A More Beautiful Question (26 page)

Hackett told me he believes that deep thinking is a lost art in today’s business environment. “There is an overcelebration of getting things done,” he said. “For a long time, I have been asking myself this question:

“Where did the balance between thinking and doing get out of equilibrium?”

At Steelcase, Hackett has tried to emphasize—and even taught courses on—the importance of doing critical thinking and questioning before taking action. “We have to train ourselves to ask questions,” he says. “We have to discipline ourselves to do it.”

One of the critical things a questioning leader must do is find ways—as Hackett is doing at Steelcase—to spark and encourage questioning in others. There are various approaches to developing a culture that encourages questioning, as we’ll see, but some of this rests on the individual leader and the way he/she interacts with employees. The most effective questioning leader won’t just give answers to others (or demand answers from them via interrogation); the better approach is to use Socratic-style questioning to encourage deeper and more creative thinking by others.

Leaders must also know when to stop questioning. “You can question yourself right into inaction because there are so many different potential outcomes that you become concerned about how to move forward or even to move forward at all,” says Casey Sheahan of Patagonia. “Questioning is critical, but at some point you have to take action when you think you’ve found the best path.” How do you know when to stop inquiring and start doing? “I feel it mostly in my gut,” Sheahan declares. “As a leader, at some point I get frustrated and say, ‘Let’s get going.’”

Should mission statements be mission questions?

The philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing
³⁶
now and then to hang a question mark on the things you take for granted.” So let’s apply this to the corporate mission statement—something that is often taken for granted, ignored, occasionally ridiculed.
What if we were to take the typical mission statement and hang a question mark on the end of it?

First let’s consider why a company might want to do this. It’s assumed that a declarative “statement” makes a company seem confident, more sure of its mission, more determined. But mission statements tend to have a different effect. They often sound arrogant. They come across as not quite credible. They seem “corporate” and “official,” which also means they’re a bit stiff. Often they’re banal pronouncements (
We save people money so they can live better.
—Walmart) or debatable assertions (
Yahoo! is the premier digital media company
) that don’t offer much help in gauging whether a company is actually living up to a larger goal or purpose.

And sometimes they sound as if they’re saying the mission has already been accomplished, and now the company is just in maintenance mode.

In these dynamic times, it seems appropriate to take that static statement and transform it into a more open-ended, fluid mission question that can still be ambitious (replacing, for example,
We make the world a better place through robotics!
with
How might we make the world a better place through robotics?
).

By articulating the company mission as a question, it tells the outside world, “This is what we’re striving for—we know we’re not there yet, but we’re on the journey.” It acknowledges room for possibility, change, and adaptability. “I’d rather have mission statements that start by asking
How might we?
” says the consultant Min Basadur. “You don’t want the mission statement to make it sound like you’re already there. If we say, ‘How might we be recognized as the best car-parts manufacturer?’ it says, ‘We’re always trying and we’re willing to open our minds to new ways of accomplishing this.’”

What if a bookstore could be like summer camp?
³⁸

It’s no secret that local bookstores have faced a tough challenge in recent years. Independent booksellers such as Steve Bercu, of Austin, Texas-based BookPeople, find themselves asking fundamental questions such as
What can we offer that Amazon can’t?
Here’s one of Bercu’s answers: a summer camp for kids. It started when a BookPeople staffer wondered if the store could create a real-life version of Camp Half Blood, featured in the popular Percy Jackson series of young-adult books. Bercu knew nothing about starting or running a camp, so he experimented—finding a space in a local park, and offering a mix of outdoor activities with lots of book talk. The program now is so popular that local parents line up for hours to get their kids into the camp before it sells out. And the goodwill and local publicity generated have helped Bercu register best-ever book sales back at the store.

Perhaps most important, a mission question invites participation and collaboration. Tim Brown, the chief executive at IDEO,
³⁷
points out that questions, by their very nature, challenge people and invite them to engage with an idea or an issue—and could therefore do likewise in engaging employees with a company mission. Indeed, thinking of a company mission as a shared endeavor—an ongoing attempt to answer a big, bold question through collaborative inquiry—seems vastly preferable to having to live up to a dictum handed down from on high.

As to how it reflects on the company (which is what a lot of mission statements are about), which seems more impressive: a company that is striving to answer an ambitious question—or one that claims to have figured everything out and distilled it down to an official “statement”?

Whether or not the mission statement is phrased as a question, it should be subject to constant questioning:

Does it still make sense today?

Are we, as a company, still living up to it (if we ever did)?

Is the mission growing and pulling us forward?

And lastly,
Are we all on this mission together?

The first three of these are somewhat self-explanatory, but companies may need to think more about the last question. Mission statements are usually created by upper management (many of them read as if they were cobbled together by an executive committee).
But does a mission mean anything if the people throughout the company don’t feel invested in it?
One way to help people feel more engaged with a company mission is to give them a role in shaping it or refreshing an existing one.

Keith Yamashita observes that some companies involve many people in the crafting of the mission, while others leave it to the leadership. “To me, there’s no right or wrong way,” he says. But he does note that being involved in the mission creation—“doing the introspection—gets people to more firmly and more deeply believe in what they are doing.”

Yamashita points to the approach used by Starbucks in modernizing its mission a few years back. CEO Howard Schultz worked with his top leaders to rewrite every word of the mission. That team then convened the top three hundred leaders of the company to get them to commit to it; they in turn went to more than twelve thousand store managers, who spent four days in New Orleans committing to the mission. “This is a great example of mission-setting, starting with a few key leaders and ultimately rallying an entire workforce,” Yamashita says.

A different approach by IBM under
³⁹
then-CEO Sam Palmisano sought even more direct input up front. Palmisano “hosted a worldwide online jam session—using technology to elicit the ideas, thinking, and stories from IBMers about what they most valued,” Yamashita recalls. More than eighty thousand employees participated—and together, they wrote the company’s values, which remain in place under current CEO Ginni Rometty.

Ron Shaich says that at Panera ideas about how to live up to the mission can come from anywhere. For example, the Panera Cares idea originated during a dinner conversation among Shaich and a group of franchisees—one of whom asked how the company might expand upon its efforts to serve the community. That got Shaich thinking about ways to elevate the company’s existing bread-donation program to a higher level.

Whether mission questions come from throughout the ranks or are posed by leaders themselves, the point is to keep asking,
What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How might we do it better?
As Shaich says, “Figuring out what you want to accomplish is a continual search—and questions are the means to the search.”

How might we create a culture of inquiry?

This is a critical question for business leaders to address, but first they might well ask,
Do we really
want
a culture of inquiry?

“I think a lot of traditional companies may not want that,” says Yamashita. “There are plenty of corporate cultures we encounter that shut down questioning.” Why? Because as Dev Patnaik points out, there’s a sense that if too much questioning is going on within a company, “it’s distracting. Nature abhors a vacuum, and companies abhor ambiguity. They want to deal in answers. And even if they get to a point where they know they need more of a questioning culture, they’re often unwilling to do what it takes to create that culture.”

Inviting and encouraging more questioning creates some complications within a corporate culture. If employees in a company are given more leeway to question, it means policies may be challenged. Established methods and practices might suddenly be looked at in a new light:
Why are we doing it this way?
Not everyone wants to have to continually defend proven methods. To some leaders, as well as some midlevel managers, it can be frustrating to have to explain and rationalize.

Questioning within a business environment can also create a perceived threat to authority. Those with expertise may resent having their learned views questioned by nonexperts. Managers trying to keep things moving may feel they shouldn’t have to answer a subordinate’s questions. Questioning may be seen as slowing progress, particularly by those who believe that what the company needs most are “answers, not more questions.”

Such concerns notwithstanding, for any company that needs to innovate or adapt to shifting market conditions, new competition, and other disruptive forces, a questioning culture is critical because it can help ensure that creativity and fresh, adaptive thinking flows throughout the organization. Having a leader serve as the “questioner in chief” is fine, but it’s not enough. Today’s companies are often tackling complex challenges that require collaborative, multidisciplinary problem solving. Creative thinking must come from all parts of the company (and from outside the company, too). When a business culture is inquisitive, the questioning, learning, and sharing of information becomes contagious—and gives people permission to explore new ideas across boundaries and silos.

If having a culture of inquiry is deemed appropriate, desirable, and perhaps even critical for a company, creating and nurturing it must start at the top—with company leadership that clearly demonstrates a willingness to ask, and tolerate, questions about anything from mission to strategy to policy. “As a business leader, if I’m trying to build a culture of inquiry, I have to start by asking a lot of provocative, disruptive questions myself,” says INSEAD’s Gregersen. “I have to walk the talk.”

The company leadership must be willing to
answer
tough questions, as well as ask them—and ideally, those questions should be coming from all levels and departments. Google has maintained a wide-open
⁴⁰
(and sometimes chaotic) questioning forum through its weekly TGIF sessions, when all employees are invited to submit questions to the company’s top executives, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The questions are instantly voted up or down by others in the company; the highest-ranking—which are also often the toughest, most controversial ones—are then fielded on the spot by the bosses.

Charles Warren, a former top engineer at Google, told me, “It’s very fulfilling to sit in those sessions and know that anybody in the company can ask
any
question, and nothing is off-limits.” Warren said people running groups or projects (he was one of the leaders of Google+) also are questioned by employees throughout the company. The questioning culture at Google is not always polite. “Questions could get personal or become attacks,” Warren noted; if you were developing a product some didn’t like, you might be subjected to queries like
Why are you trying to ruin the company?

But the overall message that comes through at Google is that anything the company does is subject to question from everyone—and that the questions will actually be heard. It’s fine to tell employees they can ask whatever they wish—but if those queries end up in a question box no one ever opens, it can be counterproductive. Today, the updated version of the old question/suggestion box is the intra–social network used by many companies—and they are often “ablaze with questions,” says Steelcase CEO Jim Hackett, whose company encourages any employee to ask anything of anyone else. The system pings Hackett or other executives every time a question is directed at them.