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Problemas De Bases De Datos Sanz y Torres Luis Grau Fernández, Ignacio López Rodríguez Rok: 2006 Język: spanish Plik: PDF, 64.64 MB Twoje tagi: 0 / 0

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Active Flow and Combustion Control 2021: Papers Contributed to the Conference “Active Flow and Combustion Control 2021”, September 28–29, 2021, ... Mechanics and Multidisciplinary Design, 152) Springer Rudibert King, Dieter Peitsch Rok: 2021 Język: english Plik: PDF, 42.58 MB Twoje tagi: 0 / 0

Dedication
TO SUZI

Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword by Ed Catmull
Prologue: Why Did I Write This Book?
1: What’s Harder Than Finding New Answers?
2: Why Don’t We Ask More?
3: What If We Brainstormed for Questions?
4: Who Revels in Being Wrong?
5: Why Would Anyone Seek Discomfort?
6: Will You Be Quiet?
7: How Do You Channel the Energy?
8: Can We Raise a Next Generation of Questioners?
9: Why Not Aim for the Biggest Questions?
Epilogue: What Will You Ask of Yourself?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Praise
Also by Hal Gregersen
Copyright
About the Publisher

Foreword
by Ed Catmull
Coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Creativity, Inc. and president of
Pixar Animation and Disney Animation
When I visited Hal Gregersen recently at MIT, he told me something about Pixar
and Disney Animation that I hadn’t actually thought about—despite having
spent a lot of time thinking about how we do things. In fact, Hal had my book
describing Pixar’s way of working, Creativity, Inc., in his office. To say it was
dog-eared would be a serious understatement. The spine was so cracked and it
was so scribbled over, highlighted, and stuffed with sticky notes that it was
almost falling apart.
“You are constantly asking questions in that book,” Hal told me. “It’s full of
questions.” More broadly, he said, based on his visits with various colleagues of
mine, that our people are great at asking “catalytic questions” of each other. “It’s
like you have this disciplined instinct, or learned habit, that has you constantly
operating under the assumption that ‘I don’t know things that I need to know.’
And then you figure out ways to get them to surface.”
I recognized what he was talking about. At Pixar, we have developed several
ways, I would even call them institutions, over the years for pushing ourselves,
our stories, and our filmmaking into new creative territory. For example, our
directors all know that at any point in a project when they are feeling stuck or
could use some fresh eyes on work in progress; , they should assemble the “Brain
Trust” of their peers to challenge their thinking. This is not just a random, ad hoc
gathering. Brain Trust meetings follow a particular process and have a set of
norms around them that we have refined over the years to help the director see
new creative possibilities but not rob that director of control. When we merged
with Disney, we found we could translate practices that worked in Pixar’s
environment to the other side of the house—so, for instance, there is now an
equivalent to Pixar’s Brain Trust, called “story trust,” in the Disney Animation
world.

To my way of thinking, putting elements like this in place to make creative
collaboration more possible is the most important work I can do at Pixar and
Disney Animation. (Probably, the same could be said for any manager of an
organization that depends on producing a steady stream of innovative work.)
Everything depends on the quality of our creative output, and it always improves
from candid feedback offered in the spirit of mutual commitment to excellence.
A lot of things go into creating the conditions for this, but perhaps the
requirement that deserves the most careful thinking is making it safe for people
to speak up about problems and offer ideas for how to solve them.
It probably goes without saying that for this sense of safety to exist, the focus
has to be kept on the problem and the need to solve it, and not on the person who
has failed to solve it so far or the people volunteering suggestions. But even
when the focus is wholly on the problem—like, what would make this character
more compelling?—any constructive reaction to the work in progress or a
comment made about it implies at least some level of dissatisfaction or rejection.
And it can really sting. For workers in creative roles, it is very hard to separate
their sense of self-worth from how others perceive their capacity for problemsolving.
The challenge is that people work within social dynamics in which they
usually feel they have something to prove. They don’t want to expose flawed or
incomplete thinking because they fear they will be judged harshly for it. And in
fact, that does happen, right? If somebody says something dumb in your
presence, you often do take note of that—and if it’s you saying the dumb thing,
you’re probably right in sensing some judgment. To the extent that you are
focused on not appearing stupid, or seeming to have something to contribute, or
looking as clever as possible, you are not really focusing on the problem to be
solved.
So, for the person who is in the position of overseeing a group’s work, the
best thing to figure out is how to remove that perceived risk that people will be
judged for speaking up. How do you create the conditions in which colleagues
will rigorously judge an idea that has been put out there, but not judge each other
for suggesting the ideas? How do you get to a point where ideas that don’t work
aren’t themselves personalized? Logically, this has to happen for ideas to rise
and fall on their merits, but emotionally, it is just profoundly counterintuitive.
Again, most of us have a very hard time separating our own sense of worth from
how the worth of our ideas is judged.
So this is the context in which I heard Hal make his comment about my
colleagues’ questioning skills. I think intuitively we probably have gravitated
toward the kinds of questions he likes to call catalytic—the kind that knock

down barriers by challenging past assumptions and create new energy for
pursing solutions along some new pathway. And if we have, it is probably in part
because asking a question is a very effective way of introducing a novel way of
thinking about something without exposing oneself to judgment. A question,
after all, is not a declaration of opinion aggressive enough to draw fire—it is an
invitation to think further within a different framing or along a divergent line. If
that line of thinking isn’t taken up, or fails to lead somewhere valuable, there is
no reputational damage to the person who suggested it. And, therefore, a person
is more likely to put it out there.
It is interesting when someone holds a mirror up to you and your
organization and allows you to recognize something you had not thought about
in quite the same terms. I think Hal is right that a certain kind of questioning is
present in my colleagues’ creative collaboration, and I am now paying more
explicit attention to it.
Thinking about the power of questions in collaborative, creative work, I will
make one more point. As my colleagues all know, I have never been a fan of
organizational mission statements. It isn’t that I am against having a collective
sense of purpose—any time people are working together in a formally organized
way, they should be thinking deeply about why they do what they do. But my
exposure to the mission statements that top management teams unveil to their
organizations is that they always represent the endpoints of discussions and
actually stop people from doing any deeper thinking.
I see better now what bugs me about them: they sound too much like
answers. I think it might be better to have mission questions—or at least mission
statements that are so ambiguous that they cause people to actively wonder:
“What does that really mean?”
When we see the point of our work as all about arriving at smart answers, too
often we mistake an answer for the end of an effort. We celebrate arriving at a
point from which we need go no further. But that isn’t the way life is. Yes, often
we are hard at work producing something that needs to be finalized—in Pixar’s
case, at some point, we release a movie. Boeing ships a jet. A professor finishes
a book. And that is an important form of culmination. But for many people, I
think, that culmination becomes the goal.
What if, instead, we valued the answers we arrive at mainly because of all
the new and better questions they lead us to? Put another way, what if instead of
seeing questions as the keys that unlock answers, we saw answers as stepping
stones to the next questions? That strikes me as a very different mindset—and
one that could take the creative efforts of groups much further.
My hope for you as you read Questions Are the Answer is that you will get

the same kind of value I have gained: that it will inspire you to think about how
a more deliberate use of questions could help you make more progress in
whatever problem you are trying to solve. In my case, I have known for a long
time that it is my responsibility to create environments where people feel safe
enough to give voice to their thoughts and ideas. Perhaps the problem you are
trying to solve has nothing to do with managing an organization but relates to a
family issue, personal goal, or community concern. Whatever it is, you are
probably, like me, receptive to having your thinking productively challenged on
the matter—and you might find that questions are the answer.

Prologue

Why Did I Write This Book?
In the word question, there is a beautiful word—quest.
I love that word.
—ELIE WIESEL

One compelling reason to write a book is because you discover things so true
and important that they deserve tens of thousands of words and hours of a
reader’s time to explore—and you sense that most people are living unaware of
how crucial those truths are. Here’s what I’ve discovered. First, if you want
better answers at work and in life, you must ask better questions. Second, if you
want better questions to ask, you do not have to resign yourself to chance and
hope they will occur to you. You can actively create for yourself the special
conditions in which questions thrive. Third, people who ask great questions are
not born different. We all start out with the capacity to ask about things we don’t
know. The ones who choose to keep their questioning skills strong just get better
at it.
How do I know all this is true? The most acceptable assurance I can give you
is that I have done my homework. I’ve reviewed the relevant research literatures,
formed my hypotheses, and then gone out in the field to test them through
hundreds of interviews with creative people. At this point, by my rough estimate,
I have pored over transcripts amounting to some three million words, finding the
themes and patterns in those fascinating, and at times humbling, conversations.
As a scholar, I am committed to that way of knowing. But at the same time I
have come to know the truth of what I am sharing more deeply than any standard
research process could tell me.
Over the past thirty years I’ve taught at several universities across three
continents. Today I teach in a place with unique conditions—conditions that

encourage everyone to challenge old assumptions and invent the impossible.
MIT’s campus is a place of constant, generative questioning. As my colleague
Andrew Lo describes it, MIT “is a safe zone for innovation—and I know that
sounds like a contradiction, because innovation is all about taking risk. But this
is an incredibly healthy and unusual situation where students feel like they can
actually question received wisdom, actually propose things that may be
completely out of left field and outside the box.” To come to work every day in
such an atmosphere is energizing. It is also a constant reminder of what so many
people are missing.
Most of us don’t live or work in conditions so primed for questioning. We
don’t even think much about questions and how, by asking more and better ones,
we might unlock entirely different answers. We started out life with great
creative curiosity, but we lost it along the way. For a long time, this was true of
me as well. I grew up in a home that wasn’t much of a safe zone for questioning.
To ask what seemed like obvious questions about why things were as they were
was seen as outright defiance. At the same time I found early on that certain
kinds of questions could shield me, if only by redirecting people’s attention to
topics that felt safer to focus on. I vaguely grasped that some questions held
more power than others.
Later, as a graduate student, I studied under Bonner Ritchie, who was
unbelievably skilled at asking tough questions that caused others to do their best
thinking. I sought him out as a mentor because of how eye-opening the effects
could be. I learned more from time spent with him than I did with other teachers.
He systematically pried open my mind and heart to new possibilities with
questions. Many of us have had mentors and friends who do the same, if we stop
to notice and value that special trait in them.
For the past decade my focus as a scholar, consultant, and coach has been on
corporate innovation, studying the effects of asking new questions in start-ups
and large organizations in established industries. Twenty-five years ago, my first
conversation with Clay Christensen—the Harvard Business School professor
who first gained fame for his theory of disruptive innovation—focused on what
causes people to ask the right questions. Our collaborations ever since have
sharpened my appreciation of the role of questions in breakthroughs. We have
both found inspiration in writings by Peter Drucker, who grasped more than fifty
years ago the power of changing what you ask. “The important and difficult job
is never to find the right answers,” he wrote. “It is to find the right question. For
there are few things as useless—if not dangerous—as the right answer to the
wrong question.” When Clay and I worked with Jeff Dyer to identify five
behaviors that make up the “innovator’s DNA,” the first of those five was the

habit of asking more questions.
Many of the innovative entrepreneurs we interviewed could remember the
specific questions they were asking at the time they had the inspiration for a new
venture. Michael Dell, for instance, told us that his idea for founding Dell
Computer sprang from his asking why a computer cost five times as much as the
sum of its parts. “I would take computers apart . . . and would observe that $600
worth of parts were sold for $3,000.” With that “Why should it cost so much?”
question in mind, he hit upon the business model that made Dell such a force in
the industry. From others we heard about long-standing predispositions to
challenge assumptions and conventions. “My learning process has always been
about disagreeing with what I’m being told and taking the opposite position, and
pushing others to really justify themselves,” Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay,
told us. “I remember it was very frustrating for the other kids when I would do
this.” Innovative entrepreneurs love to imagine how things could be different.
Asking themselves, or others, what is being taken as a given today that should
not be assumed or accepted can be the best way to catalyze original thinking.
Over the years I came to appreciate that perspective-changing inquiry wasn’t
just about business innovation and organizational change. Questions have a
curious power to unlock new insights and positive behavior change in every part
of our lives. They can get people unstuck and open new directions for progress
no matter what they are struggling with. Reframed questions, in whatever
setting, turn out to have some fundamental things in common. For one thing,
they have a paradoxical quality of being utterly surprising in the moment they
are asked but in retrospect seeming obvious. In other words they carry with them
a quality of inevitability without having been inevitable at all. For another thing,
they are generative. They open up space for people to do their best thinking.
They don’t put anyone on the spot, demanding correct, often predetermined
answers under threat of public humiliation. They invite people down an
intriguing new line of thought that offers some promise of solving a problem
they care about. I often use the word “catalytic” for these kinds of questions,
because they act like catalysts in chemical processes: they knock down barriers
to thinking and channel energy down more productive pathways.
On a personal level, too, I keep discovering how crucial it is to raise the right
questions—sometimes by being caught out by not asking them. In January 2014,
for example, I suffered a heart attack while giving a speech. Later, I had to come
to terms with the fact that, for a few deep reasons, I had chosen to make some
convenient assumptions about the state of my health, and it had almost cost me
my life. A year later, in the spring of 2015, I had the chance to join my friend
David Breashears, a renowned mountaineer, expedition leader, and

cinematographer—he codirected and filmed the IMAX film Everest—at Everest
Base Camp and to climb up into the Khumbu Icefall. We embarked on the
adventure after having formulated what we thought was a great research
question about leadership. The many expeditions that attempt to summit the
mountain every year amount to a fairly controlled experiment: every team uses
similar equipment and follows known paths. Yet some make it and some don’t.
Are there key differences to be found in the leaders of the successful ones—and
the systems they cultivate around themselves? Meanwhile, though, in my
planning of the trip, I hadn’t been so focused on a quite fundamental question:
Did I, who live these days literally at sea level, have any hope of being
productive in a short jaunt above 18,000 feet?
Adding insult to injury, even my research approach turned out to have
embedded assumptions I hadn’t thought to question. David Breashears has seen
many attempts on Everest fail in the many years he has been climbing on the
mountain, some tragically. He was there in 1996 when the terrible events
resulting in the loss of eight lives that were later described in Jon Krakauer’s
1997 book Into Thin Air unfolded. Whenever I listened to his stories, I processed
them in the mode of a leadership scholar, dispassionately forming hypotheses
about, for example, cognitive biases in decision-making. On my trek from Lukla
to Base Camp, I realized that it’s one thing to be in an MBA classroom talking
about bad calls like Rob Hall’s fatal choice to try to get a straggling client to the
summit even though it was far past the “safe time.” It’s another thing to actually
be at an altitude where even breathing or thinking clearly is a challenge. I
realized how wrong I had been to believe I was in possession of sufficient
information to judge.

Sunrise below Mt. Everest (second peak on the right) taken during an exhausting
ascent of Kala Patthar (18,519 ft.).

Ang Phula Sherpa (on the right) and I pause in the Khumbu Icefall, with majestic
Pumori (23,494 ft.) behind us. David Breashears

Step by step, I (second from right) ascend the Khumbu Icefall with Ang Phula
Sherpa (far right) always nearby. David Breashears

Turnaround time in the Khumbu Icefall, with Everest Base Camp (17,598 ft.)
spread out below our shoulders (Ang Phula Sherpa right). David Breashears

If you picked this up as a business book reader, expect to encounter a
somewhat different style of narrative. Maybe that is already clear. I am
fascinated by issues of leadership and innovation in organizations, and many of

the interviews this book draws on are with CEOs and other high-level executives
in the most innovative companies and social enterprises I know. But I have
talked with these leaders as whole people whose lives are bigger than their very
big jobs. The truth I have stumbled across—that the way to find better answers is
to ask new questions—is not a truth that applies only to one part of life.
Think for a moment of your own life and those occasions when the right
questions have unlocked a new solution to an issue that you had just been
wrestling with. My central question is: What kinds of conditions (or forces) were
in place when that happened, both inside of you as well as around you? Are there
certain circumstances that help you frame your best questions—or others that
you can sense shutting them down? This book pulls together the collective
response of several hundred creatives to these questions. My hope with it is to
get you, too, to better appreciate the importance of questions as catalysts for
change in general, and to enable you to be more reflective about how you can
generate those questions.
Finally, I am writing this book in the first person. If you have read Henry
David Thoreau’s Walden, you may remember his apology on the first page for
doing the same. “In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be
retained . . .,” he informs the reader. “We commonly do not remember that it is,
after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about
myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. . . .” Then he turns this
mild defense of his own voice into a demand of others: “Moreover, I, on my
side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own
life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives . . .” His hope is that
any author would give him “some such account as he would send to his kindred
from a distant land . . .”
I have valued that kind of authentic voice in many books I cherish—among
them, great books about questions like Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak and
A Hidden Wholeness; Twyla Tharp’s Creative Habit; Victor Frankl’s Man’s
Search for Meaning; Mary Catherine Bateson’s Peripheral Visions; John
Steinbeck’s East of Eden; and Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand
Years. (In the last, the fact that a film is being made about the author’s life causes
him to question the story of his life and then change it for the better.) Picasso
once said, “There is only one way to see things, until someone shows us how to
look at them with different eyes.” All these authors have given me new ways to
see things—and eyes that remained different as a result.
I don’t want to adopt some disembodied “expert voice” as we get into the
chapters. I want to be that kindred person who has struggled with serious
impasses in various areas of life and worked to overcome them—by asking

tough questions that took my head, heart, and hands down entirely new paths.

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 lifechanging 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 massproduced 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 problemsolving, 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 like this invite more creative thinking.6
While “open” sounds better than “closed,” and “complex cognition” sounds
smarter than “simple cognition,” there is no inherent value judgment going on in
these systems of classification. The theorists behind them stress that they all
have appropriate places, depending on the purpose at hand. But let’s say we do
have a purpose in mind—and it’s to arrive at novel insights by exposing
“unknown unknowns.” Let’s even say we are convinced that, as a general rule,
the world needs a lot more people devoted to that purpose. In that case, we are
making a value judgment. The best questions, then, are the ones that excite the
imagination and spur positive change.
Meanwhile, the goodness or badness of a question is also determined by the
spirit in which it’s asked. Take the question that Apple design chief Jony Ive says
his old boss, Steve Jobs, used to ask him “nearly every day.” Ive had always

noticed Jobs’s ability to maintain a laser focus on the task where his attention
would make the most difference. One day Ive told Jobs he admired that, and
admitted it was something he himself struggled with. Evidently, this became one
of the people-development problems Jobs then decided to prioritize. In their
daily encounters, Ive said, Jobs “would try to help me improve my focus by
asking me, ‘How many times did you say no today?’”7
That in itself is a great question, because it forces a perspective shift: it
recasts the challenge of staying focused from sustaining engagement in a task to
rejecting distractions from it. But it is easy to imagine that having Steve Jobs
repeat the same question to you day after day could start to feel like a form of
abuse. The reason it didn’t for Ive is that Jobs genuinely wanted to help. The
same question in different hands can be an expression of caring or a cudgel.
For me, the best questions—the ones this book focuses on—are catalytic;
that is, they dissolve barriers—which, in idea generation, usually come in the
form of false assumptions—and channel energy down new, more productive
pathways. Let’s take a look at each of these powerful qualities in turn.

GREAT QUESTIONS BREAK DOWN ASSUMPTIONS
Some questions knock down the walls that have been constraining a problemsolver’s thinking. They remove one or more of the “givens” in a line of thinking
and open up space for inquiry that had been closed off. We commonly call this
reframing.
Tina Seelig, a Stanford professor who writes about creativity and innovation,
is a big advocate of reframing. In her words, “All questions are the frame into
which the answers fall. And . . . by changing the frame, you dramatically change
the range of possible solutions.” Seelig quotes the often-told story about
Einstein, in which he says: “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life
depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining
the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the
problem in less than five minutes.” Seelig suggests that one way to reframe
things is to think of someone quite different from yourself and try to adopt the
perspective they would take on the situation. Would a child interpret something
differently than you do as an adult, or would someone from a different place,
versus a local, start with a fundamentally different set of assumptions?8
At Alphabet, the parent company of Google, an entire unit of the company
exists to operate as a “moonshot factory,” trying to devise very ambitious
solutions to big problems. Called simply X, it likes to take on “age-old, world-

hurting problems,” as one of its managers, Phil Watson, puts it, that could be
solved in a dramatically better way given new technological capabilities. Since
transportation is that kind of problem, for example, Alphabet’s driverless car
initiative started within X before turning into Waymo, a standalone Alphabet
company. The same goes for Loon, which started in the X unit as the “Project
Loon” effort to provide Internet connectivity to Earth’s most remote areas using
stratospheric balloons to suspend networks nodes in the sky. Always, the effort
starts with an attempt to map the problem space correctly before jumping into
building a solution. The leader of the group, Astro Teller, constantly reminds
teams to “start with the hardest part of the problem,” Watson tells me—which of
course begs the question, since at the outset of any effort to imagine a solution
that doesn’t exist, it can be hard to predict exactly where the going will get
tough.
What people at X have learned to recognize, however, is that the human
tendency is to start digging in and making progress on whatever part of the effort
is easiest. So, just calling out that tendency and advising against it can help. The
comical example Xers use is that, if the vision was to get a monkey to sit on top
of a pole reciting Shakespeare, the typical team would go straight to work
building that pole with its nicely balanced platform at the top. It’s the part of the
problem they already know how to approach, and solving it feels and looks like
momentum-building progress. But everyone knows the hard part is going to be
teaching the monkey—and if that proves impossible, any time spent on other
parts of the solution will turn out to have been wasted. To keep themselves
focused on where their energies should be directed, people at X sometimes toss a
hashtag into their team communications: #monkeyfirst.
Cognitive psychologists know there are deep reasons that humans readily
settle into comfortable frames of thinking and generally resist breaking them
until the feeling of being thwarted by them becomes unbearable. In social
groups, moreover, this tendency is compounded. Sociologist Amitai Etzioni,
who finds strong evidence that people’s social identities and personalities are
shaped mainly by their community relationships, observes that we cling to
“stable knowledge” rather than allowing “transforming knowledge” to challenge
the basic assumptions of our systems. When we engage in producing stable
knowledge we only play with secondary assumptions within a larger framework
which is taken for granted. To question the frame of our knowledge system is,
for most of us at most times, to upset the applecart too much. As Etzioni puts it,
“Once consensus has been reached on a basic worldview, a self-view, a view of
others, or strategic doctrine, it is politically, economically, and psychologically
expensive for the [decision-makers] to transform these assumptions . . .

Therefore, they tend to become tabooed assumptions, limiting the production of
knowledge to specifics within the confines of these assumptions.”9 The status
quo marches on.
Questions turn out to be the most effective way of breaking through this wall
of resistance to reframing. In a tentative, nonaggressive way, questions crack
open taboo territory and encourage us—individually and collectively—to
reexamine fundamental assumptions we are making. Elon Musk’s favorite term
for this is “first-principles thinking.” When his electric car company, Tesla,
landed at the top of the Forbes Most Innovative Companies list a few years ago,
the team of us who compiled that annual ranking talked to him about his knack
for coming at enormous problems from new angles.
First-principles thinking, Musk explained, hacks away all the things that
have been treated as givens but shouldn’t be, until it gets down to the base layer
of incontrovertible truth. Then it works back up from there. Musk’s easy
example for us was one from the automotive world in which Tesla competes.
Why simply accept that in putting lightweight aluminum wheels on its cars Tesla
must incur the going rate of $500 apiece? Instead he would likely say: “Well,
that seems odd, because the cost of cast aluminum is maybe two dollars a pound.
And the wheel is twenty-five pounds, so that’s fifty bucks. Okay, there’s some
processing costs involved, so let’s double that and now we’re at a hundred. This
wheel should not cost five hundred.” Musk is very aware that people don’t
normally push back so hard on what is presented to them as reality. They are
“more likely to say: ‘Well, we looked at what other people pay for wheels and
they seem to pay somewhere between $300 and $600. So, we think our $500
number is not that bad.’ But that just means everybody else is getting ripped off,
too!” Analysis of a problem by first principles, as he summed it up, “is where
you try to boil things down to the most fundamental truths in a particular area by
asking ‘What are we sure is true?’ The things you’re highly sure of are base
truths, your axiomatic elements, and then you apply your reasoning using those.”
Reframing, this example suggests, is almost always a case of “larger
framing”—opening up a space of inquiry that has been closed down to some
extent. Similarly, this is what my colleague Clay Christensen does when he
advises innovators within firms to stay focused on “the jobs to be done” by the
goods and services they produce.10 If, for example, a company produces cars, it
should not fall into the trap of saying “What would make our cars better?” It
should take the larger perspective of remembering that a car is just a solution the
customer “hires” to get a job done, which is to transport her to where she needs
to go. Think in terms of “How can we transport the customer better?” and the

frame for innovation in the company’s offerings suddenly becomes vastly larger.

GREAT QUESTIONS ENGAGE AND ENERGIZE
Malcolm Gladwell is the modern-day master of persuasive rhetoric, or what is
called in the twenty-first century “narrative nonfiction.” At the outset of his
bestselling book Outliers: The Story of Success, he invites us to come along with
him on his journey of discovery:
What is the question we always ask about the successful? We want to know what they’re like—what
kind of personalities they have, or how intelligent they are, or what kind of lifestyles they have, or what
special talents they might have been born with. And we assume that it is those personal qualities that
explain how that individual reached the top.
. . .In Outliers, I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t
work. . . . It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking
where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.11

Please note here that Gladwell is starting his book by saying, essentially,
“Let’s reframe the question.” He does that because it immediately engages his
audience’s attention. He is telling them that, while they have always looked at a
topic they care about in one way, they really should be looking at it in another
way. He knows their reaction will be “Ooh, cool, this should be interesting. I will
enjoy poking around in that space for a while.” This is the second quality of a
certain kind of questions, the kind I am trying to encourage more of. They excite
and engage others’ creative thinking. They unleash energy and channel it down a
new pathway that presents the potential for new solutions.
Great insights, on their own, are next to useless. They take on their worldchanging power only when someone turns them into practical reality. And
turning insight into impact almost always entails hard work. Usually it requires
more work than one person can do, both in terms of their time and personal skill
sets. To do big things—even to change big things about one’s own life—means
recruiting and motivating others to take up the cause.
Recruiting others to a cause is something a group of parents in New Jersey
had to do, for example, when they were feeling stuck for solutions. Their kids,
whose autism spectrum disorders made it difficult for them to function
independently, were about to age out of the programs provided through the local
school system. In 2000 they began by forming an informal club of parents who
were in the same boat, who all contributed some funds to provide a range of
recreation activities for their kids. As these parents got to know each other better,
conversations among them kept landing on their biggest worry: “What will

happen to our child when we are not around?” That changed one day in a very
productive way. “As our kids aged up,” they report now, “we saw we had to take
action. And the first thing we did is reframe the question.” The group started
asking itself: “What can we do to make sure our child has a purposeful life
today, and in the future?”12
On one level, that is a simple shift in language—yet, isn’t it obvious how the
first question trapped people in helpless dread, while the second motivated
productive action? The new question not only energized the parents; it gave
them a focal point for sharing ideas and a basis for inviting others—like clinical
psychologists and nonprofit agency advisors—whose help they would need.
Today, the Quest Autism Foundation they created together provides a range of
services as a state-approved “Real Life Choices provider” of adult day programs
and, thanks to a capital campaign, is about to combine its two sites into a home
of its own.
Was it really instrumental in the beginnings of the Quest Foundation that a
question was posed instead of a declarative statement sharing an idea or setting
forth an inspiring vision? I think so, for a few reasons. Questions, when they are
seen as sincere requests for help, invite creative contributions from others rather
than merely campaigning for their support. In most cases that additional thinking
makes for better solutions, but if nothing else it generates more active support.13
People who cognitively engage with an issue become more invested in getting it
resolved. Since so much of what we struggle with in life and work is bigger than
we are, it is essential that we use the tools we have to recruit help from others,
and good questions are among the best of those tools.

TIME TO GO BEYOND ANSWERING
A few years ago I gave a speech to a group of CEOs and senior leaders in
Singapore at a Wall Street Journal conference, presenting findings from The
Innovator’s DNA, for which Jeff Dyer, Clay Christensen, and I had researched
behavioral differences between businesspeople who were and were not highly
innovative. One of five key skills that distinguished innovators from noninnovators was their questioning behavior. (For example, we found that
innovators often demonstrate a high Q/A ratio, referring to the number of
questions versus answers we found in their transcribed conversations.) In
Singapore, someone from the crowd came up to me afterward. “Here’s my
concern,” he said. “All the way up from the bottom to the top of my company,
I’ve been promoted primarily for having all the right answers. Now I’m in the

CEO role I realize, uh-oh, it’s not about answers up here. It’s probably more
about asking the right questions. And I’m not quite sure I know how to do
that.”14
I wasn’t surprised to hear that he had made it so far in his career without
becoming a more deliberate questioner. When people spend a lot of time in
hierarchical organizations, they are rarely encouraged to ask questions of any
kind. Instead, abundant signals clue them in to the grim reality that asking
convergent questions—seeking simply factual information—makes them look
dumb. And even harsher signals discourage them from asking divergent
questions, which often challenge matters that are supposed to be settled at pay
grades higher than theirs. And, by the way, when I refer to hierarchical
organizations, I am hardly limiting that term to corporations. It describes the vast
majority of nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, government
agencies, and the military. (There’s a reason Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote of the
Light Brigade, “Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but
to do and die.”)
In such environments, the keys to surviving and thriving are smart answers.
People get ahead by standing and delivering solutions to problems just as they
are presented to them. Time goes by, the solutions incrementally improve, and
no one has paused to revisit the questions. And who ends up in charge of the
whole operation? Someone who is the product of that process. Like the CEO I
met in Singapore, these are managers who have had questioning beaten out of
them so long ago that they don’t even know how to go about it when they get
their turn at the top. Yet the future of the enterprise, and the livelihood of
everyone who works in it, depends on senior leaders spotting when assumptions
need to be called out and raising basic questions about how to serve customers
better. Most often when I learn of leaders who are the exceptions, they are
entrepreneurial founders as opposed to classic risers through the ranks. At
Salesforce, for example, chief marketing officer Simon Mulcahy tells me that
Marc Benioff (cofounder, chairman, and CEO) is constantly asking what the
future will look like and how the company should adapt. Importantly, though, he
always stresses the need to approach these questions with a “beginner’s mind”—
constantly seeing the world with fresh eyes. “You need to have a beginner’s
mind to create bold innovation,” Benioff says. In older enterprises more focused
on execution than invention, the potential “movers and shakers” who challenge
conventions are too easily dismissed as “dreamers of dreams.”15
Focusing on answers to settled questions is fine in many situations. In fact,
it’s essential that good questions should lead to periods of good answering.16 The

point is not to remain in constant questioning mode, always stepping back to
rethink things instead of stepping up to make a decision and get on with life. But
answering yesterday’s questions is not good enough at times when we are feeling
stuck, or when innovation is imperative, or when change must happen more
continuously.
And so I was also not surprised that the CEO who approached me in
Singapore was, in his new leadership role, now realizing that the most important
personal development task he faced was improving his ability to frame and
reframe questions. I’ve heard the same from many others. For example, Mark
Weinberger, who leads the professional services firm EY, told me: “CEOs are
expected to have the answers—and obviously you do need to have some
answers. But sometimes it’s not easy for other people to realize that one of your
biggest jobs, in the CEO role, is to ask the questions.” He was quick to add that
those questions also have to be asked in the right spirit. “You can’t make people
feel like you think they’re wrong if they can’t answer what you’re asking about.
That can’t be the purpose of the question. The real purpose is to help them think
differently.”
For Narayana Murthy, founder of Infosys, this is the only way to keep
growing as a firm. “At the end of the day, for us to succeed in the marketplace,
we have to create sustainable differentiation—and sustainable differentiation
comes from the power of the human mind,” he told me. “And that power is
expressed in terms of the right questions—and then the right answers to those
questions.” He summed up his line of thinking by stressing that the job of the
leader is to ensure the organization is “creating differentiation through the power
of innovation,” and that implies certain priorities for how leaders think and
behave: “I believe that asking the right questions is the first step.”

THE MORE WAYS WE’RE STUCK, THE MORE
QUESTIONS WE NEED
As it happens, we are collectively—and in many cases individually—in need of
the power of innovation in numerous realms. There are scientific mysteries to
unravel, social issues to resolve, personal difficulties to overcome. In many of
these areas, progress has stalled as old ideas have run their repetitive course.
Only new questions can show the ways forward.
For example, one problem that many people have noticed is the lack of
gender diversity in certain fields, especially science, technology, and
engineering. One entrepreneur I know, Debbie Sterling, was especially bothered

by it when she came out of college. She herself had majored in engineering at
Stanford, but she and the other women in her program were vastly outnumbered.
They knew this wasn’t a case of discrimination by the admissions staff: across
the board, there just weren’t enough women applying to engineering programs.
Sterling told me about the day she discovered something she could do about
it. “The idea first started at a club that I started with my friends called ‘Idea
Brunch,’ where we would get together every couple of months and make
breakfast, and each person would get up and pitch an idea—like for an art
project, or a business, or an app—and we’d brainstorm for a few minutes and
then go on to the next.” At one brunch her friend Christy used her turn to recall
the experience of being a little girl playing with her older brother’s Lincoln Logs
and Erector Set. Those toys got her interested in building at an age when “she
didn’t know any better—that this wasn’t something for a girl to do.” Sterling
recalled her friend asking why those had been the brother’s toys and not hers.
“Christy’s question was: What would make those toys appropriate for girls,
too? . . . And I remember sitting there so mesmerized by that. It was just an
epiphany moment, like: Oh—this is what I was put on this earth to do.”
Sterling took that sense of purpose and ran with it, coming up with a product
idea and using Kickstarter crowdfunding to get it prototyped. Today the
company she founded, GoldieBlox, makes a range of toys—and is proud to
proclaim why. “GoldieBlox is on a mission to inspire the next generation of
female engineers,” its website says. “Our goal is to get girls building.” I like
even better how Sterling put it to me: “Our question is: How can we disrupt the
pink aisle?”
It’s just one example of someone seeing a problem that has others throwing
up their hands, and then finding an unexpected new angle to approach it from. In
chapters to come, this is a continuing theme, with people challenging how
cybercrime gets thwarted, how traffic problems get solved, how gun violence is
combated, and more. Their work suggests not only that new answers are always
out there but also that we should always be working to turn more people into
catalytic questioners.

TIME TO GET BETTER AT QUESTIONING
In case it is not already evident, I need to make something clear: this is not a
book that “gives you the questions” any more than it is a book that gives you the
answers. Other books often hand over question sets, and their formulaic
approach can be effective in the specific use cases they target.17 However, this

book aims higher, to equip people to generate unique, unlocking questions
relevant to their own situations.
In that quest, the focus here is on a special class of questions, a small subset
of the whole universe of questions. This is why, perhaps, those other books
extolling questions and questioning have not been as useful or satisfying as they
could have been. It isn’t simply a matter of asking more questions; indeed, the
questions raised in many settings are time-wasting diversions if not downright
toxic. Instead, it’s a certain kind of question that inspires creative problemsolving because it energizes collective thinking, inspiring collaborative work to
make serious progress. By keeping a focus on these questions, we can learn how
to bring more of them to the surface of our lives and work.
Breakthrough solutions start with reframed questions, and we are in need of
breakthrough solutions in many, many realms. We can all benefit by grasping in
a more disciplined way something we have tended to see as pure serendipity: the
flash of inquiry that leads to insight. This last point is really the rationale for the
book: the belief that something that seems like a once-in-a-lifetime stroke of
luck—the insight, seemingly out of nowhere, that shows the way forward—is
actually not something we should leave to chance or assume must be rare. We
can make such moments happen by putting more emphasis on the questions that
precipitate them.

2

Why Don’t We Ask More?
And you, Scarecrow, have the effrontery to ask for a brain?
You billowing bale of bovine fodder!
—THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ

When you look at a provocative political piece of art, you often suspect that an
outsize personality lies behind it. That seems to have been the case with the late
Tim Rollins. He was a New York artist known for his longtime collaboration
with high school kids, many of them with learning challenges, from the toughest
neighborhoods in the Bronx. Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (for “Kids of Survival”)
was a darling of the art world in the late eighties, and the “Kids’” output
continues to this day—but a New York magazine article at the high point of the
collaboration’s sales attempted to show a less attractive side of the story. It used
quotes from disaffected students to paint an unflattering portrait of the studio’s
dynamics.1 For example, one student complained that if Rollins didn’t go for one
student’s suggestion for a painting, the rest would pile on: “He’d be like ‘Well,
nope.’ And everybody would say, ‘Nope, nope, nope.’” But if it was Rollins’s
own idea, everybody would go overboard to support it: “He’d say, ‘How about
this?’ ‘Oooh, yeah, we like that, Tim.’”
I don’t presume to know the truth of the situation—and probably multiple
truths were in play—but it would make sense that the kids were struggling to
sort out just how this unusual arrangement worked. One young woman told the
New York reporter, “The kids would never say anything because they didn’t want
to hurt Tim’s feelings.” They were conscious of being beneficiaries of the
program and were afraid he would think they were using him. But at the same
time, she noted, some knew the kids’ involvement was exactly why the work
held so much appeal to buyers. So, she said, “the kids felt like, ‘Wait a minute—

who’s getting used here, anyway?’”
Take sides if you want on the answer to that question, but the crucial point
here is that the question was a legitimate one to ask. Raising it within the studio
itself, in a spirit of perspective-taking rather than accusation, might have headed
off some resentments. It could even have proved catalytic, strengthening the
partnership so that it would become even more creatively productive than it was.
So why didn’t the students who had that question express it? Why don’t big,
path-affecting, fair questions like this get raised? In this chapter we will explore
that puzzle. The answer I propose is complex, since various elements conspire to
kill off questions, but in the end it will boil down to something simple and
solvable. Most of the spaces where social discourse happens in our world are not
conducive to questioning or to developing people into more creative,
constructive questioners—but if we recognize that deficit and resolve to change
it, we can build the spaces that are.

LEARNING NOT TO ASK
The first reason that questions don’t spring naturally to many people’s lips is
that, early in life, the natural desire to ask them was checked many, many times
—so much so that questioning impulses weakened and the desire withered away.
The process takes place at school and at home, and continues as young people
head off to work. By the time they are in positions where they feel at liberty to
ask challenging questions, and are even required to do so for their own good and
that of others, they don’t know how to do it.
Anyone who has spent much time around kids knows that humans start out
full of questions and are uninhibited about asking them. Most of this questioning
is simple knowledge seeking and sense making, but mixed in with the factual
questions are inevitably some discomfiting ones, and now and again there’s one
that touches a third rail, however inadvertently. As their questions provoke
responses, kids learn on two levels. They get answers (when they’re lucky) to
what they are curious about, and at the same time they get signals about whether
they should keep asking.
Often, questions are very much alive in young people as they head off to
school, but on first contact with most formal education systems the questions
start getting rebuffed. Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith capture this dynamic
well in their recent book Most Likely to Succeed. Teachers beholden to
administrators to improve their districts’ showings in standardized examinations
spend their days “teaching to the test,” trying to cram as much codified

knowledge into students’ heads as possible. Questions from students create
unwelcome delays in the march through the curriculum, and in the typical
classroom of twenty to thirty students the teachers’ own questions are hardly
models of generative inquiry. Plenty get asked, but they are designed to test
recall and keep students paying attention, if only from fear of being called on
next.
Education researchers have long been aware of this imbalance. Edwin
Susskind, for example, went into elementary classrooms in the 1960s and
rigorously recorded every spoken interaction. He found that, on average, an hour
of class time featured eighty-four questions by the teacher, and just two
questions asked by the pupils—that is, by all of the pupils combined. He counted
one question per pupil per month.2 Even earlier, in 1942, psychologist George
Fahey observed 169 pupils in six high school classes across an academic year
and found the same: one question per student per month.3 William D. Floyd
found among primary teachers a ratio of teacher questions to pupil questions as
high as 95 to 5.4 Summing up the body of research that existed by the late 1980s,
the education scholar James T. Dillon said, “Students do not ask questions in
classrooms. Whereas teachers have consistently been observed to ask a great
many questions, students are heard to ask remarkably few if any at all.”5
We might expect that this “stand-and-deliver” mode of questioning in
classrooms would fade as students advanced in their studies, to the point that the
use of questions would not be so one-sided, and students would have sufficient
knowledge to start probing for new discovery. In his landmark book Productive
Thinking, Max Wertheimer examines how Einstein, for example, came to
develop his theory of relativity. At age sixteen, he reports, Einstein “was not an
especially good student, unless he did productive work on his own account. This
he did in physics and mathematics, and consequently he knew more about these
subjects than his classmates. It was then that the great problem really started to
trouble him. He was intensely concerned with it for seven years.” Einstein is an
extreme case, but the point is that he couldn’t seriously engage with questions
about a field until he had spent years with existing literature—and, at the turn of
the twentieth century, it was possible at age twenty-three to be on top of it.
(While we are on the subject of Einstein and questions, I can’t resist including
the next few lines of Wertheimer’s account: “From the moment, however, that he
came to question the customary concept of time . . . it took him only five weeks
to write his paper on relativity—although at that time he was doing a full day’s
work at the Patent Office” [emphasis mine].6 What an astonishing testimony to
how catalytic the right question can prove to be.)

In any field, students generally need a grounding in fundamental facts and
theory—that is, foundational knowledge of what has already been established
beyond question—to be able to make insightful, productive inquiries of their
own. Science education researcher Philip Scott explains that in a classroom the
discourse among students and their teacher comes in two flavors. In the
“authoritative” mode, the teacher is just transmitting, aiming to convey
information to students. Yes, students ask questions, but only to obtain factual
answers or explanations. The questions coming from teachers are frequent but
only designed to test comprehension. When teachers shift to a “dialogic” mode,
they encourage students to venture ideas of their own and consider different
points of view. They draw out students’ tentative responses with intriguing
questions, and, equally important, they welcome such questions in return. Scott’s
point is that both modes are necessary and that effective classrooms feature a
mix, but that the proportion of dialogic discourse rises as students advance.7
You can likely see a built-in problem implied here that logically gets worse
with every passing decade. In any given discipline, the foundational set of
knowledge keeps growing. Thus, for each generation, it takes more years of
formal schooling for students to clamber up onto the shoulders of the giants that
came before them and begin to look farther. For most people, that is more years
than they can commit to expensive formal schooling. Instead, they spend their
entire educational careers in classrooms designed for transmission of
information, not questioning or learning to question the foundational concepts.
From there they move into workplaces. Some join the military—again, not a
sector historically known for cultivating questioning behaviors. Others go into
public and private sector jobs highly regimented by standard processes and rules.
If anything is perfectly designed to head off questions, it is a detailed procedural
manual, handed to an employee with a heavy workload to put through its explicit
steps. So workers whose habits were formed in question-hostile educational
settings usually find themselves in execution-focused workplaces where learning
goals to encourage creativity are conspicuously absent (though the world’s most
innovative companies are exactly the opposite).
From classrooms to offices, then, people spend their days in question deserts
where creative inquiry is ignored and silenced in the interests of efficiency.
Stopping to consider how a problem might be solved differently, or how a
different problem might get solved, is a regrettable cause for delay and, if the
question is really challenging, can bring activity to a halt. This love of
productivity is a reason why questioners are discouraged, but usually it is not the
whole reason. The bigger, darker reason for shutting down questioning is that
these settings are also rife with power struggles.

POWER CORRUPTS THE QUESTIONING PROCESS
In every realm of human interaction, people jockey for power—even in my own
world of academia, where, as Wallace Sayre famously observed, the politics are
especially intense “because the stakes are so low.” But if you want to see how
world-class power players do battle, there is no place like Hollywood. We could
choose to zoom in on just about any major studio in any month to find a struggle
playing out, but here’s a well-documented one from the 1940s that I especially
like because it pits people with different powers against each other—the rich
producer Samuel Goldwyn and the respected writer Lillian Hellman—and more
than hints at why most people lose their taste for questions.
As Goldwyn’s biographer A. Scott Berg tells the story, Hellman was ordered
by Goldwyn to show up at his Hollywood home one day in 1943 after she had
dramatically declared a film he had made from one of her scripts “a piece of
junk”:
As she entered the house, Goldwyn shouted, “I hear you tell people that Teresa Wright was your
discovery!”
“What does this have to do with anything,” she asked.
“Answer my question,” he demanded.
“No,” she said. “I will not answer any questions. I told you this afternoon, I take no more orders
from you. Ever.”
Goldwyn commanded her to leave. “I will not get out of this house,” she said, “until you have left
this room.” All the color draining from his face, he reissued his order. She restated hers. They stared
each other down, and he blinked first, crying out for [his wife,] Frances. She ran into the room, trying
to make peace, and he stormed up the stairs. Upon his exit, Hellman walked out the front door.8

It’s a ridiculous, petty encounter, but at the same time hard to read without
feeling one’s blood pressure rise. What we’re witnessing is a contest of who’s
calling the shots—and we instinctively get that the winner will be the one who
gets to pose the questions, and the loser will be the one who is forced to answer.
In this case, the result is a standoff. An unstoppable questioner has met an
unquestionable object.
This encounter does not, of course, feature the kind of catalytic questions
that open up new space for creative breakthroughs. These are a more common
kind of question—a kind that is easily deployed as a weapon. We see this all the
time in political affairs. As Douglas Walton writes, the “questioning and reply
characteristic of much political debate . . . is an overly aggressive question, an
overly evasive reply, and then a complaint by the questioner” that their target has

ducked the question.9 Those attempting to gain or maintain power don’t use
questions to ask permission, gain others’ perspectives, get to know others better,
or seek their counsel. They use questions to put others in their places, to catch
them out and make them look stupid, or to remind them that they are obliged to
stop whatever they’re doing to respond. The power hungry aren’t seekers of
truth; they are seekers of advantage.
This explains further why ordinary people don’t venture to ask many
questions: seeing them used in these ways by power seekers creates the lasting
impression that questions are acts of aggression. Noting this, those who do not
wish to challenge others or be seen as trying to take charge opt quietly to keep
their questions to themselves. Thus, many people who should be asking more
questions—in the nonaggressive ways that would yield knowledge, resolve
ambiguity, and inspire fresh thinking—engage in constant self-editing to avoid
giving offense. They internalize the power dynamics around them and hold their
tongues.

In Hamburg, this street scene forced me to stop and reflect on how power-hungry
people close off windows of crucial inquiry in our lives.

The most alarming example that comes to mind for me is the classic study of
nurses conducted by psychiatrist Charles Hofling in the 1960s. To test the actual
“situational” behavior of workers in power hierarchies and how it differed from
their own predictions of how they would behave under certain conditions, he had
a researcher posing as a doctor phone in orders to nursing staff on actual hospital

wards. The order was for a drug named Astroten—actually nonexistent, but a
bottle of placebo pills labeled as such had been planted in the supply cabinet—to
be administered to a particular patient without delay. This request not only
violated the hospitals’ protocols for how prescriptions must be communicated, it
called for twice the dosage level marked clearly on the bottle as the “daily
maximum.” Yet twenty-one of the twenty-two nurses who picked up the phone
did not question the order and had to be intercepted to keep it from being carried
out.
For someone who lives to control others, such unquestioning obedience is
nirvana. The single best measure of power, in fact, may be the extent to which
one’s edicts and actions can go unquestioned. Thinking again of Hollywood and
the source of this chapter’s epigraph, recall the scene in the classic film The
Wizard of Oz when the misfit heroes arrive in the Emerald City and are granted
an audience with the Wizard. The audience is meant to perceive that this
eminence, who the protagonists hope will be beneficent, is actually an imperious
bully. How does the film make that immediately clear? By having him shoot
down questions. When Dorothy speaks up with a tentative “We’ve come to ask
you . . .” she is promptly cut off. “Silence! The Great and Powerful Oz knows
why you have come.” It is too much to expect, however, that because he knows
their request he will respond to it. Instead, she and her friends are issued an order
—“Step forward”—then subjected to the wizard’s barrage of insults and given
an assignment that serves his own needs. It’s just a movie, but the point is, we all
get it. This is just how imperious bullies act.
Power-seeking people are tuned in to the fact that questions steer the course
of conversations and that the ones doing the asking are therefore in the driver’s
seat. They use questions to maintain control and, when others pose questions,
ignore them or try to turn them to their advantage. In a career advice column on
Forbes magazine’s website, plenty of letters come from office workers frustrated
with domineering bosses. One named Josh writes:
I got halfway through the presentation and one of the VPs asked a simple, logical question.
Bart jumped in before I could speak. . . .
The VP said “My question is for Josh” and then I answered the question.
Bart said “Josh, you should really let me answer a question like that! This is not your area of
expertise. The VPs and I know better than you do.”
The presentation is about a topic that is exactly in my area of expertise.10

This pattern of behavior shows up in many workplaces, evidently. When a
website called the Muse asked contributors for tales of their worst bosses, one
office worker recalled this: “I once had a boss who, while I was replying to a

question addressed to me by their boss in a meeting (with whom I had worked
before and had developed rapport), actually put their hand less than an inch in
front of my face to silence me so that they could answer instead.”11 Lest you
wonder if this experience is unique, Bob Sutton, professor at Stanford and author
of The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide, provides ample
research evidence to suggest the opposite. He tells me it’s far more prevalent
than most would imagine or admit.
To sum all this up, there are good questioners and bad questioners, and the
worst questioners make use of questions to dominate others. But most people
never pause to think that questions come in different shades of good and bad,
and therefore the stinging effects of toxic questioning taint all questioning
activity for them. On a deep level they come to believe that to ask a question—
especially one that challenges any edge of the status quo—is to behave
obnoxiously. The higher that people rise in hierarchies—based on position,
expertise, ownership, charisma, or, heaven forbid, all four—the more their
questions tend to pack a wallop and fail to encourage the challenging inquiry
that could lead them and others to better ways of thinking and doing.
More than a century ago Lord Acton made a wise observation based on his
study of senior government and church officials. “Power tends to corrupt,” he
concluded, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” He built further on that
thought: “Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise
influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the
certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office
sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which . . . the end learns to justify
the means.” I would extend Lord Acton’s observation into the territory of this
book by saying: Power tends to corrupt the questioning process and absolute
power corrupts the questioning process absolutely.

LACKING THE GROWTH MINDSET
Why do people put up with this kind of thing? Barbara Kellerman ventured an
explanation in her book Bad Leadership: “Our need for safety plays itself out at
many levels other than the original, familial one, and this is why we follow the
leader in everyday life. To be a well-behaved child is generally not to question
the teacher, even when the teacher is somehow bad. When we are adults on the
job it’s the same: By and large we toe the line. We do what we’re told and play
by the rules, even when the rules are unfair, and those who set them badly
equipped or disposed. We follow because the cost of not following is, more often

than not, high.”12
So we yield too easily to the power games others play on us. But the selfediting doesn’t end there. We also have our own self-serving reasons for not
asking more questions. We may, as Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP, told me, “not
want to learn what uncomfortable answers our inquiries might yield, or to take
responsibility for doing something with our newfound knowledge.” The example
of Kevin T. Hunsaker comes to mind. He was the “director of ethics” at HewlettPackard in 2006 when the company reacted to a boardroom leak of sensitive
information with an aggressive effort to uncover which director had shared the
secret with a reporter. When a member of the security team complained to
Hunsaker that HP’s investigation tactics had crossed a line in obtaining private
phone records and were “very unethical at the least and probably illegal,”
Hunsaker felt compelled to ask the company’s top investigator if all was
aboveboard. Informed that it was “on the edge,” he didn’t push for details.
Instead, he emailed back: “I shouldn’t have asked.”13 What a terrible irony,
given that the entire rationale for having an ethics officer position was to give
someone the power to ask. Instead, an overzealous investigation went
unchecked, and everyone involved was tainted by it, if not indicted.
People often hesitate to ask questions because they would rather not gain
information that would make them confront a need for change. Even when,
rationally, it is evident that things are not going as well as they could, there is
something within individuals that is ferociously protective of the status quo.14
Recall the matrix discussed in Chapter 1 with its one quadrant full of things “you
don’t know you don’t know.” For most people, that territory is blocked off by
various barriers, including emotional ones that keep them from wanting to
venture into it.
Carol Dweck’s work on people’s beliefs about intelligence is relevant here.
The groundbreaking research behind her book Mindset: The New Psychology of
Success shows that people differ according to whether they believe a person’s
level of intelligence is fixed or subject to development. People who believe the
latter have what Dweck calls a growth mindset, and it gives them the motivation
to work harder and achieve more than their fixed-mindset counterparts. But
Dweck is quick to point out that the growth-mindset advantage “isn’t just about
effort”: while a willingness to work hard matters, people who want to keep
learning “also need to try new strategies and seek input from others when they’re
stuck.”15
Dweck specifically addresses how learners from each mindset react
differently to having questions posed to them. Imagine, she proposes, that you

sign up for a course in an unfamiliar subject and, a few sessions into it, the
teacher brings you to the front of the class and asks you a series of questions
about the material. “Put yourself in a fixed mindset,” Dweck instructs. “Your
ability is on the line. Can you feel everyone’s eyes on you? Can you see the
instructor’s face evaluating you? Feel the tension, feel your ego bristle and
waver.” Now switch, she invites, to putting yourself into the same situation with
a growth mindset. “You’re a novice—that’s why you’re here. You’re here to
learn. The teacher is a resource for learning. Feel the tension leave you; feel your
mind open up.”
While I’ve just devoted a fair bit of space to the questioning behaviors of
powerful people, Dweck’s comments here are an important reminder that there is
another side of the coin to consider. Beyond how others in your presence are
deploying their questions, there is the matter of how you are receiving them. Are
you responding with a growth mindset or a fixed mindset? My hunch, too, is that
the kinds of questions people ask are very different depending on whether they
have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. Those who lack the mindset that
invites change and growth are less comfortable raising the kinds of questions
that challenge assumptions and invite creative thinking about what could change.
For them, even the seemingly benign questioning that would not disrupt things
doesn’t happen. The questions with potentially bigger implications—the ones
with transformative potential—are truly off the table.
I mentioned Kodak’s founding in Chapter 1, spurred by a catalytic question.
But consider again how, many decades later, that company’s story turned out. In
2012, Kodak found itself in bankruptcy. The destruction took place because
someone else had asked and answered all the right questions—about how digital
technology could transform amateur photography—before Kodak did. This
happened despite the fact that in 1974 Kodak engineers had invented the first
electronic camera: it may have delivered only a 0.01 megapixel image, but it was
a start that could have been pursued far more seriously. Instead, Kodak
management saw no compelling reason to commit significant resources to
pursuing the invention. With images so low in resolution, and no PCs or highspeed Internet at home or work to share or print images, Kodak’s digital camera
sat on the shelf.

On a recent Disneyland Park trip with our grandchildren, we noticed a changing
of the guard where decades-old “Kodak Picture Spot” signs had been replaced
by “Nikon Picture Spot” ones.

Fast-forward twenty years, and while Kodak had seen the light and was
running a successful consumer digital business, it had squandered a huge
opportunity in a rapidly moving new market. The mystery is: Why had the
company become incapable of the kind of imaginative, catalytic questioning it
had been founded on? And why do so many others? My theory is that, as
organizations grow and gain market power, power-seeking people are attracted
to them and gravitate to upper managerial roles. The ranks, in turn, fill up with
the kind of people who can stand working for such bosses—people who lack the
growth mindset that would make it impossible to go through life without
questioning. Thus, even places that once changed the world can lose their
abilities to generate and pursue exciting new questions.

QUESTIONS NEED PLACES TO FLOURISH
Among the many problems in our world crying out for better solutions is the
difficulty of protecting endangered species. Especially galling to any
conservationist is the plight of the white rhino, constantly poached for the
alleged but completely bogus medicinal value of its horn. A few years ago a

nonprofit organization in South Africa won an innovation award for an idea that
sprang from changing the question. All previous efforts had focused on how to
dissuade or intercept the poachers who found it so easy to trespass on the
animals’ habitat. This new effort asked: Why don’t we move the animals
instead? The result was Rhinos Without Borders, which has already transported
dozens of rhinos to an area of Botswana where poachers have no operations and
networks and are easier to keep out.
It’s a great story about a question, but I tell it here because it also serves as
an apt analogy to what questioners themselves need. It just won’t work to
attempt on some large scale to convince question killers to back off so that
question-hostile environments will transform into places where creative inquiry
thrives. The forces against this are too entrenched and too great. Those who want
to cultivate more questioning should instead create new spaces designed and
protected as areas where the rules are different and different conditions prevail.
Consider a comment by Vijay Anand, an executive at Intuit, a software
company that is very attuned to the need to keep innovating. “As a leader, it’s
your job to set the big goal, envision the big dream,” he says, “but as a good
leader, it’s also your job to step aside, let people run with the idea and build it.
Stay out of the nitty-gritty, and give people the freedom to do their own thing. A
lot of times, that’s all you need to do. My one question is always, ‘What is your
billion-dollar product idea for India?’ And it is remarkable how inspired
everyone is to answer that question and bring that dream alive.”16 This is a
philosophy that Brad Smith, Intuit’s chairman and CEO, has worked to spread in
the company throughout his fifteen years in the job. He is a big fan of the “grand
challenge” style of questioning that gets lots of people thinking about what it
would take to realize an inspiring vision. He cherishes any question “that gets
our heart beating really fast and causes us to step back and say: ‘Wow, to achieve
that, I’m going to have to think and act completely differently.’”
For that matter, listen to Lionel Mohri, Intuit’s vice president of design and
innovation, for whom the task of creating good spaces for questioning is a fulltime job. A strong advocate of the “design thinking” approach to product and
service innovation, and more generally of engaging people in systems thinking,
he provides the frameworks and resources to help others in the organization
develop ideas for fresh solutions. But fundamentally, he told me, “I don’t think
innovation is actually about solutions—it’s actually about the right questions. . . .
If you don’t ask the right questions, you’re not going to get the right solutions.”
Especially if people are interested in “breaking paradigms and doing disruptive
innovation,” he says, they have to go to this higher level of reframing the
question. This is what he considers “the biggest takeaway from design thinking

and systems thinking”: it solves the problem he faces of “How do you make it so
that people can go there?”
All these comments are evidence of a much broader Intuit effort to create a
“culture of innovation”—in other words, a kind of “conservation land” for
questions to survive and multiply over months and years. In the chapters to
come, I will introduce many other people who care about doing the same:
creating an oasis here and there with hopes that creativity-friendly conditions
will spread.

WHERE IN THE WORLD DO QUESTIONS THRIVE?
The notion that we can do more to create spaces conducive to questioning isn’t
just about organizational cultures inside companies. Whole societies’ cultures
also vary in terms of how encouraging they are of questioning. Nitin Nohria, the
dean of Harvard Business School, recalls the exhilaration he felt on leaving
Bombay for the first time in his life and arriving in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
to do his PhD at MIT:
I had this simultaneous sense of, on the one hand, being in a small place, but on the other hand, being
in a limitless place intellectually. What was striking is that nobody said that just because you’re a
graduate student, you’re supposed to think small thoughts and you have to wait until you get tenure to
think big thoughts. In India, you almost always felt that you had to find your place. It was a very
hierarchical society, and when you were young, you were never supposed to challenge a professor.
Here, to suddenly be liberated to imagine whatever you wanted to imagine for yourself, to be
encouraged to sit in seminars—yourright to ask a question, if you asked an intelligent question, was
the same as anybody else’s right to ask an intelligent question.17

To be sure, India is a different place than it was decades ago—so is the
United States—and at any time, it is possible to overstate this cultural angle.
“TK” is a Korean law professor in Washington, DC, who complains about
“culturalism”—a term he coined in his popular blog called “Ask a Korean!” By
way of definition, he writes that culturalism is the “unwarranted impulse to
explain people’s behavior with a ‘cultural difference,’ whether real or
imagined.”18 The post where this critique appears was prompted by his close
examination of a theory, endorsed by Malcolm Gladwell, purporting to explain
why an infamous disaster happened to Korean Air Lines. No one will ever know
for sure why the crew of Korean Air Flight 801 so misjudged its approach to a
Guam runway that it crashed into neighboring high terrain. But this theory posits
that, because the plane’s first officer and engineer were too respectful of the
hierarchy of the cockpit, they failed to question the decisions of their tired

captain even as they saw him making mistakes. The idea that an overly
deferential Korean culture is the blame for the crash is, however, a theory TK
doesn’t buy. “Because the culturalist impulse always attempts to explain more
with culture than warranted, the ‘cultural difference’ used in a cultural
explanation is more often imagined than real,” he writes. “To paraphrase
Abraham Maslow, to a man with a culturalist impulse, every problem looks like
a cultural problem.”
While culturalism can certainly be taken too far, a large body of research
does confirm that real differences exist between country cultures, and some of
these differences must influence whether people ask and encourage challenging
questions. For example, a renowned researcher in the field, Geert Hofstede, and
his colleagues have studied six dimensions of cross-cultural differences for
several decades. Among them is “power distance,” defined as “the extent to
which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the
family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.”19 In a culture
with small power distance, many aspects of life are observably different from
those in large power distance societies. For example, where inequality is not as
great, “subordinates expect to be consulted,” whereas they expect, in places with
high inequality, “to be told what to do.” The implications for raising questions
that challenge the status quo are obvious.
A second cultural dimension that makes a difference when it comes to
questions is “uncertainty avoidance,” or the degree to which members of a
society feel stressed by ambiguity, unstructured situations, and the prospect of an
unknown future. In cultures where uncertainty avoidance is high, people are
comfortable with strict behavioral codes, laws, and rules. There is “disapproval
of deviant opinions, and a belief [that] ‘there can only be one Truth and we have
it.’” Among the observable differences on this dimension, Hofstede points to
schools in which teachers can say “I don’t know” versus schools where teachers
are “supposed to have all the answers.” Again, it is easy to see how these
cultural differences would translate to very different propensities to ask thoughtprovoking questions.
Hofstede’s third dimension of cultural difference relevant to questioning is
the extent to which a society’s people tend toward individualism versus
collectivism. In individualist cultures, ties among individuals tend to be looser,
as people look after themselves. In collectivist cultures, people are more likely to
be found living in strong, cohesive groups at home and work. Individualist
cultures value speaking one’s mind while collectivist cultures focus on
maintaining harmony. If the latter is the goal, questions tend to suffer, as people
value the stable knowledge that is foundational to their mutual understanding

and cooperation over transformative knowledge that might disrupt many existing
arrangements.
Hofstede’s work is a constant reminder to those who deal with people from
other cultures that the attitudes and behaviors they may think are universal are
not at all. For those of us particularly interested in questioning behaviors, it also
reinforces the notion that the natural curiosity humans are born with can be
encouraged or discouraged to very different degrees depending on the
circumstances in which they find themselves. If we acknowledge that whole
societies, and certainly whole organizations, can trend toward keeping questions
from surfacing, that should reinforce our resolve to carve out the special places
in which we know they can flourish.

CLEARING A SPACE FOR INQUIRY
The Quakers have an institutional practice that sounds like a wonderful example
of a space specifically carved out for productive questioning. I discovered it
from Parker Palmer, an educator and activist who has touched millions of people
through his books, including my favorite, Let Your Life Speak. He recalled a time
when he was offered a plum job as a college president. Certain that he would
accept, he nonetheless followed his faith’s practice: “As is the custom in the
Quaker community, I called on half a dozen trusted friends to help me discern
my vocation by means of a ‘clearness committee,’ a process in which the group
refrains from giving you advice but spends three hours asking you honest open
questions to help you discover your own inner truth. (Looking back, of course, it
is clear that my real intent in convening this group was not to discern anything
but to brag about being offered a job I had already decided to accept!)”
Palmer’s memory of the meeting is that the questions at the beginning were
easy to field. They weren’t too much different from the ones he had prepared for
and answered well in his interviews for the new post. But at some point a
question came at him that “sounded easy yet turned out to be very hard.” It was:
“What would you like most about being a president?” Some hemming and
hawing followed, with Palmer making evasive answers that were seen as such by
the committee. After cycling through the question a number of times, he finally
gave the honest reply, “an answer that appalled even me as I spoke it”:
“Well,” said I, in the smallest voice I possess, “I guess what I’d like most is getting my picture in the
paper with the word president under it.”
I was sitting with seasoned Quakers who knew that though my answer was laughable, my mortal
soul was clearly at stake! They did not laugh at all but went into a long and serious silence—a silence
in which I could only sweat and inwardly groan.

Finally my questioner broke the silence with a question that cracked all of us up—and cracked me
open: “Parker,” he said, “can you think of an easier way to get your picture in the paper?”

The committee had done its job. Its questions had caused Palmer to look
within himself and discover that his desire for the prestigious position “had
much more to do with my ego than with the ecology of my life.” When he made
the call shortly after to withdraw his candidacy, he knew he was avoiding a step
that “would have been very bad for me and a disaster for the school.”20
I bet that an experience like that would turn anyone into a lifelong fan of
questions, and it also drives home the truth that c