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

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.

Clay Christensen suggests a bolder version of this question: What if the company didn’t exist? That question allows you to take a clean-slate approach in thinking about the industry and your place in it. Christensen points out that thinking about your company as if there were no history enables leaders to stop focusing on preexisting beliefs and st

As Bottino points out, it’s critical when taking on a challenging project to know how to solicit outside input and help, and to know how to engage with potential advisers, supporters, and collaborators. If you’re pursuing a truly ambitious question, you probably can’t answer it alone. Collaborative inquiry begins with asking others, Do you find thi

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

As Winston Churchill once said, “The trick is to go from one failure65 to another, with no loss of enthusiasm.” But how does one learn to perform that “trick” of “failing enthusiastically”?

“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.”

“Ask yourself an interesting enough question3 and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome—which I think is a more interesting place to be.”)

Einstein saw curiosity as something “holy.” Though he wondered about a great many things,

This expansive effect of questions has been studied by Dan Rothstein, who along with his colleague Luz Santana established the Right Question Institute, a small and fascinating nonprofit group formed in order to try to advance the teaching of questioning skills.