A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

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.

You can conduct all business, including the business of everyday life, constantly accompanied by a curious and vocal three- or four-year-old, who will see what you miss. Or you can attempt to adjust the way you look at the world so that your perspective more closely aligns with that of a curious child. That second option is by no means easy—it take

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

As Basadur notes, if you are able to “find” a problem before others do, and then successfully answer the questions surrounding that problem, you can create a new venture, a new career, a new industry. Here again, as Basadur attests, it applies to life, as well—if you seek out problems in your life before they’re obvious, before they’ve reached a cr

A year before Jennifer’s question and Land’s feverish walk, in December of 1942, he had said to Polaroid employees, “If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it . . . if you think of, detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream even if the end is a long way off, for there are about five thousand st

The esteemed physicist Edward Witten10 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.”

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

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,

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).