A More Beautiful Question (6 page)

How do you move from asking to action?

At some point, Van Phillips progressed from Why to What If. Phillips was by now working in the prosthetics industry and doing his own “contextual inquiry” (inquiring up close and in context) in his endeavor to understand how things were done in that business, so that he could question more intelligently.

Yet even as Phillips began to gain expertise in prosthetics, he tried to maintain his original “outsider” perspective. As he was working on his project, he was advised by a mentor to go to the patent office and research everything that had been done on prosthetic foot inventions. “My reaction to that was ‘I’m not going to pollute my mind with everyone else’s ideas. I’m following my own path, not somebody else’s.’”

Phillips was not in a hurry; he was not looking for quick answers from experts. “If you give the mind time and space, it will do its own work on the problem, over time,” he said. “And it will usually come up with interesting possibilities to work with.” Gradually, those possibilities began to surface in Phillips’s mind. At the What If stage the imagination begins to go to work, whether we’re conscious of it or not. The mind, if preoccupied with a problem or question long enough, will tend to come up with possibilities that might eventually lead to answers, but at this stage are still speculations, untested hypotheses, and early epiphanies. (Epiphanies often are characterized as “Aha! moments,” but that suggests the problem has been solved in a flash. More often, insights arrive as What if moments—bright possibilities that are untested and open to question.)

Exploring What If possibilities is a wide-open, fun stage of questioning and should not be rushed. Today, the idea of “sitting with” and “living with” a question may seem strange, as we’ve gotten used to having our queries answered quickly and in bite-size servings. Stuart Firestein, in his book
Ignorance
, wonders if we’ve gotten too comfortable with this.
Are we too enthralled with answers?
he asks.
Are we afraid of questions, especially those that linger too long?

Often the worst thing you can do with a difficult question is to try to answer it too quickly. When the mind is coming up with What If possibilities, these fresh, new ideas can take time to percolate and form. They often result from connecting existing ideas in unusual and interesting ways. Einstein was an early believer in this form of “combinatorial thinking”; today it is widely accepted as one of the primary sources of creativity. Since this type of thinking involves both connections and questions, I think of it as
connective inquiry
.

As Van Phillips got, in his words, “knee-deep” into his foot project, he did lots of interesting, offbeat connective inquiry. For example, he’d started thinking about the spring force of a diving board and wondering,
What if you could somehow replicate a diving board’s propulsive effect in a prosthetic foot?
Somewhere along the way he learned about animal leg movements—in particular, about how the powerful tendons in a cheetah’s hind legs produced remarkable spring-force whenever the legs were bent and the tendons compressed.
What if a human leg could be more like a cheetah’s?

What if a car windshield could blink?
⁴²

In 1902 Alabama tourist Mary Anderson watched her New York streetcar driver struggling to see through his snow-covered windshield and wondered,
Why doesn’t someone create a device to remove the snow?
(The “someone,” of course, became Mary, designer of the first windshield wiper.) Sixty years later, Bob Kearns brought the windshield wiper into the modern era by posing a new question of his own. Dissatisfied with wipers that moved at one speed whether it was pouring or drizzling outside, Kearns inquired,
Why can’t a wiper work more like my eyelid, blinking as much (or little) as needed?
Kearns worked on his “intermittent wiper” idea in his basement, eventually coming up with an elegantly simple three-component electronic sensing and timing device. (The sad story of how the Big Three car companies infringed on his patent is told in the 2008 film
Flash of Genius
.)

He also made a mental con-nection with a distant memory. When he was growing up, his father owned an antique Chinese sword with a C-shaped blade. Phillips had always been fascinated by this sword because the curved blade was actually stronger and more flexible than a straight one. This created a fresh possibility in his mind:
Instead of a traditional L-shaped lower leg and foot, what if he dispensed with the heel and created a limb that was one smooth, continuous curve, from leg to toe?
With such a design, and with the right materials, he’d be able to incorporate the elasticity of a cheetah’s tendons and the bounce of a diving board. On such a limb, an amputee could not just walk, but run and jump.

What If possibilities are powerful things; they are the seeds of innovation. But you do not get from idea to reality in one leap, even if you’ve got spring-force dynamics on your side. What sets apart the innovative questioners is their ability—mostly born out of persistence and determination—to give form to their ideas and make them real. This is the final, and critical, How stage of inquiry—when you’ve asked all the Whys, considered the What Ifs . . . and must now figure out,
How do I actually get this done?
It’s the action stage, yet it is still driven by questions, albeit more practical ones.

How do I decide which of my ideas is the one I’ll pursue?

How do I begin to test that idea, to see what works and what doesn’t?

And
if/when I find it’s not working, how do I figure out what’s wrong and fix it?

Today, most of us are in a better position to build on our ideas and questions than ever before. We can use computer sketch programs, create YouTube videos of what we’re doing, set up beta websites, tap into social networks for help—or even launch a Kickstarter project to fund our efforts to solve a problem or create something new.

Phillips didn’t have any of those resources at the time he was working on his foot. He sketched by hand, then built clay prototypes in his basement lab. He would trek up to the kitchen to bake in his oven the ingredients that would go into his superfoot. “I was curing parts between fifty-pound hot plates in my oven, burning myself a lot,” he told me.

Phillips created somewhere between two hundred and three hundred prototypes of the Flex-Foot, and “a lot of them broke the first time you put your weight down on them.” Every time a foot broke, he dissected the failure through questioning:
Why did it break? What if I change the mix of materials? How will this new version hold up?
Each time Phillips fell, he landed in a place that was further ahead, closer to the breakthrough. He was failing forward, the whole time.

The Flex-Foot prosthetics that Phillips introduced, starting in the mid-1980s and continuing until he sold the line and his company in 2000, revolutionized the prosthetics industry. While the Flex-Foot line had various models for different uses, its most dramatic was the Cheetah—which incorporated various disparate influences (the diving board, the animal leg, the curved Chinese sword). With its curved blades, it changed everything: the way we think about prosthetics, how they’re supposed to look, what an amputee can do with them. Using Phillips’s creation, an amputee climbed Mount Everest; the runner Aimee Mullins became the first double-amputee sprinter to compete in NCAA track and field, for Georgetown University; and most famously, the South African runner Oscar Pistorius ran on two Cheetahs as he competed in the 2012 Olympics. As for Phillips himself, his prosthetic foot—the decades-long answer to his original question—enabled him to return to one of his deepest passions in life: He now runs every day, on the beach near his home in Mendocino, California.

When he’s not running, Phillips is hard at work trying to create new versions of limbs that do even more for less. In fact, almost as soon as he developed the Cheetah, he was asking,
Why does it have to cost so much? What if the design were tweaked in some way—through new materials, different processes—so as to make the limb accessible to more people? How might I make that work?

It’s common for questioners to do this; each “answer” they arrive at brings a fresh wave of questions. To keep questioning is as natural, for them, as breathing. But
how did they come to be this way? And why aren’t more people like that?

Chapter 2

Why We Stop Questioning

Why do kids ask so many questions? (And how do we
really
feel about that?)

Why does questioning fall off a cliff?

Can a school be built on questions?

Who is entitled to ask questions in class?

 
If we’re born to inquire, then why must it be taught?

Can we teach ourselves to question?

Why do kids ask so many questions? (And how do we
really
feel about that?)

A few years ago, the American comedian Louis C.K.
¹
wrote a bit for his stand-up act that focused on children and questioning. It starts with a description of a beleaguered mother and her young child, at McDonald’s. The child asks why the sky is blue, and the parent snaps, “Just shut up and eat your french fries!” Louis explains to the audience that while this might seem to be harsh, the reality is “You can’t answer a kid’s question; they don’t accept any answer.” If you do try to answer, you only end up caught in an endless circle of Why questions—as he then demonstrates by recounting a conversation with his own young daughter.

It starts innocently enough (“
Papa, why can’t we go outside?
”), but eventually Louis is asked to explain why it’s raining, why clouds form, why he doesn’t
know
why clouds form, why he didn’t pay attention in school, why his parents didn’t care about his education, and why their parents before that were just as bad. It devolves down to Louis’s trying to explain to his child why “we’re alone in the universe, and nobody gives a s— about us.” It ends, inevitably, with his telling his child, “Shut up and eat your french fries!”

The bit nicely captures a truth that any parent—or anyone who’s been around kids of a certain age—has experienced many times over. What makes it funny, though, is the comedian’s brutally candid description of how frustrating it can be to be on the receiving end of kids’ questions. The adult, in this case, becomes exasperated, insecure, aware of his own ignorance, and reminded of his insignificance—all because of that word
why
. As Louis C.K. makes clear, we may profess to admire kids’ curiosity, but at some point we just don’t welcome those questions anymore.

Maybe we’re simply worn out by the sheer volume of inquiry among young children. According to Paul Harris, a Harvard child psychologist and author, research shows that a child asks about
²
forty thousand questions between the ages of two and five. During that three-year span, Harris says, a shift occurs in the kind of questions being asked: from simple factual ones (name of object) to the first requests for explanations by thirty months. By age four, the lion’s share of the questions are seeking explanations, not just facts.

As this is happening, rapid brain growth is occurring. At the University of Washington, advanced brain-scan technology shows connections forming in young brains (some of the lab’s work is featured
³
in Tiffany Shlain’s fascinating film
Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks
). The lab’s scans reveal an explosion of connections (synapses) between neurons in young children’s brains—amounting to about a quadrillion connections, or more than three times the number found in an adult brain. Kids’ brains are constantly connecting stimuli or thoughts. And as they’re making these mental connections, they’re seeking more information and clarification by way of questioning.