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

The How stage of questioning is where the rubber meets the road or, in Nanda’s case, the clock hits the floor. It’s the point at which things come together and then, more often than not, fall apart, repeatedly. Reality intrudes and nothing goes quite as planned. To say it’s the hard part of questioning is not to suggest it’s easy to challenge assum

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.

One such example, which has become a modern classic business story, is the origin of the Netflix video-rental service. The man who would go on to start the company, Reed Hastings, was reacting to one20 of those frustrating everyday experiences we’ve all had. Hastings had been lax in returning some movies rented from a Blockbuster video store, and b

Just asking Why without taking any action may be a source of stimulating thought or conversation, but it is not likely to produce change. (Basic formula: Q (questioning) + A (action) = I (innovation). On the other hand, Q – A = P (philosophy).

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

“When you’re leading a team, a start-up, or a public company, your primary occupation must be to discover the future. A compelling and even subversive question is an effective tool for navigating uncharted terrain.”

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

Often the worst thing you can do with a difficult question is to try to answer it too quickly. When the mind is coming up with What If possibilities, these fresh, new ideas can take time to percolate and form. They often result from connecting existing ideas in unusual and interesting ways. Einstein was an early believer in this form of “combinator

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