The five whys methodology originated27 in Japan and is credited to Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota Industries. For decades, the company used the practice of asking why five times in succession as a means of getting to the root of a particular manufacturing problem.

“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

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.”

But as Drucker knew, an outsider looking at your business will probably never understand it as well as you do. Hence, that outsider generally shouldn’t be telling you what to do. He/she should be helping you to see things from a different angle, challenge your own assumptions, reframe old problems, and ask better questions—so that, in the end, you

“Everything that’s ever happened to you or occurred to you in your life informs every decision you make—and also influences what questions you decide to ask. So it can be useful to step back and inquire, Why did I come up with that question?” Burton adds, “Every time you come up with a question, you should be wondering, What are the underlying assu

The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer observed that questions “are the engines of intellect5—cerebral machines that convert curiosity into controlled inquiry.”

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.

In the business world, Hal Gregersen has been studying the24 effectiveness of question-storming at major corporations and has found it to be far more effective than conventional brainstorming. “Regular brainstorming for ideas often hits a wall because we only have so many ideas,” Gregersen says. “Part of the reason we hit that wall is we’re asking

We do know that the ability to question, whether verbally or through other means, is one of the things that separates us from lower primates. Paul Harris, an education professor8 at Harvard University who has studied questioning in children, observes, “Unlike other primates, we humans are designed so that the young look to the old for cultural info