Why ask better questions?
Key insight
Intentionally asking better questions breaks thinking patterns and spurs innovation. Asking the right questions is becoming more valuable than having the right answers. You should take ownership of your questions. Ask better questions.
A more beautiful question
“We live in the world our questions create.” That’s a quote by David Cooperrider, and it has crossed my mind quite often over the last few weeks. Last year, I wrote an article called The demise of specialists. In that article, I argue that the value of expertise is decreasing, because access to information and education is being democratized by the internet. Through the internet, we can access the collective knowledge of the entire human race in mere seconds. So, simply having access to information is no longer something that sets you apart from others. What sets you apart is knowing what to do with that vast amount of information. In other words: it’s not having the best answers that counts, but asking the best questions.
Why should we ask better questions? Because asking better questions dramatically improves our outcomes. Great questions spur innovation by breaking old thinking patterns. They allow us to see the world in a different light and question why we do things the way we do them. Many great products and companies started as great questions. Think about the windshield wiper. Every single car that’s produced in the world today has a pair of windshield wipers. That product was invented when Mary Anderson asked: “what if cars would have eyelashes?” Have you ever found yourself thinking “why haven’t they found an easier way to do this?” If so, I have good news for you. You have the innate ability to ask great questions. Use it. Develop it.
The bad news? In this age of abundant information, we have gotten worse at asking good questions. There are at least two important reasons for this.
First, our education system is not teaching us to ask great questions. Our schools mainly teach us to memorize facts for long enough to recite them on a test. How is that valuable if there are computers and databases and search engines all around us? How does that make us more effective people in the 21st century? What if the curriculum revolved around learning how to ask more interesting questions instead?
Second, having access to technology like Google seems to make us intellectually lazy. Having a question come up without immediately being able to answer it makes us uncomfortable. When was the last time you sat on a question for a few days? When we are faced with a difficult question, we tend to either discard it or look up the answer as soon as possible. If we cannot find the answer, we are quick to drop the question. That’s a shame. I feel like there’s a direct relationship between the number of difficult questions you try to answer and the quality of your life.
How can we ask better questions? Two things that play an important role in improving the quality of our questions are being intentional and applying structure. Firstly, asking better questions begins with the intention to improve your inquiry. Try to pay attention to the questions you ask. Whenever someone else asks you a question, listen carefully. How is that question worded? What is its goal? How could you word it differently to make it a more effective question? Secondly, you should know that there’s a structure to asking great questions. Good streams of questions often start with a ‘why’. Asking ‘why’ helps you understand why things are the way they are. Then, try asking ‘what if’ to discover what this situation would look like if we did things differently. Lastly, ask ‘how’ to find the concrete action steps you need to take to solve a problem.
What if you would take ownership of your questions? How could you make them more beautiful? A question well-put is half-answered.
