A More Beautiful Question (3 page)

Then one day, the foot under him didn’t break. And Phillips knew, at that moment, that he was about to change the world.

What can a question do?

The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer observed that questions “are the engines of intellect
⁵
—cerebral machines that convert curiosity into controlled inquiry.” Fischer’s “engine” is just one of many metaphors that have been used to try to describe the surprising power that questions have. Questions are sometimes seen as spades that help to unearth buried truths; or flashlights that, in the words of Dan Rothstein of the Right Question Institute (RQI), “shine a light on where you need
⁶
to go.”

The late Frances Peavey, a quirky,
⁷
colorful social activist whose work revolved around what she called “strategic questioning” aimed at bridging cultural differences between people, once observed that a good question is like “a lever used to pry open the stuck lid on a paint can.”

Maybe we talk about what a question is
like
because it’s hard to wrap our minds around what it actually is. Many tend to think of it as a form of speech—but that would mean if you didn’t utter a question, it wouldn’t exist, and that’s not the case. A question can reside in the mind for a long time—maybe forever—without being spoken to anyone.

We do know that the ability to question, whether verbally or through other means, is one of the things that separates us from lower primates. Paul Harris, an education professor
⁸
at Harvard University who has studied questioning in children, observes, “Unlike other primates, we humans are designed so that the young look to the old for cultural information.” He sees this as an important “evolutionary divide”—that from an early age, even before speech, humans will use some form of questioning to try to gain information. A child may pick up a kiwi fruit and indicate, through a look or gesture directed at a nearby adult, a desire to know more. Chimpanzees don’t do this; they may “ask” for a treat through signaling, but it’s a simple request for food, as opposed to an information-seeking question.

So then, one of the primary drivers of questioning is an awareness of what we don’t know—which is a form of higher awareness that separates not only man from monkey but also the smart and curious person from the dullard who doesn’t know or care. Good questioners tend to be aware of, and quite comfortable with, their own ignorance (Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of the TED Conferences, has been known to brag, “I know more about my ignorance
⁹
than you know about yours”). But they constantly probe that vast ignorance using the question flashlight—or, if you prefer, they attack it with the question spade.

The author Stuart Firestein, in his
¹⁰
fine book
Ignorance: How It Drives Science
, argues that one of the keys to scientific discovery is the willingness of scientists to embrace ignorance—and to use questions as a means of navigating through it to new discoveries. “One good question can give rise to several layers of answers, can inspire decades-long searches for solutions, can generate whole new fields of inquiry, and can prompt changes in entrenched thinking,” Firestein writes. “Answers, on the other hand, often end the process.”

This expansive effect of questions has been studied by Dan Rothstein, who along with his colleague Luz Santana established the Right Question Institute, a small and fascinating nonprofit group formed in order to try to advance the teaching of questioning skills. Rothstein believes that questions do
something
—he is not sure precisely what—that has an “unlocking” effect in people’s minds. “It’s an experience we’ve all had at one point or another,” Rothstein maintains. “Just asking or hearing a question phrased a certain way produces an almost palpable feeling of discovery and new understanding. Questions produce the lightbulb effect.”

How might we prepare during peacetime to offer help in times of war?
¹²

The exigencies of war have brought forth many a beautiful question. In 1859, a young Swiss Calvinist named Henry Dunant traveling in Italy came upon the aftermath of a bloody battle between the Austrian and French armies. On the battlefield some forty thousand men lay dead or wounded, and Dunant hastily organized the locals in binding wounds and feeding the injured. Upon his return home, Dunant wrote:
“Would there not be some means, during a period of peace and calm, of forming relief societies whose object would be to have the wounded cared for in time of war by enthusiastic, devoted volunteers, fully qualified for the task?”
And thus the Red Cross national relief societies were born. The subsequent idea of pooling the skills and resources of various Red Cross Societies to provide humanitarian assistance in peacetime, and not just during war, also was championed by Dunant.

Rothstein has seen this phenomenon at work in classrooms where students (whether adults or children) are instructed to think and brainstorm using only questions. As they do this, Rothstein says, the floodgates of imagination seem to open up. The participants tend to become more engaged, more interested, in the subject at hand; the ideas begin to flow, in the form of questions.
Harvard Business Review
writer Polly LaBarre
¹¹
echoes this in describing the effect that lively and imaginative questioning can have in business settings: Such questions can be “fundamentally subversive, disruptive, and playful” and seem to “switch people into the mode required to create anything new.”

How do questions do this? The neurologist and author Ken Heilman,
¹³
a leading expert on creative activity in the brain, acknowledges that scant research has been focused on what’s happening in the brain when we ask questions. Neurologists these days can tell us what’s going on in the cerebral cortex when we daydream, watch a commercial, or work on a crossword puzzle, but, strangely, no one has much to say about the mental processes involved in forming and asking a question. However, Heilman points out, there
has
been significant neurological study of divergent thinking—the mental process of trying to come up with alternative ideas. Heilman notes, “Since divergent thinking is about saying, ‘Hey, what if I think differently about this?’ it’s actually a form of asking questions.”

What we know about divergent thinking is that it mostly happens in the more creative right hemisphere of the brain; that it taps into imagination and often triggers random association of ideas (which is a primary source of creativity); and that it can be intellectually stimulating and rewarding. So to the extent that questioning triggers divergent thinking, it’s not surprising that it can have the kind of mind-opening effect that Rothstein has observed in classrooms using RQI’s question-based teaching.

Rothstein points out, however, that questions not only open up thinking—they also can direct and focus it. In his exercises, students may begin with wide-open, divergent “what-if” speculation, but they gradually use their own questions to do “convergent” (focused) thinking as they get at the core of a difficult problem and reach consensus on how to proceed. They even use questions for “meta cognitive thinking,” as they analyze and reflect upon their own questions. “People think of questioning as simple,” Rothstein says, but when done right, “it’s a very sophisticated, high-level form of thinking.”

It is also egalitarian: “You don’t have to hold a position
¹⁴
of authority to ask a powerful question,” noted LaBarre. In some ways, it can be more difficult or risky for those in authority to question. In Hal Gregersen’s study of business leaders who question, he found that they exhibited an unusual “blend of humility and confidence”
¹⁵
—they were humble enough to acknowledge a lack of knowledge, and confident enough to admit this in front of others. The latter is no small thing given that, as author Sir Ken Robinson has observed, “In our culture, not to know
¹⁶
is to be at fault, socially.”

Being willing to question is one thing; questioning well and effectively is another. Not all questions have the positive effects described above. Open questions—in particular, the kind of Why, What If,
and How questions that can’t be answered with simple facts—generally tend to encourage creative thinking more than closed yes-or-no questions (though closed questions have their place, too, as we’ll see).

What may be even more important is the tone of questions. Confronted with a challenge or problem, one could respond with the question
Oh my God, what are we going to do?
Faced with the same situation, one might ask
,
What if this change represents an opportunity for us? How might we make the most of the situation?

Questions of the second type, with a more positive tone, will tend to yield better answers, according to David Cooperrider,
¹⁷
a Case Western professor who has developed a popular theory of “appreciative inquiry.” Cooperrider says that “organizations gravitate toward the questions they ask.” If the questions from leaders and managers focus more on
Why are we falling behind competitors?
and
Who is to blame?
, then the organization is more likely to end up with a culture of turf-guarding and finger-pointing. Conversely, if the questions asked tend to be more expansive and optimistic, then
that
will be reflected in the culture. This is true of more than companies, he maintains. Whether we’re talking about countries, communities, families, or individuals, “we all live in the world our questions create.”

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

One of the most important things questioning does is to enable people to think and act in the face of uncertainty. As Steve Quatrano of the Right Question Institute puts it, forming questions helps us “to organize our thinking around
¹⁸
what we
don’t
know.” This may explain why questioning is so important in innovation hotbeds such as Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs must figure out, seemingly daily, how to create new products and businesses from thin air, while navigating highly competitive, volatile market conditions.

Sebastian Thrun, the engineer/inventor
¹⁹
behind Google’s experimental self-driving X car and the founder of the online university Udacity, acknowledges the two-way relationship between technological change and questioning. The changes are fueled by the questions being asked—but those changes, in turn, fuel more questions. That’s because with each new advance, Thrun said, one must pause to ask,
Now that we know what we now know, what’s possible
now
?

In some sense, innovation means trying to find and formulate new questions that can, over time, be answered. Those questions, once identified, often become the basis for starting a new venture. Indeed, the rise of a number of today’s top tech firms—Foursquare, Airbnb, Pandora Internet Radio—can be traced to a
Why doesn’t somebody
or
What if we were to
question, in some cases inspired by the founder’s personal experience.

One such example, which has become a modern classic business story, is the origin of the Netflix video-rental service. The man who would go on to start the company, Reed Hastings, was reacting to one
²⁰
of those frustrating everyday experiences we’ve all had. Hastings had been lax in returning some movies rented from a Blockbuster video store, and by the time he got around to it, the late charges were exorbitant. A frustrated Hastings wondered,
Why should I have to pay these fees?
(He has admitted that another question on his mind at the time was
How am I going explain this charge to my wife?
)

Surely, others have been similarly outraged by late fees. But Hastings decided to do something about it, which led to a subsequent question:
What if a video-rental business were run like a health club?
He then set about figuring out how to design a video-rental model that had a monthly membership, like a health club, with no late fees. (Years later, Hastings would question whether Netflix could and should expand its model:
Why are we only renting the films and shows? What if we
made
them, too?
)

Through the years, companies from Polaroid (
Why do we have to wait for the picture?
) to Pixar (
Can animation be cuddly?
²¹
) have started with questions. However, when it comes to questioning, companies are like people: They start out doing it, then gradually do it less and less. A hierarchy forms, a methodology is established, and rules are set; after that, what is there to question?

But business leaders sometimes find themselves thrust back into questioning mode during dire or dynamic times, when those rules and methods they’ve come to rely on no longer work. Such is the case in today’s business market, where the speed of, and need for, innovation has been ratcheted up—forcing some companies to ask bigger and more fundamental questions than they’ve asked in years about everything from the company’s identity, to its mission, to a reexamination of who the customer is and what the core competencies should be. Much of it boils down to a fundamental question that a lot of companies find themselves asking right now: