Questions Are the Answer

Hal Gregersen

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780062844774
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

2018 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner

What if you could unlock a better answer to your most vexing problem—in your workplace, community, or home life—just by changing the question?

Talk to creative problem-solvers and they will often tell you, the key to their success is asking a different question.

Take Debbie Sterling, the social entrepreneur who created GoldieBlox. The idea came when a friend complained about too few women in engineering and Sterling wondered aloud: "why are all the great building toys made for boys?" Or consider Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, who asked: "would it change economic theory if we stopped pretending people were rational?" Or listen to JeffBezoswhose relentless approach to problem solving has fueled Amazon's exponential growth: "Getting the right question is key to getting the right answer."

Great questions like these have a catalytic quality—that is, they dissolve barriers to creative thinking and channel the pursuit of solutions into new, accelerated pathways. Often, the moment they are voiced, they have the paradoxical effect of being utterly surprising yet instantly obvious.

For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions has always been clear—but it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn't we know more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest ultimately including over two hundred interviews with creative thinkers. Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions—and breakthrough insights—and how anyone can create them.

1

What’s Harder Than Finding New Answers?

The important and difficult job is never to find the right answers,

it is to find the right question.

—PETER DRUCKER

When the first group of visitors arrived at a newly opened event space in Shanghai in June 2017, they were promptly immersed in a situation unlike any they had encountered before. First, they sat through a concert combining music and poetry. Then they made their way through a full-scale mockup of some typical features of a town: a park with a pond offering boat rides, an outdoor market with a playground for the kids among them, a café full of chattering patrons. Not so remarkable, you think? Here’s the catch: they experienced all this in utter pitch-blackness. They stumbled around. They bumped into things. They laughed but at the same time were deeply bewildered. None could have managed it at all except for the help of their expert and agile guides—who, of course, were blind.

This is “Dialogue in the Dark,” the brainchild of Andreas Heinecke, who created the first such installation in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1989. Today, the social enterprise he built operates in dozens of countries, simultaneously creating jobs for blind people and helping sighted people understand how they go through life. Millions of visitors have experienced it, and for many it sparks a life-changing moment.

And it all started with a question—actually, with a reframed question. Some thirty years ago Heinecke was working for a radio station, when he learned from a manager that a former employee would be rejoining the staff there soon. The man had been in a terrible car accident and left blind by his injuries, but he wanted to work again. Heinecke was asked to help that colleague accomplish his reentry into the workplace. It was a challenging assignment, since Heinecke had no experience in any assistance of this nature, but immediately he started trying to solve the problem of what a person with such a disability could still do at a passable level. It was only as he got to know his colleague well that he realized he had been asking a terribly reductive question. He switched it around to something more positive: In what kind of job setting could a blind man capitalize on his relative strengths? The idea for “Dialogue in the Dark” sprang to mind and showed the way to what would be his life’s work.

My contention in this book is that this is how a great deal of progress happens. Questions are reframed in ways that prove catalytic. They dissolve barriers to thinking, like limiting prior assumptions, and they channel creative energy down more productive pathways. People who have been feeling stuck suddenly see new possibilities and are motivated to pursue them.

The chapters that follow will deal with how this insight might let you operate differently in work and life. What if the key to finding better answers is to start by asking better questions? How would you go about doing that? As we’ll see from many creative people’s efforts in all kinds of settings, it is possible to create conditions in which new angles of attack on problems will more likely be voiced and paid attention to. It is possible to build habits of pausing to revisit questions before rushing to formulate new answers. But before we move on to exploring these methods, there is the work of this chapter to accomplish: convincing you that this is a line of effort worth pursuing. You need to appreciate first the power of a certain kind of questioning, and avoid the traps of only working to solve problems presented in the same old ways.

BEHIND EVERY BREAKTHROUGH IS A BETTER QUESTION

Trace the origin story of any creative breakthrough, and it is possible to find the point where someone changed the question. I have seen this as a longtime student of innovation; the stories in that realm abound. For example, consider the origins of the snapshot. Photography had been invented well before Kodak founder George Eastman was born in 1854, and he took an interest in it as a young man. But as he prepared to take an international trip at age twenty-four, he found it was too much of an undertaking to pack along the elaborate and expensive equipment. The technology for capturing photographic images had steadily improved over the years in terms of speed and quality, but the assumption remained that this was a process for professionals, or at least for serious and well-heeled enthusiasts. Eastman wondered: Could photography be made less cumbersome and easier for the average person to enjoy?

It was a promising enough question to motivate Eastman to dive into research mode, and exciting enough that he could recruit others to help. By age twenty-six he had launched a company, and eight years later, in 1888, the first Kodak camera came to market. Not only did it replace wet emulsion plates with new dry film technology, it featured what managers today call a “business model innovation.” There was no longer an expectation that the customer would acquire the skills and the setup for developing the film. Instead, after shooting a whole roll of a hundred pictures, he or she sent the compact camera back to the company for developing. The Kodak was a smash hit, but the question lived on. By 1900, Eastman and his colleagues launched the Brownie, a one-dollar camera simple enough for a child to operate and durable enough for soldiers to take into the field.

Today, as I sit in the midst of MIT’s buzzing hive of innovators, I see plenty of people arriving at and articulating questions with the same power to excite the imagination and engage other clever people’s efforts. For the moment I’ll name one: Jeff Karp. He’s a bioengineer in charge of a lab devoted to biomimicry. If that’s an unfamiliar term to you, let me suggest that the best way to understand it is with a question: How does nature solve this problem Say the problem in question is the need for a bandage that will stay stuck to a wet spot, such as a heart, bladder, or lung that has just been operated on. In that case, what could be learned from slugs, snails, and sandcastle worms? Perhaps it is not surprising that this particular question had never been posed—but once it was, scientists in Karp’s lab made rapid progress toward a product used widely today. As Karp puts it, nature offers an “encyclopedia of solutions” for those who think to consult it. “By exploring nature for new ideas,” he explained, “you uncover insights you would have otherwise missed by simply staying in the lab.”

Sometimes the outcome of asking a different question is an immediate insight—a novel solution that has people slapping their foreheads at how obvious it should have been.¹ (I can imagine someone in the early days of magazines asking, “Why don’t we charge the subscribers next to nothing, and take on advertising?” Or someone in a more recent decade asking, “Would we accomplish more if we stopped condemning alcoholism as a moral failing and instead treated it like a disease?”) It’s as though the new answer is so embedded in a question that you effectively unlock the answer as soon as you ask the question. More often, discovering an answer takes time, but framing the question makes the pursuit possible. As with Eastman’s or Karp’s question, catalytic inquiry opens up space for new lines of thinking; it recruits help, often from people trained in other disciplines; and it generates new appetite for the work.

It’s also important to note that while I tend to accentuate the positive as I talk about the power of questions—their ability to reveal opportunities and yield breakthrough ideas—they are just as powerful in helping people tackle negative threats. One way to think about what a great question can do is to acknowledge the inherent danger in what “you don’t know you don’t know.” Imagine a simple diagram: a two-by-two matrix describing the state of your knowledge of a situation. One axis presents two possibilities: there are things that are important to your success that you know all about, and other things unknown to you. The other axis reflects how cognizant you are of those knowledge assets and gaps; that is, you may or may not be aware that there is a piece of information out there that you need to solve your problem. Thus, there are things you know you don’t know. For example, if you are an army general, you might know that the enemy has a weapons cache but be unsure about where it is. You know that you don’t know that. Far more troubling, though, are the things you don’t know you don’t know. These are things that have not even crossed your mind to ask.

Donald Rumsfeld invoked this framework in a famous discussion of the Bush administration’s suspicion of weapons development in Iraq, and pointed out that the “unknown unknowns” often turn out to be one’s downfall. Business strategists, too, recognize this as the realm from which business-destroying disruptions usually emerge. We can return to Kodak for a classic example. After a century of success, it was decimated by something it didn’t know it didn’t know: how fast it would need to retool and reorganize in response to a sudden, large-scale consumer shift to digital photography. Or, more recently, think of the taxicab industry, whose “unknown unknown” was the impact of thousands of ordinary car owners turning into ride providers through services like Uber and Lyft. Was this question even raised in a Yellow Cab management meeting as recently as five years ago? If so, it was not taken to heart. (The company, San Francisco’s largest traditional taxi firm, filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2016.)

You might say that such developments should have been foreseeable—and who could argue with that? After all, they were foreseen by the disruptive innovators who triggered the radical change. But for the people who were busy going about their business in the old mode, gaining the same insights would have required venturing into uncomfortable territory—beyond the usual realms of work where they knew they didn’t have all the answers, to realms where they weren’t even asking the right questions.

In the face of positive opportunities, then, and also negative threats, my claim is that, by revisiting the questions they are asking, and asking better ones, people arrive at dramatically better answers. In fact, I would push this to a bolder declaration that no dramatically better solution is possible without a better question. Without changing your questions, you cannot get beyond incremental progress along the same path you’ve been pursuing.

IT PAYS TO FOCUS ON QUESTIONING SKILLS

There’s a corollary to the thesis that breakthrough solutions spring from better questions: by getting better at questioning, you raise your chances of unlocking better answers. Talk about things you didn’t know you didn’t know: Has it ever occurred to you before now that some people are better questioners than others, and that this is a learnable skill? If you agree that this is a capacity you should deliberately expand in yourself and perhaps others around you, do you have any idea how to go about it?

Now that the idea has entered your head, I suspect you will start to notice that highly creative people mention this capability a lot—and always have. Reading an interview with Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, for example, you might now pause over the point where he says, “A lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.”² Reading the blog of Ellen Langer, the Harvard psychologist who pioneered the concept of “mindfulness,” you might engage with the post that begins: “Outside of Jeopardy and the game ‘20 Questions,’ we typically worry about answers more than questions. Yet, questions direct our information search and all but determine the answer.”³ Scrolling through your Twitter feed, you might retweet the observation by disruption theorist Clay Christensen: “Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go.” You might suddenly glimpse the respect for questions behind Picasso’s great pronouncement: “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” You might start to see calls for better questions everywhere.

Fast Company magazine recently profiled how a particularly creative engineer, Chris Gentile, goes about his work. Gentile, who is now president and CEO of iBoard, figured out, for example, how to integrate holograms into mass-produced toys. He is the force behind other innovations in virtual reality as well, such as 3-D Web graphics and gaming devices. The journalist behind the story said he felt like “a young monk climbing the mountain” as he approached such awesomeness. And he did not come away empty-handed: Gentile gave away his top four pieces of advice for anyone trying to generate a breakthrough idea. Number one? “Change the question.” The simple example he gives is described by the reporter:

Gentile was once asked by some researchers to help them figure out how they might commercialize robots they had been working on. When Gentile stepped into their lab, they eagerly walked him over to their robots that were swinging their arms in their best effort to mimic human movement. But Gentile got distracted by some computer screens across the room where he saw stick-figure depictions of the robots moving seamlessly. He asked, “What are those?” and learned that the researchers had developed software to read and depict their movement. Gentile’s eyes gleamed and he said, “Forget the robots!” He changed the question from “How can we commercialize robots?” to “How can we commercialize the software?” The idea led to a new form of more realistic animation for video games and movies.⁴

The urgings of all these people to get others to pay more attention to questions is, in itself, a challenge to a deep-seated assumption many of us make. We tend to believe that creative ideas are just lightning bolts of insight—eureka moments—that can’t be summoned on demand. Even more helplessly we tell ourselves that it must take a special kind of brain—on the order of Einstein’s—to serve as the lightning rod to such epiphanies. The truth is we can do much more than passively wait and hope. We must do much more.

It would surely be malpractice on my part to suggest that no one else has already been researching the notion of building questioning capacity. That work has been going on for decades, beginning, not surprisingly, in the field of education. You may, for example, have heard of “Bloom’s taxonomy,” which outlines six distinct levels at which a student’s cognitive capabilities can be challenged by a question or problem. They range from the very basic application of knowledge one performs by recognizing or recalling a piece of information, to the much more complex processes used in analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist, published that taxonomy over six decades ago, in 1956—and legions of education theorists since have explored how better questions can activate the higher levels of cognition. In more recent decades, experts in other disciplines have turned their attention to settings beyond classrooms. In the context of workplaces, for example, my MIT colleague Edgar Schein has urged leaders to engage in “humble inquiry,” which he defines as “the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.”⁵

The result of this ongoing work is that, even if no definitive recipe book for arriving at great questions exists, we have gained many ideas and practices that have proven effective in various settings. More broadly, this work raises awareness of the fundamental idea that questioning is a skill and capacity that a person, with deliberate practice, can strengthen. Understanding the power of questions and emphasizing that you should get better at asking them offers a critical choice. You can begin to ask: What am I doing today and tomorrow and the next day so that better questions come into my work and my world?

NOT ALL QUESTIONS ARE GOOD ONES

One theme that runs through the work of every researcher focused on questioning is that not all questions are created equal. Building a questioning capacity isn’t simply a matter of asking more questions—of yourself or others. There are different kinds of questions, and while some are inspiring, and some instructive, others are downright toxic.

Bloom’s taxonomy is one way of thinking about the qualitative differences in questions: they vary according to the mental processes demanded of the person attempting to answer them. More complex cognition is required for problem-solving, for example, than for simple retrieval of memorized facts. Along similar lines, Robert Pate and Neville Bremer proposed another way to divide up the world of questions: some are convergent, while others are divergent. Convergent ones seek a single right answer, which in a teaching setting is already known to the teacher. These “closed” questions—like “What is the average temperature in Hawaii?”—test someone’s knowledge or ability to arrive at a logical answer. Divergent ones invite more than one answer, like “How should societies respond to climate change?” “Open” questions li...