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

Meier felt that instead of just pushing information at kids, schools needed to teach them how to make sense of what they were being told so they would know what to make of it and what to do with 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

“He had an ability to reframe things—to ask questions that got at something fundamental. Sometimes the questions almost seemed stupid; there’s the idea of ‘the holy fool’ who asks the questions no one else will, and that was part of what he was doing.” In doing this, Deresiewicz has written, his professor “was showing us that everything is open to

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.

“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.”

The glut of knowledge has another27 interesting effect, as noted by author Stuart Firestein: It makes us more ignorant. That is to say, as our collective knowledge grows—as there is more and more to know, more than we can possibly keep up with—the amount that the individual knows, in relation to the growing body of knowledge, is smaller.

you can improve a question by opening and closing it. For instance, suppose one is grappling with the question Why is my father-in-law difficult to get along with? Like most Why, What If, and How questions, this question is open-ended because it has no one definitive answer. But note what happens when we transform this into a closed, yes-or-no ques

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

Google has maintained a wide-open40 (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,