potentially game-changing questions.

In my inquiry into the value of inquiry, I’ve become convinced that questioning is more important today than it was yesterday—and will be even more important tomorrow—in helping us figure out what matters, where opportunity lies, and how to get there. We’re all hungry for better answers. But first, we need to learn how to ask the right questions.

Chapter 1

The Power of Inquiry

If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they make a decent foot?

What can a question do?

What business are we in now—and is there still a job for me?

Are questions becoming more valuable than answers?

Is “knowing” obsolete?

Why does everything begin with Why?

How do you move from asking to action?

If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they make a decent foot?

Back in 1976, long before there
¹
was a Google to field all of our queries, a young man named Van Phillips started asking the question above, first in his head and then aloud. Phillips felt his future depended upon finding a good answer, and no one seemed to have one for him.

He was twenty-one years old and had been living the charmed life of an athletic, handsome, and bright young college student. But one day in the summer of that year, Phillips’s fortunes changed. He was water-skiing on a lake in Arizona when a small fire broke out on the boat pulling him. In the ensuing confusion, the boat’s driver didn’t see that a second motorboat, coming around a blind curve in the lake, was headed straight at Phillips.

Phillips awoke from anesthesia the next morning in a hospital. He recalls, “I did the proverbial ‘I don’t want to look, but let’s see’” and checked under his blanket to find “an empty place where my left foot should have been.” The limb had been severed, just below the knee, by the other boat’s propeller.

At the hospital, Phillips was fitted with “a pink foot attached to an aluminum tube.” The “foot” wasn’t much more than a block of wood with foam rubber added; such was the state of prosthetic limbs at the time. Phillips left the hospital with instructions: Get used to your “new best friend,” walk on it twice a day, and “toughen up that stump.” One of the first times he tried to walk on the foot, Phillips recalls, he tripped “on a pebble the size of a pea.” He knew, right then, this was not going to work for him. He recalls visiting his girlfriend’s parents’ house around that time, and being taken aside by her father, who said, “Van—you’re just going to have to learn to accept this.” When he heard that, Phillips recalls, “I bit my tongue. I knew he was right, in a way—I did have to accept that I was an amputee. But I would
not
accept the fact that I had to wear this foot.”

At that moment, Phillips exhibited one of the telltale signs of an innovative questioner: a refusal to accept the existing reality. He’d shown other signs before that in childhood—as a kid, he once went through his house and removed all the doorknobs (mischievous
What If I take this apart?
childhood stories are common among questioners). But now, as an adult, he was experiencing a critical Why moment, as in
Why should I settle for this lousy foot?

This did not seem an unreasonable question to Phillips, particularly since he was very aware—as was everyone else at the time—that amazing things were happening in the world of technology, particularly in the U.S. space program. Hence, he naturally wondered why some of the vast means and know-how that enabled a man to walk on the moon couldn’t somehow be applied to his down-to-earth problem.

What he hadn’t thought of at that time—it would become clear to him later, as he got to know more about the field of prosthetics—was that some problems do not have governments or large corporations rushing to solve them. The prosthetics industry had been “in a time warp for decades,” Phillips recalls. No one was investing in it because the customer base, amputees, was no one’s idea of an attractive business market. “But this worked to my advantage in a way,” Phillips told me, years later. Since progress had been stalled for so long, it left plenty of room to question outdated approaches and status quo practices—and to inject much-needed fresh thinking.

Still, Phillips quickly found, as a naïve questioner sometimes does, that his Why and What If inquiries weren’t particularly welcome in the realm of What Is. Frequently in various professional domains—in hospitals or doctors’ offices, in business conference rooms, even in classrooms—basic, fundamental questions can make people impatient and even uncomfortable. Phillips’s questions about why there weren’t better prosthetic limbs, and whether that could be changed, could be taken as a challenge to the expertise of those who knew far more than he did on the subject—the doctors, the prosthetics engineers, and others who understood “what was possible” at the time.

As an outsider in that domain, Phillips was actually in the best position to ask questions. One of the many interesting and appealing things about questioning is that it often has an inverse relationship to expertise—such that, within their own subject areas, experts are apt to be poor questioners. Frank Lloyd Wright put it well when he remarked that an expert is someone who has “stopped thinking because he ‘knows.’”
²
If you “know,” there’s no reason to ask; yet if you
don’t
ask, then you are relying on “expert” knowledge that is certainly limited, may be outdated, and could be altogether wrong.

Phillips was not going to convince the experts that he knew better (and in fact, he didn’t “know” better—he only suspected). Somewhere along the line, he took another critical step for a questioner tackling a challenge: He took ownership of that question,
Why can’t they make a better foot?
To do this, he had to make a change of pronouns: Specifically, he had to replace
they
with
I
.

This is an important concept, as explained by the small, independent inventor and inveterate questioner Mark Noonan, who once, after suffering
³
his umpteenth backache from shoveling snow, wondered,
Why don’t they come up with a better shovel?
Noonan solved the problem himself, inventing a shovel with a long handle, a lever, and a wheel—when you use it, you no longer have to bend your back. Noonan observes that if you never actually
do
anything about a problem yourself, then you’re not really questioning—you’re complaining. And that situation you’re complaining about may never change because, as Regina Dugan, a former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) director, has observed about problems in general, “We think someone else—someone smarter
⁴
than us, someone more capable, with more resources—will solve that problem. But there isn’t anyone else.”

When Van Phillips realized that he was going to have to answer his own question, he also understood, almost immediately, that to inquire about prosthetics in a meaningful way he would have to wade into that world. He had been a broadcast major in college, but now changed directions and enrolled in one of the top prosthetics study programs in the United States, at Northwestern University, from whence he found work in a prosthetics lab in Utah. He began to understand how and why prosthetic limbs were designed the way they were.

He would spend nearly a decade grappling with his original question, then forming new ones, and eventually acting upon those. Phillips’s journey of inquiry led him to some unusual places: He extracted lessons from the animal kingdom and borrowed influences from his local swimming pool as well as from the battlefields of ancient China.

In his pursuit of a better foot, he faltered many times—literally, he fell to the ground again and again. This would happen as he was trying to answer his latest question (
I wonder if this prototype will hold up better than the last one?
) by taking it for a test run. He would receive his disappointing answer each time the new version of the foot broke under him. He would curse and swear, and then, inevitably, he would begin to ask new questions—attempting to understand and learn from each of his failures.