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

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.

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).

One of the many interesting and appealing things about questioning is that it often has an inverse relationship to expertise—such that, within their own subject areas, experts are apt to be poor questioners. Frank Lloyd Wright put it well when he remarked that an expert is someone who has “stopped thinking because he ‘knows.’”2 If you “know,” there

ambitious, catalytic questioning tends to follow a logical progression, one that often starts with stepping back and seeing things differently and ends with taking action on a particular question.

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.

Stanford University’s Bob Sutton says that67 when analyzing a misstep, in addition to asking what went wrong, you should also ask, In this failure, what went right? (Conversely, when you try out something and it seems to have succeeded, look for what went wrong or could have been better, Sutton says. The best learning comes from looking at successe

Picasso was onto this truth fifty years ago when he commented, “Computers are useless—they only give31 you answers.”

The Polaroid tale also nicely illustrates the sequential inquiry process that can be triggered by a certain kind of catalytic question. This Why–What If–How progression—which can be identified in many stories of innovative breakthroughs—is clearly evident in the Polaroid example.

What kind of preparation does the modern workplace and society demand of its citizens—i.e., what kind of skills, knowledge, and capabilities are needed to be productive and thrive? The answer to that, again, is not simple, but among those who’ve studied the needs of the evolving workplace from an educational standpoint—and two people at the forefro