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# Introduction: Why Questioning?
... Questions challenge authority and disrupt established structures,
processes, and systems, forcing people to have to at least think
about doing something differently. To encourage or even allow
questioning is to cede power--not something that is done lightly in
hierarchical companies or in government organizations, or even in
classrooms...
Anything that forces people to think is not an easy sell... We
operate on autopilot--which can help us save mental energy, allowing
us to multitask, and enabling us to get through the daily grind.
But when we want to shake things and instigate change, it's necessary
to break free of familiar thought patterns and easy assumptions. We
have to veer off the beaten neural path, and we do this, in large
part, by questioning.
A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can
begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something--and that
might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.
# Chapter 1: The Power of Inquiry
At that moment, Phillips exhibited one of the telltale signs of an
innovative questioner: a refusal to accept the existing reality. One
of the many interesting and appealing things about questioning is
that it often has an inverse relationship to expertise--such that,
within their own subject areas, experts are apt to be poor
questioners.
Another critical step for a questioner tackling a challenge: Take
ownership of a question.
Divergent thinking: the mental process of trying to come up with
alternative ideas. It is a form of asking the question "What if I
think differently about this?" It mostly happens in the more
creative right hemisphere of the brain... and often triggers random
association of ideas (which is a primary source of creativity)...
Open questions with a positive tone tend to yield better answers and
instigate change.
Serial mastery: the need for modern workers to constantly adapt.
[IOW, Be curious or die.]
Q + A (action) = I (innovation)
Q - A = P (philosophy)
Why? -> What if? -> How? -> Solution
"design thinking":
* frame problem and learn more about it
* generate ideas
* build on those ideas through prototyping
Classical four-stage process of creativity developed nearly a century
ago by British psychologist Graham Wallas:
* Preparation
* Incubation
* Illumination
* Implementation
Having a process helps you keep taking next steps so that even when
you don't know what you're doing, you still know what to do.
Often the very worst thing that you can do with a difficult question
is to try to answer it too quickly.
Connective inquiry: connecting existing ideas in unusual and
interesting ways, AKA combinatory thinking
# Chapter 2, Why we stop questioning
Neoteny: a state where you see things without labels, without
categorization, AKA beginner's mind.
Pre-schoolers immediately begin to ask fewer questions. The more
preschool models itself after regular school, the more it seems to
squelch natural curiosity. As kids begin in grade school, their
questioning really starts to disappear. As kids stop questioning,
they simultaneously become less engaged in school. Synaptic pruning
begins at about age five.
Many of today's schools are product-driven. Under pressure to
improve test scores, they've tried to instill businesslike
efficiency...
Activity-permissive education: advocates letting kids move as they
learn
To the extent that a school is like a factory, students who inquire
about "the way things are" could be seen as insubordinate... If
schools were built on a factory model, were they actually designed to
squelch questions?
Five learning skills, or "habits of mind," were at the core of
Deborah Meier's school:
* Evidence: How do we know what's true or fake? What evidence
counts?
* Viewpoint: How might this look if we looked at it from another
direction?
* Connection: Is there a pattern? Have we seen something like this
before?
* Conjecture: What if it were different?
* Relevance: Why does this matter?
Before settling on her five habits of mind, Meier started with two
particular ways of thinking she wanted to emphasize--skepticism and
empathy. In her schools, students were given much more autonomy and
freedom... often when you give kids more freedom to pursue what
they're interested in, they become easier to control.
Inquiry-based learning schools share many core principles with
Montessori schools.
What Dan Meyer did... was to transfer ownership: Instead of asking
the question himself, he allowed students to think of it on their
own--at which point it became THEIR question... this issue of "Who
gets to ask questions in class?" touches on purpose, power, control,
and even race and social class.
... those who don't know how to ask the right questions are
vulnerable to being denied that which they might need or are entitled
to have.
Right Question Institute technique for K-12 classroom program:
* Teachers design a question focus
* Students produce questions
* Students improve their questions
* Students prioritize their questions
* Students and teachers decide on next steps
* Students reflect on what they have learned
Nikhil Goyal thinks this is where the future of learning-by-inquiry
is going to happen--not in schools, but in makeshift classrooms,
often held in "maker" or "hacker" spaces. Libraries are being
re-made as interesting maker spaces.
# Chapter 3: The Why, What If, and How of Innovative Questioning
To ask powerful Why questions we must:
* Step back
* Notice what others miss
* Challenge assumptions (including our own)
* Gain a deeper understanding of the situation or problem at hand,
through contextual inquiry
* Question the questions we're asking
* Take ownership of a particular question
... at least temporarily it is necessary to stop doing and stop
knowing in order to start asking.
"Steve Jobs had an unusual relationship with Zen. He got the
artistic side of it but not the Buddhist side--the art, but not the
heart."
The five Why's methodology originated in Japan and is credited to
Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota Industries.
Contextual inquiry is about asking questions up close and in context,
relying on observation, listening, and empathy to guide us towards a
more intelligent, and therefore more effective, question.
David Kord Murray, a former rocket-scientist who worked on a project
for NASA and later became head innovator at Intuit, made a study of
connective creativity in his book Borrowing Brilliance. According to
Murray, "The nature of innovation [is that] we build new ideas out of
existing ideas."
"These days it's easier and less expensive to just try out your ideas
than to figure out IF you should try them out."
The best learning comes from looking at success and failures side by
side. In this failure, what went wrong? What went right? Am i
failing differently each time? If yes, then you are learning.
Collaborative inquiry begins with asking others, "Do you find this
question as interesting as i do? Want to join me in trying to answer
it?"
# Chapter 4: Questioning In Business
The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen: Should we make better
products that we can sell for higher profits to our best
customers--or make worse products that none of our customers would
buy, and that would ruin our margins?
Keith Yamashita observes that in the business world at large "we're
coming off a 25-year post-eighties period of efficiency, efficiency,
efficiency. I think the unintended consequence of that entire
efficiency era is that people diminished their questions to very
small-minded ones. In this quest for incremental improvement, it
became all about asking, "How can we save a little bit of $, make it
a little more efficient, where can we cut costs?" But... "In order
to innovate now, they have to ask more expansive questions.
What is our purpose on this Earth? Who must we fearlessly become?
What if the company didn't exist? Who would miss us? What does the
world hunger for?
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"There is too much pressure and too much influence from others in the
group," according to Debra Kay, author of the book Red Thread
Thinking. "The free association done in brainstorming sessions is
often shackled by peer pressure and as a result generates obvious
responses." One solution is to generate questions instead of ideas.
# Chapter 5: Questioning For Life
As you make these daily choices about what to spend your time on and
which possibilities to pursue, the author and consultant John Hagel
suggests you ask yourself this question: When I look back in five
years, which of these options will make the better story?
Appreciative inquiry is usually focused on building upon current
strengths, but sometimes by looking into the past, you can glimpse
what might improve your life in the present and future...
experimentation can be thought of as, simply, the ways you act upon
questions.
"It's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think
your way into a new way of acting." -- Millard Fuller, founder of
Habitat For Humanity.
According to Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior
at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and author of Working Identity:
Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career, the best way
to find a new career is to keep asking, and quickly acting upon, the
question "What if I try this?"
The typical career change, she notes, often involves poring over
self-help books, talking to people who can offer advice, and waiting
for the epiphany that shows you your "true self"--at which point you
can strike out confidently in a new direction. That's all wrong,
says Ibarra: "We need to act." Through her research, Ibarra learned
that most real-life career transitions take about three years, and
they rarely happen in a linear path. It's a series of trials and
errors, and where we end up often surprises us. But the main thing
is to get the testing and learning under way as soon as possible.
Jon Bond considers questions to be "the verbal equivalent of
nonviolent conflict resolution."
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