What we learn from those kids is that there’s no substitute for quickly trying things out to see what works.

When the world moved at a slower pace and things weren’t quite so complex, we spent the early part of life in learning mode. Then, once you became an adult, “you figured out what your job was and you repeated the same thing over and over again for the rest of your life.” Today, Ito explains, because of constant change and increased complexity, that

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

The Why/What If/How progression offers a simplified way to approach questioning; it’s an attempt to bring at least some semblance of order to a questioning process that is, by its nature, chaotic and unpredictable.

whereas in the past one needed to appear to have “all the answers” in order to rise in companies, today, at least in some enlightened segments of the business world, the corner office is there for the askers.

The business world has a kind of love/hate relationship with questioning. The business-innovation guru Clayton Christensen6—himself a master questioner—observes that questioning is seen as “inefficient” by many business leaders, who are so anxious to act, to do, that they often feel they don’t have time to question just what it is they’re doing.

“What’s different about this school is you’re interested in what we don’t know, not just what we do know.”

And those not in leadership roles frequently perceive (often correctly) that questioning can be hazardous to one’s career: that to raise a hand in the conference room and ask “Why?” is to risk being seen as uninformed, or possibly insubordinate, or maybe both.

E. E. Cummings, from whom I borrowed this book’s title, wrote, Always the beautiful answer / who asks a more beautiful question.