A More Beautiful Question Berger en 21718

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A More Beautiful QuestionThe Power of Inquiry to SparkBreakthrough Ideas Warren BergerBloomsbury USA © 2014272 pages[@]

Rating8 Applicability

8 Innovation

8 Style8

FocusLeadership & Management

Strategy

Sales & Marketing

Finance

Human Resources

IT, Production & Logistics

Career & Self-Development

Small Business

Economics & Politics

Industries

Global Business

Concepts & Trends

Take-Aways• Asking lots of questions stimulates out-of-the-box thinking.

• Too many companies favor “knowing and doing” over questioning.

• Children ask fewer and fewer questions as they progress through school.

• Being willing to ask “big, meaningful, beautiful questions” is a prerequisite to movingaway from the familiar in order to “embrace the new.”

• The first step in solving a problem is to ask why a situation is the way it is.

• Follow up with what-if questions that consider any possible solution, no matter howoutlandish. Then ask how you can turn a what-if scenario into a reality.

• Most innovations combine existing ideas in a new way.

• Many freewheeling thoughts arise when you are relaxed.

• In a time of rapid change, questions may be more valuable than answers.

• Fostering a “culture of inquiry” must start with a company’s leadership.

This summary is restricted to the personal use of Marina Furmanchuk ([email protected])

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A More Beautiful Question getAbstract © 2014 2 of 5

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getabstractWhat You Will LearnIn this summary, you will learn:r1) How questioning stimulates creativity, 2) Why businesses and schools discourageinquiry, 3) Why the most effective questioning follows a “Why – What If – How” model, and 4) How to use “beautifulquestions” to your advantage.

getabstractReviewSmartphones, e-books and online shopping exist because someone asked, “Why not?” Journalist Warren Bergerasserts that asking simple questions is crucial to creative problem solving. In this absorbing exploration, Bergerdetails how innovators such as Polaroid’s Edwin Land and Netflix’s Eric Hastings parlayed “why” questions intohuge businesses. Inquiry is far too rare in business, says Berger, because after the start-up phase, companies tendto perceive questions as threats to the established order. Berger outlines techniques that organizations can use tostimulate a spirit of inquiry, but this is not primarily a how-to manual. Instead, Berger seeks to inspire. Throughdozens of stories and the insights of experts, he shows how you can use the right questions to see things that othersmiss and to expand the sphere of what’s possible. His concepts should be of particular interest to those in creativefields like design or advertising. getAbstract also recommends Berger’s vision of raising and answering “beautifulquestions” to entrepreneurs, investors, innovators and anyone doing business in this era of rapid change.

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Summarygetabstract

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getabstract“One goodquestion...can generatewhole new fields ofinquiry and can promptchanges in entrenchedthinking. Answers, onthe other hand, oftenend the process.”

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getabstract“Increasingly,businesses must tacklemore sophisticatedopen questions(Why? What if?How?) to thrive inan environment thatdemands a clearersense of purpose, avision for the futureand an appetite forchange.”

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It’s Not What You Already Know...When you face a problem, you look for a solution. That seems reasonable enough, but issolution-seeking always the best strategy? You generally devise solutions by drawing oninformation you already know or by trying fixes that worked in the past. But what if youface a new kind of problem that requires a new kind of solution – one that no one has triedbefore you?

You won’t find a breakthrough idea by reviewing what you already know. Instead,follow the example of such innovators as Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs: Don’t look foranswers; look for “beautiful questions” instead. The game-changing products, servicesand entertainment you enjoy today – including online shopping and Pixar movies – havetheir roots in questions. As New York Times technology reporter David Pogue asserts, suchimaginative leaps occur “when someone looks at the way things have always been doneand asks why.”

Three Kinds of QueriesInterviews with more than 100 creative thinkers in science, business, technology andentertainment suggest that effective questioners usually pose three kinds of queries:

1. “Why questions” – When amputee Van Phillips struggled with the clumsy prostheticsof the 1970s, he asked, “If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they make a decentfoot?” Why questions inspired innovations such as the Polaroid camera and Netflix. Thedoor to fresh solutions opens when you refuse to accept the existing reality.

2. “What-if questions” – Phillips dreamed up possible solutions to his why question byasking what-if questions. What if a foot could be like a diving board? What if a prostheticfoot could be like a cheetah’s paw? What-if questions enable you to browse through




getabstract“Many companies –whether consciously ornot – have establishedcultures that tend todiscourage inquiry.”

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getabstract“A beautiful questionis an ambitious yetactionable questionthat can begin to shiftthe way we perceive orthink about something– and that might serveas a catalyst to bringabout change.”

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getabstract“Innovativequestioners, when facedwith situations thatare less than ideal,inquire as to why, tryingto figure out what’slacking.”

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getabstract“For some reason,questioning isn’t taughtin most schools – noris it rewarded (onlymemorized answersare).”

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possibilities without regard to practicality. They help you conjure fresh approaches toestablished problems. They free you from what you think you know.

3. “How questions” – Phillips asked how he could incorporate the spring force of a divingboard or the power of a cheetah’s paw into a prosthetic foot. Only after going throughhow questioning did he hit on the concept of a curved wooden blade that he called theFlex-Foot.

Why Don’t Adults Question More?Human beings are natural-born questioners. Almost every kid asks, “Why is the sky blue?”That’s only one of the 40,000 questions that the typical child asks between the ages of twoand five. After that age, the number of questions that children ask drops off dramaticallyas they grow older.

One culprit is school, which emphasizes facts and rewards students who have the “rightanswers.” “Schools in many industrialized nations were not, for the most part, designedto produce innovative thinkers or questioners – their primary purpose was to produceworkers.” As a result, schools prioritize obedience and memorizing core facts, both desiredtraits in a laborer.

Another factor concerns how you allocate your mental resources. You can’t questioneverything in your daily life and still function efficiently. You have to perform many tasksautomatically, ignoring distractions and inconsistencies so you can reserve your mentalenergy for the things you choose to focus on. But in today’s environment of rapid change,you can safely ignore fewer things. As your environment becomes more unpredictable, youneed to ask more questions in order to adapt successfully.

Corporate cultures generally repress questioning. The founders of many major companiesmodeled their enterprises on the military, with layers of responsibility and status, and withlittle scope for asking questions about standard practices and processes. This system tends tosanction expertise instead of curiosity. Industrial economies reward expressing confidenceand acting as if you have all the answers. As consultant Eric Ries points out, “If you didyour homework, you were supposed to know.”

In times of change, when you constantly confront the unknown, you must rely on creativitymore than knowledge. Questioning stimulates your creativity.

The Naive Question: Why?The first step in innovation is to forget what you know, or at least clear it from yourconscious mind. Steve Jobs, for instance, adopted the Zen Buddhist concept of “beginner’smind,” the ability to see a situation as if for the first time. Heed Zen master Shunryu Suzuki’sadvice, who wrote, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’sthere are few.” You can cultivate this frame of mind by asking naive questions, includinga child’s favorite: “Why?”

A child’s why led to the development of the Polaroid camera. On a family vacation in the1940s, Edwin Land’s three-year-old daughter asked why she couldn’t immediately see thephotograph her father had just taken. Land knew that producing an instant photograph wasimpossible: You had to develop film in a darkroom. But instead of relying on what he knew,he continued to think about her question. Four years later, his first black-and-white instantcamera hit the market.




getabstract“One of the manyinteresting andappealing thingsabout questioning isthat it often has aninverse relationship toexpertise.”

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getabstract“The old educationalmodel hasn’t evolvedmuch – and for the mostpart hasn’t adapted tothe modern economy’sneed for more creative,independent-thinking‘workers’.”

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getabstract“Questions (the rightones, anyway) aregood at generatingmomentum, which iswhy change-makersso often use them as astarting point.”

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getabstract“The problem withasking questions, forsome business leaders,is that it exposes a lackof expertise and, intheory, makes themvulnerable.”

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Why is powerful because it gives you a new perspective. Why lets you “step back” fromyour assumptions and expertise and see things freshly, with a beginner’s mind.

The Dreamer’s Question: What If?Your why opens a new field of thought, often unveiling a need. A second kind of question– What if? – will help you imagine ways to satisfy this need. Asking a what-if questionlets you brainstorm a range of solutions, freeing your imagination from the constraints ofpracticality. Innovation requires “a time for wild, improbable ideas to surface and inspire.”Sometimes the most outlandish what-if question is the one that produces results. TimWestergren once asked a far-fetched question that juxtaposed concepts from biology and thearts: “What if we could map the DNA of music?” This idea led to Pandora Internet Radio,which recommends music to users based on an analysis of its “basic building blocks.”

In many cases, you don’t have to invent your what-if ideas out of whole cloth: Manyfresh ideas are recombinations of existing and often seemingly incompatible concepts.Westergren’s combination of songs and genetics is an example of “remixing” ideas.Einstein, Jobs, Walt Disney and Star Wars director George Lucas were all master remixers.They borrowed existing ideas and combined them in creative, unexpected ways.

If you don’t feel as creative as an Einstein or a Disney, embrace a few useful techniques tostimulate your recombining abilities. One tactic is to “think wrong.” Force your thinkingout of its familiar tracks by purposely “coming up with ideas that seem to make no sense,mixing and matching things that don’t normally go together.” Wrong thinking might leadyou to the question, “What if some company started selling socks that didn’t match?”This provocative, nonsensical question led to the business plan of the now thriving sockcompany, LittleMissMatched.

Or just go for a stroll. To unleash creative mixing, give your mind time to let the question“incubate.” By “stepping away...you give your brain a chance to come up with the kindsof fresh insights and what-if possibilities that can lead to breakthroughs.” According tobrain researcher Chen-Bo Zhong, the mind does this best in a “state of inattention”: Pullingthe conscious mind away from the problem at hand gives your unconscious a chance togo to work. Gently distracting the conscious mind is easy enough. Go to a museum, takea walk, daydream or even sleep. When the brain is relaxed, it “turns inward” and ignoresdistractions, which generates more brain “activity in the right hemisphere,” which is themore creative part of the brain. A visit to a museum can be a perfect way to step back: Itprovides a break from conscious attention on your problem and offers a plethora of ideasthat will stimulate your imagination and generate fresh conceptual fodder for thinking ofinnovative connections.

The Realist’s Question: How?The third stage of “actionable inquiry” is when you narrow down your what-if ideas andfigure out how to make one of them into a workable product or process. During this “slow,methodical” stage, test ideas, watch them fail and learn from the failures.

Test your idea by building a prototype – any kind of working model – whether it’s a crudemock-up built from simple materials or a graphic representation on a computer screen.Don’t overplan the concepts you try. “Quickly test ideas to get feedback and see what worksand what doesn’t.” Phillips tested more than 200 Flex-Foot prototypes. Become inured toany successive failures – each one unveils new pieces of information that take you thatmuch nearer to success.




getabstract“Positive questions,focusing on strengthsand assets, tend to yieldmore effective resultsthan negative questionsfocusing on problems ordeficits.”

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getabstract“For decades, [Toyota]used the practice ofasking why five timesin succession as ameans of getting to theroot of a particularmanufacturingproblem.”

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getabstract“Asking why can be thefirst step to bringingabout change in almostany context.”

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During the why and what-if stages, ignoring conventional wisdom often proves useful. Yetduring the how phase, other people’s expertise can be a rich resource. In the digital era,reaching out to a diverse collection of people who have expertise, abilities and conceptualbrilliance is easier than ever. When you have a compelling question, people “almost can’tresist advising or helping you” find some great answers.

Fostering a “Culture of Inquiry”Conventional businesses prize doing over questioning and expertise over uncertainty.Today, knowledge for its own sake is less valuable. As the speed of change accelerates,expertise has a shorter lifespan. Today’s answers are out of date tomorrow. In the age ofGoogle and Wikipedia, you needn’t memorize vast stores of knowledge – almost any factis a mouse click away.

Businesses can take several steps to foster a culture of inquiry:

• Start with the leadership – Leaders need to welcome the challenges of uncertainty.The old role for leaders was to know; their new role is to make sense of change fortheir employees. A chief executive officer who becomes a chief executive questionerencourages everyone throughout the organization to ask probing questions. Employeesare likely to come up with inquiries that wouldn’t occur to the top brass. The mosteffective leader doesn’t only offer answers. He or she uses Socratic-style debate anddeeper questioning to spark intense creativity from staff members.

• “Reward questioning” – Organizations should stop punishing those who ask questionsor saddling those who identify a problem with the responsibility of fixing it. Companiesneed to devise ways to give employees the time to pursue meaningful lines of inquiry.Google, for instance, has a “20% time” policy whereby employees can “devote a fifth oftheir time to work on independent projects.”

• Restructure the company as a learning environment – Organizations need to createan atmosphere that nurtures exploration. Some replace the traditional military modelwith cultures relying on the metaphors of the university or the laboratory. Google, forexample, hosts guest lecturers and provides a platform for employees to teach in-houseclasses on topics ranging from technology to parenting.

• Replace brainstorming with “question-storming” – Brainstorming sessions leveragethe power of collaboration, but be aware that pressure to come up with original ideas andsolutions can short-circuit creativity. Shift the focus toward generating questions abouta problem.

• Recruit questioners – To bring about a change in how your firm thinks, search for andhire information seekers. Populate the company culture with daring new employees whoare “naturally inquisitive.” Job interviews traditionally assess a candidate’s talent foranswering questions. A more revealing method might be to test an interviewee’s abilityto ask questions as well. Require candidates to bring a handful of questions about yourbusiness to the interview. Build on those inquiries by asking follow-up questions to theinterviewee’s questions.getabstract

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About the Authorgetabstract

getabstractJournalist Warren Berger has written for Fast Company, Harvard Business Review and Wired. His book Glimmerwas one of BusinessWeek’s Best Innovation and Design Books of the Year.



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A More Beautiful Question Berger en 21718