Questions Are the Answer

Key Concepts

Breakthroughs come from better questions

“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..” (p. 21)

“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.” (p. 22)

Questions can help one see past current assumptions

“Some questions knock down the walls that have been constraining a problem-solver’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.” (p. 27)

Leaders need to create environments in which questions can flourish

“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.” (p. 52)

“Question Burst”

Step 1: Set the Stage. 

“To begin, select a challenge you care deeply about. Perhaps you’ve suffered a setback or you have an indistinct sense of an intriguing opportunity. How do you know it’s a problem ripe for a breakthrough, given the right unlocking question? It’s probably a good candidate if it “makes your heart beat fast,” as Intuit CEO Brad Smith put it.” (p. 69)

“With your partners in the exercise assembled, give yourself just two minutes to lay out the problem for them.” (p. 69)

“Quickly sharing the challenge forces a high-level framing that doesn’t constrain or direct the questioning. So just hit the highlights: Try to convey how things would change for the better if the problem were solved. And briefly say why you are stuck—why it hasn’t already been solved.” (p. 69)

“Before launching into question generation, it’s important to clearly spell out two critical rules of engagement. First, ask people to contribute only questions. Explain that those who try to suggest solutions will be redirected by you, the leader of the brainstorming session. Second, announce that no preambles are allowed. Explanations and details, short or long, mainly guide people to see the problem in a certain way—the very thing you’re trying to avoid.” (p. 69)

Step 2: Generate the Questions.

“With the problem now presented in broad-brush fashion, and everyone apprised of the rules, set a timer and spend the next four minutes collectively brainstorming surprising and provocative questions about the challenge. As in all brainstorming, no pushback is allowed on others’ contributions. Your goal is to jot down on paper at least fifteen to twenty questions (best for verbatim capture and for consulting later).” (p. 70)

“Throughout the four minutes, you’ll write everyone’s questions down. Capture everything verbatim and ask your partners to keep you honest on this; otherwise, you might unconsciously censor something you don’t immediately “get” or want to hear. As you’re writing, add your own questions to the mix. Doing so may reveal patterns in how you’ve habitually framed the problem (and unknowingly perpetuated it).” (p. 71)

Step 3: Unpack the Questions. 

“On your own, study the questions you jotted down. Be on the lookout for ones that suggest new pathways.” (p. 71)

“Select a few questions that intrigue you and strike you as different from how you’ve been going about things. A few criteria can help as you consider each question: Is it one you have not asked or been asked before? Is it one for which you honestly don’t have a good answer? Is it one that evokes an emotional response, positive or negative?” (p. 71)

“Now try expanding those few into their own sets of related or follow-on questions. ...The point is to keep opening up the space the problem occupies, which also broadens the territory of possible solutions and deepens your resolve to do something about it.” (p. 72)

“Devise a near-term action plan: What concrete actions will you personally take in the next three weeks to find potential solutions suggested by your new questions?” (p. 72)

Exploring how you might be wrong helps generate good questions

“Nothing shuts down questioning activity more than the determination to be—and be seen to be—unquestionably right. When we are sure we are right, or convinced that a decision must be made without delay, we leap to ready answers and shut down further inquiry. We resist opening up the discovery process and pressure others to close it down. By contrast, when we know we are wrong about something, we stay in a questioning mode because we must. If something we are trying is unequivocally not working, we can’t kid ourselves that we are right about it, so the questions keep flowing.” (p. 99)

“Several common themes emerge in what they are doing. First, they try to make themselves more conscious in general of their probable wrongness. Second, they cause themselves to be more receptive to disconfirming evidence and other challenging information they have avoided noticing or taking seriously. Third, they spend more time with people who deliver different views and data and who actively confront them with the truth they are missing.” (p. 99)

Leaders should get out of their comfort zones

“Too many leaders get their information catered—picked, prepared, and plated for them in the way they’ve already indicated they’ll find palatable. To fight back, they need to get out into the field, gathering raw stuff on their own.” (p. 127)

“First, you can encounter the stimulating surprise of bumping into new things and new perspectives. You see and experience things you have never known or thought about. Novelty is all around you.” (p. 128)

“Second, breaking your routine causes you to stop doing whatever focused work you were doing. You become distracted—but often in a productive way. Your focus gets diverted from the problem you were hammering away at in whatever way you had framed it. Stepping away from intense concentration on a task puts your mind in a different processing mode, one more receptive to questions that have been lingering at the edge of your consciousness yet eluding you. You’re not “working” in a traditional sense, and therefore not actively trying to go down the same problem-solving path you’ve been on. A new possibility for attacking the problem can creep into your thoughts.” (p. 132)

Practices

• Live somewhere else far away. (p. 138)

• Take the scenic route. (p. 139)

• Shake Your Entourage. (p. 140)

• Face Your Critics. (p. 140)

• Head for the Cheap Seats. (p. 141)

• Don’t overdo it. (p. 142)

• Audit your comfort level. (p. 142)

One need to get into a listening mindset

“If you want to create plans that succeed, you must tamp down the impulse to transmit and instead switch over to receiving mode for some significant portion of your time. I have heard about people creating these “more quiet” conditions for themselves in a few major ways: first, by listening better to others; second, by spending more time soaking up information in other forms; and third, by clearing their minds of the usual noise that fills them. Here are the key insights and practices I gathered about each approach.” (p. 148)

“One last theme in my interviews related to listening is about something that actually comes first in the process: for you to gain opportunities for listening, others must see you as approachable. And approachability can be compromised by things you don’t intend or think much about. Take the obvious example of electronic devices. If, in the moments when you could be available to someone nearby, you promptly pull out your smartphone and start tapping away—or put in your earbuds and close your eyes—you will cut yourself off from untold encounters in which you might have learned about something you didn’t know you didn’t know.” (p. 156)

Quotables

“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?” (p. 7)

“Neil Postman famously put it, ‘students enter school as question marks and leave as periods’” (p. 59)

“Since that time, Benioff has been a huge advocate of cycling back into questioning mode before moving on to answers. In fact, he has come up with a set of five big questions that he brings his teams back to whenever a set of decisions has to be made about what Salesforce will sell or how it will operate going forward. They are: What is it that we really want? What’s really important to us? How are we going to get it? What is preventing us from having it? And how will we know that we have it? This five-question sequence keeps everyone going back to reconsider vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measures—so much that everyone knows it by its acronym, V2MOM.” (p. 81)

“Nandan Nilekani, the founder and former CEO of Infosys, told me the danger of this: ‘If you’re a leader, you can put yourself in a cocoon—a good-news cocoon. Everyone says, ‘It’s all right, there’s no problem.’ And the next day everything’s wrong.’” (p. 125)

“My observation is that top executives’ legacies come down to whether, across their tenures, they have been able to spot the moments when big change is called for—what Intel’s Andy Grove famously called the “inflection points”—and marshal the energies that only they can marshal to bring about the transformation. They get the questions right.” (p. 241)

“Do you know what your own keystone question is? Would you know if it was time to revisit it? And would you recognize a better one if it occurred to you?” (p. 260)