Warren Berger Quotes

You don’t learn unless you question.

Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air, and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.

The main premise of appreciative inquiry is that positive questions, focusing on strengths and assets, tend to yield more effective results than negative questions focusing on problems or deficits.

Don’t just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.” After

What if our schools could train students to be better lifelong learners and better adapters to change, by enabling them to be better questioners?

questions challenge authority and disrupt established structures, processes, and systems, forcing people to have to at least think about doing something differently.

What’s required is a willingness to go out into the world with a curious and open mind, to observe closely, and—perhaps most important, according to a number of the questioners I’ve interviewed—to listen.

If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it . . . if you think of, detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream even if the end is a long way off, for there are about five thousand steps to be taken before we realize it; and start making the first ten, and stay making twenty after, it is amazing how quickly you get through those five thousand steps.

most creative, successful business leaders have tended to be expert questioners. They’re known to question the conventional wisdom of their industry, the fundamental practices of their company, even the validity of their own assumptions.

Picasso was onto this truth fifty years ago when he commented, “Computers are useless—they only give31 you answers.

when he came home from school, “while other mothers asked their kids ‘Did you learn anything today?’ [my mother ] would say, ‘Izzy, did you ask a good question today?

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Beginner’s

It’s easier to act your way33 into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.

Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question

I’ve always been very concerned with democracy. If you can’t imagine you could be wrong, what’s the point of democracy? And if you can’t imagine how or why others think differently, then how could you tolerate democracy?

you can’t help but feel uncomfortable,” because it becomes clear that fear of failure “keeps us from attempting great things . . . and life gets dull. Amazing things stop happening.” But if you can get past that fear, Dugan said, “Impossible things suddenly become possible.

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.

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.

Death to Core Competency,” suggests that whatever a company’s specialty product or service might be—whatever got you to where you are today—might not be the thing that gets you to the next level.

one of the most important things a leader can do is project a clear and distinctive point of view that others can follow. But that clear vision is arrived at, and constantly modified and sharpened, through deep reflection and questioning.

This works well under most circumstances, but when we wish to move beyond that default setting—to consider new ideas and possibilities, to break from habitual thinking and expand upon our existing knowledge—it helps if we can let go of what we know, just temporarily.

As you make those daily choices about what to spend your time on and which possibilities to pursue, the author and consultant John Hagel suggests you ask yourself13 this question: When I look back in five years, which of these options will make the better story? As Hagel points out, “No one ever regrets taking the path that leads to a better story.

... schools in many industrialized nations were not, for the most part, designed to produce innovative thinkers or questioners -- their primary purpose was to produce workers. The author Seth Godin writes, "Our grandfathers and great grandfathers built schools to train people to have a lifetime of productive labor as part of the industrialized economy. And it worked." To create good workers, educations systems put a premium on compliancy and rote memorization of basic knowledge -- excellent qualities in an industrial worker. (Or, as the cartoonist and Simpsons creator Matt Groening puts it, "it seems the main rule that traditional schools teach is how to sit in rows quietly, which is perfect training for grown-up work in a dull office or factory, but not so good for education.") And not so good for questioning: To the extent a school is like a factory, students who inquire about "the way things are" could be seen as insubordinate. It raises, at least in my mind, a question that may seem extreme: If schools were build on a factory model, were they actually designed to squelch questions?

Self-Management If you can read just one book on motivation—yours and others: Dan Pink, Drive If you can read just one book on building new habits: Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit If you can read just one book on harnessing neuroscience for personal change: Dan Siegel, Mindsight If you can read just one book on deep personal change: Lisa Lahey and Bob Kegan, Immunity to Change If you can read just one book on resilience: Seth Godin, The Dip Organizational Change If you can read just one book on how organizational change really works: Chip and Dan Heath, Switch If you can read just two books on understanding that change is a complex system: Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations Dan Pontefract, Flat Army Hear interviews with FREDERIC LALOUX, DAN PONTEFRACT, and JERRY STERNIN at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just one book on using structure to change behaviours: Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto If you can read just one book on how to amplify the good: Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin, The Power of Positive Deviance If you can read just one book on increasing your impact within organizations: Peter Block, Flawless Consulting Other Cool Stuff If you can read just one book on being strategic: Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley, Playing to Win If you can read just one book on scaling up your impact: Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, Scaling Up Excellence If you can read just one book on being more helpful: Edgar Schein, Helping Hear interviews with ROGER MARTIN, BOB SUTTON, and WARREN BERGER at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just two books on the great questions: Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question Dorothy Strachan, Making Questions Work If you can read just one book on creating learning that sticks: Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick If you can read just one book on why you should appreciate and marvel at every day, every moment: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything If you can read just one book that saves lives while increasing impact: Michael Bungay Stanier, ed., End Malaria (All money goes to Malaria No More; about $400,000 has been raised so far.) IF THERE ARE NO STUPID QUESTIONS, THEN WHAT KIND OF QUESTIONS DO STUPID PEOPLE ASK?

The mind, if preoccupied with a problem or question long enough, will tend to come up with possibilities that might eventually lead to answers, but at this stage are still speculations, untested hypotheses, and early epiphanies. (Epiphanies often are characterized as “Aha! moments,” but that suggests the problem has been solved in a flash. More often, insights arrive as What if moments—bright possibilities that are untested and open to question.)

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. Frank Lloyd Wright put it well when he remarked that an expert is someone who has “stopped thinking because he ‘knows.’”2 If you “know,” there’s no reason to ask; yet if you don’t ask, then you are relying on “expert” knowledge that is certainly limited, may be outdated, and could be altogether wrong.

Carlin died in 2008, but his daughter, the comedian and radio host Kelly Carlin,16 feels the vuja de way of looking at the world—of observing mundane, everyday things as if one were witnessing something strange and fascinating—is exactly the way Carlin went through his life and got his material. “When the familiar becomes this sort of alien world and you can see it fresh, then it’s like you’ve gone into a whole other section of the file folder in your brain,” she said. “And now you have access to this other perspective that most people don’t have.

with others.” Bennett culls all of these bits59 and shares the best of them with the people at IDEO, or with a larger audience on his blog, The Curiosity Chronicles. For many of us, the beautiful question that calls to us is some variation of what Bennett is talking about: How do we continually find inspiration so that we can inspire others? That question must be asked and answered fresh, over and over. There is no definitive answer, at least not for the creative individual who wants to keep growing, improving, innovating. To say, I’ve figured it out—this is

Yes, we want a Silicon Valley,” she said, “but do we really want three hundred million people who actually think for themselves?

But the happiest people he encountered —including some living extremely modestly—had a strong connection to those around them. “They laughed and really enjoyed being around the people they love.

When you change one small thing32 and it works, it can help breed the confidence to change other things—including bigger ones.

The maker movement is mostly about building things (whether low-tech or high-tech), as well as creating art and music. But it’s driven by project-based, peer-to-peer learning, which tends to happen as novice “makers

It can be a relief to know that, in coming up with fresh ideas, we don’t have to invent from scratch; we can draw upon what already exists and use that as raw material. The key may lie in connecting those bits and pieces in a clever, unusual, and useful way, resulting in (to use a term that seems to have39 originated with the British designer John Thackara) smart recombinations.

This Why–What If–How progression—which can be identified in many stories of innovative breakthroughs—is

If we’re born to inquire, then why must it be taught?

In order for imagination to flourish,37 there must be an opportunity to see things as other than they currently are or appear to be. This begins with a simple question: What if? It is a process of introducing something strange and perhaps even demonstrably untrue into our current situation or perspective.

David Kord Murray, a former rocket scientist42 who worked on projects for NASA and later became the head of innovation 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.” Murray cites Einstein, Walt Disney, George Lucas, and Steve Jobs as prime examples of innovators who “defined problems, borrowed ideas, and then made new combinations.

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.

As Winston Churchill once said, “The trick is to go from one failure65 to another, with no loss of enthusiasm.

Still, technology doesn’t necessarily ease the trepidation many people feel about going public with ideas—particularly at the rough, early stages. As the writer Peter Sims noted in63Harvard Business Review, most of us, throughout our school years and even in the business world, have been taught to hold back ideas until they are polished and perfect. That tendency toward overthinking and excessively preparing, rather than quickly trying out ideas to get feedback and to see what works and doesn’t, is a behavior that becomes ingrained over time. But

Libraries are being remade as interesting maker spaces, with the librarian playing more of the role of the teacher of inquiry-based learning,

What if a job interview tested one’s ability to ask questions, as well as answer them? The logical way to achieve that would be to ask interviewees to generate questions. While job interviews often end with the interviewee being asked, Do you have any questions?, that’s treated more as a rote throwaway line, and if anything it invites only closed, practical questions (When would I start? How much travel will there be?) as opposed to thoughtful, creative questions. As an alternative approach, tell every person coming in for an interview to bring a few questions with them. Make it clear those questions should be ambitious and open-ended—Why, What If, and How questions are recommended. These should also be relevant to your company or industry. The questions might inquire about ways the company or its offerings could be expanded or improved; a customer or societal challenge that could be tackled by the company; an untapped opportunity to be explored. The questions this person brings will reveal a lot about him or her. Are the questions audacious and imaginative, or more modest and practical? Do the questions indicate that the candidate did some research before forming them (if so, good sign: it indicates the candidate knows how to do contextual inquiry). To test whether the person can question on the fly, you might ask, during the interview, that the candidate build upon one or more of the prepared questions with additional questions (using the Right Question Institute practice of follow-up questioning to improve and advance existing questions). For example, if she has suggested a What If scenario, ask her to now challenge her own assumptions with Why questions, or get her to take her idea to a more practical level by generating How questions. This will show if a person knows how to “think in questions.” If the candidate has come up with at least one interesting question and then improved on that question during the interview, that person is clearly a gifted questioner and is likely a welcome addition to a company’s culture of inquiry.

The Why/What If/How progression offers a simplified way to approach questioning; it’s an attempt to bring at least some semblance of order to a questioning process that is, by its nature, chaotic and unpredictable. A journey of inquiry is bound to lead you into the unknown (as it should), but if you have a sense of the kinds of questions to ask at various stages along the way, you’ve at least got some road markers. Indeed, this is the beauty of “process” in general: It may not provide any answers or solutions, but, as one design-thinker told me, having a process helps you to keep taking next steps—so that, as he put it, “even when you don’t know what41 you’re doing, you still know what to do.

But business leaders sometimes find themselves thrust back into questioning mode during dire or dynamic times, when those rules and methods they’ve come to rely on no longer work. Such is the case in today’s business market, where the speed of, and need for, innovation has been ratcheted up—forcing some companies to ask bigger and more fundamental questions than they’ve asked in years about everything from the company’s identity, to its mission, to a reexamination of who the customer is and what the core competencies should be. Much of it boils down to a fundamental question that a lot of companies find themselves asking right now: With all that’s changing in the world and in our customers’ lives, what business are we really in?

The more we’re deluged with information, with “facts” (which may or may not be), views, appeals, offers, and choices, then the more we must be able to sift and sort and decode and make sense of it all through rigorous inquiry.

Through the years, companies from Polaroid (Why do we have to wait for the picture?) to Pixar (Can animation be cuddly?21) have started with questions. However, when it comes to questioning, companies are like people: They start out doing it, then gradually do it less and less. A hierarchy forms, a methodology is established, and rules are set; after that, what is there to question?

When I visited Watson and its programmers recently at IBM’s main research facility—where the machine, consisting of a stack of servers, resides alone in a basement, humming quietly and waiting for questions to crunch on—I inquired (directing my queries to the nearby humans, not the machine) whether Watson might ever turn the tables on us and start asking us wickedly complex questions. While that’s not its purpose, its programmers point out something interesting and quite promising: As Watson comes in increasing contact with doctors and medical students currently using the system, the machine is slowly training them to ask more and better questions in order to pull the information they need out of the system. As it trains them to be better questioners, Watson will almost certainly help them to be better doctors.

But if we can’t compete with technology when it comes to storing answers, questioning—that uniquely human capacity—is our ace in the hole. Until Watson acquires the equivalent of human curiosity, creativity, divergent thinking skills, imagination, and judgment, it will not be able to formulate the kind of original, counterintuitive, and unpredictable questions an innovative thinker—or even just your average four-year-old—can come up with.

This all comprises the first stage of innovative questioning—first confronting, formulating, and framing the initial question that articulates the challenge at hand, and trying to gain some understanding of context. I think of this as the Why stage, though not every question asked at this juncture has to begin with the word why. Still, this is the point at which one is apt to inquire: •  Why does a particular situation exist? •  Why does it present a problem or create a need or opportunity, and for whom? •  Why has no one addressed this need or solved this problem before? •  Why do you personally (or your company, or organization) want to invest more time thinking about, and formulating questions around, this problem?

(Basic formula: Q (questioning) + A (action) = I (innovation). On the other hand, Q – A = P (philosophy).

(Epiphanies often are characterized as “Aha! moments,” but that suggests the problem has been solved in a flash. More often, insights arrive as What if moments—bright possibilities that are untested and open to question.)

Exploring What If possibilities is a wide-open, fun stage of questioning and should not be rushed.

Often the worst thing you can do with a difficult question is to try to answer it too quickly. When the mind is coming up with What If possibilities, these fresh, new ideas can take time to percolate and form. They often result from connecting existing ideas in unusual and interesting ways.

What If possibilities are powerful things; they are the seeds of innovation. But you do not get from idea to reality in one leap, even if you’ve got spring-force dynamics on your side. What sets apart the innovative questioners is their ability—mostly born out of persistence and determination—to give form to their ideas and make them real. This is the final, and critical, How stage of inquiry—when you’ve asked all the Whys, considered the What Ifs . . . and must now figure out, How do I actually get this done? It’s the action stage, yet it is still driven by questions, albeit more practical ones.

What’s this?” and “What’s that?” But many educators and learning experts contend that our current system of education does not encourage, teach, or in some cases even tolerate questioning. Harvard’s Tony Wagner says, “Somehow, we’ve defined the goal of schooling as enabling you to have more ‘right answers’ than the person next to you. And we penalize incorrect answers. And we do this at a pace—especially now, in this highly focused test-prep universe—where we don’t have time for extraneous questions.

the more general problem of schools favoring memorized answers over creative questions is nothing new. Some point out that it’s built into an educational system that was created in a different time, the Industrial Age, and for a different purpose.

Importantly, the professor was also “willing to ask questions without knowing the answer. Teachers and professors, we think our authority rests on having answers. But students find it really liberating to have a teacher say, ‘I don’t know the answer—so let’s figure this out together.

A year before Jennifer’s question and Land’s feverish walk, in December of 1942, he had said to Polaroid employees, “If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it . . . if you think of, detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream even if the end is a long way off, for there are about five thousand steps to be taken before we realize it; and start making the first ten, and stay making twenty after, it is amazing how quickly you get through those five thousand steps.

nonexperts or outsiders are often better at questioning than the experts. No one would argue that expert knowledge isn’t valuable—but when it’s time to question, it can get in the way.

to ask powerful Why questions. To do so, 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. While a fairly straightforward process, it begins by moving backward.

at least temporarily, it’s necessary to stop doing and stop knowing in order to start asking.

So perhaps the first rule of asking why is that there must be a pause, a space, an interruption in the meeting, a halt of “progress,” a quiet moment looking out the window on the bus. Often, these are the only times when there is time to question.

I position myself relentlessly as an idiot at IDEO,” Bennett observes. “And that’s not a negative, it’s a positive. Because being comfortable with not knowing—that’s the first part of being able to question.

Part of the value in asking naïve questions, Bennett says, is that it forces people to explain things simply, which can help bring clarity to an otherwise complex issue. “If I just keep saying, ‘I don’t get it, can you tell me why once more?,’ it forces people to synthesize and simplify—to strip away the irrelevances and get to the core idea.

The kids used their time much more efficiently by constructing right away. They tried one way of building, and if it didn’t work, they quickly tried another. They got in a lot more tries. They learned from their mistakes as they went along, instead of attempting to figure out everything in advance. The point of the marshmallow experiment was not to humble MBA students (if anything, that was a side benefit), but rather to better understand how to make progress when tasked with a difficult challenge in uncertain conditions. What we learn from those kids is that there’s no substitute for quickly trying things out to see what works. Looking at this through the questioning prism: The MBA students got stuck too long contemplating the possible What Ifs, while the kids moved quickly from What If to How. As soon as they thought of a possible combination, they tried it to see how it would work.

These days it’s easier and less expensive to just try out your ideas than to figure out if you should try them out.

What does the world need most . . . that we are uniquely able to provide? Shaich says he wrestled with that question for a while, then worked his way to an answer with the launch of Panera Cares—an initiative to open a number of pay-what-you-can cafés that are identical to the chain’s other restaurants, except customers pay what they wish or can afford (based on suggested donation amounts).

But there’s a difference between donating to charity (something many companies do, almost by rote), and fully committing to a cause. “We started asking ourselves, What more can we do?” Shaich says. “I felt like, I want to put our bodies on the line.” What gradually became clear was that Panera could provide not just bread giveaways, but a more complete dining experience for those going hungry. That extra level of involvement—“putting bodies on the line,” to use Shaich’s words—made the effort bigger and more distinctive than a standard corporate charity program.

As Peer Insight’s Tim Ogilvie observes, being true to a cause often requires making tough decisions and sacrificing at times. “When you come to the point where you can’t serve both the bottom line and the cause, one or the other must suffer,” says Ogilvie, pointing to the Whole Foods supermarket chain, which stopped selling live lobsters for an extended time until it found a supplier that did humane harvesting. “Those are hard choices, but when you opt for the cause over the bottom line, employees can see that, and then they believe in the company and the cause even more.

It’s somewhat counterintuitive for most managers—who tend to think in terms of “making products,” not “making experiments.” But as Ries points out, anytime you’re doing something new “it’s an experiment whether you admit it or not. Because it is not a fact that it’s going to work.” So how do companies get better at experimenting? Ries says you start with the acknowledgment that “we are operating amid all this uncertainty—and that the purpose of building a product or doing any other activity is to create an experiment to reduce that uncertainty.” This means that instead of asking What will we do? or What will we build? the emphasis should be on What will we learn?

That word process is key. You don’t just “find” answers to complex life problems (or any type of complex problem, including business ones). You work your way, gradually, toward figuring out those answers, relying on questions each step of the way.

If you fear not having answers to the questions you might ask yourself, remember that one of the hallmarks of innovative problem solvers is that they are willing to raise questions without having any idea of what the answer might be. Part of being able to tackle complex and difficult questions is accepting that there is nothing wrong with not knowing. People who are good at questioning are comfortable with uncertainty.

In one of his lectures on creativity, the comedian John Cleese talked about the need to find one’s own “tortoise enclosure”—that19 sheltered, quiet place where you can go for extended periods to escape from the distractions of the outside world so that you can think without interruption.

What if we start with what we already have? When innovators look at the world around them, they’re often looking for what’s missing. But while questioning your own life, it’s also important to look, via “appreciative inquiry,” not just for what’s missing, but also for what’s there. The main premise of appreciative inquiry is that positive questions, focusing on strengths and assets, tend to yield more effective results than negative questions focusing on problems or deficits. Strength-based questioning focuses on what is working in our lives—so that we can build upon that and get more out of it.

Roko Belic, who believes that “gratitude is a shortcut to happiness.

Jacqueline Novogratz has her own spin24 on this concept, phrased in the question What are you doing when you feel most beautiful? In her travels for the Acumen Fund, she sometimes asks her question in unlikely settings: “I decided to try it out on women living in a slum in Bombay.” At first, it didn’t go over well: “One woman said, ‘There’s nothing in our lives that’s beautiful.’ But finally another woman, who worked as a gardener, said, ‘Well, I can think of one time. All winter long I slog and slog, but when those flowers push through the ground, I feel beautiful.

Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller, who said, “It’s easier to act your way33 into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.

Keith Yamashita says companies can try to find their cause by asking, What does the world hunger for?

Contextual inquiry is about asking questions up close and in context, relying on observation, listening, and empathy to guide us toward a more intelligent, and therefore more effective, question.

remote associations—“like when we think of ‘table’ and the idea of ‘under the table’”—require more of a neural reach. The brain’s right hemisphere, made up of cells with longer branches, is better suited for this task.

We arrive at originality because the dendrites have reached out and made contact with the branches of faraway “trees,” thereby enabling us to combine thoughts, bits of knowledge, and influences that normally do not mix.

Just asking Why and What If will not necessarily cause these neural connections to occur—but questioning can help nourish the trees and extend the reach of those branches.

we can’t necessarily control the brain’s search for remote connections—much of which happens in the unconscious mind—but we can provide impetus and help guide that search by focusing on a problem to be solved, a challenging question to be answered. “Having that goal or that question you’re working on is very important,” Zhong confirms. If your conscious mind puts a big question out there, chances are good that your unconscious mind will go to work on it.

if you have a curious mind—and if you actively ask questions and gather knowledge to sate that curiosity—this also can aid in connective inquiry by providing “a plethora of raw materials to be connected,” as Zhong puts it. In particular, if your curiosity has been focused on a particular problem, and you’ve been doing deep thinking, contextual inquiry, questioning the problem from various perspectives and angles, asking your multiple Whys—it all becomes fodder for later insights and smart recombinations.

It also helps to have a wide base of knowledge on all sorts of things that might seem to be unrelated to the problem—the more eclectic your storehouse of information, the more possibilities for unexpected connections.

When I used to take tests in college, I would be very anxious,” he told me. “So I came up with a process whereby I would always answer the more obvious questions first. Then, as my anxiety would lessen, I’d start to answer more of the questions that required real thinking.

In the more relaxed state, neural networks open up and connections of all kinds form more freely.

For a questioner, it’s important to spend time with challenging questions instead of trying to answer them right away. By “living with” a question, thinking about it and then stepping away from it, allowing it to marinate, you give your brain a chance to come up with the kinds of fresh insights and What If possibilities that can lead to breakthroughs.

Google’s scientist-in-residence Ray Kurzweil47 revealed in an interview. He said that when he is working on a difficult problem, he sets aside time, right before going to bed, to review all the pertinent issues and challenges. Then he goes to sleep and allows his unconscious mind to go to work.

The sleeping or relaxed brain cuts off distractions and turns inward, as the right hemisphere becomes more active, leading to periods of greater connectivity.

And it’s possible you may get different results depending on which hand you doodle with,” Kounios says. “Using the left hand may stimulate the brain’s right hemisphere.

(The designer George Lois, who claims some of his best ideas have come while meandering through the Metropolitan Museum, says, “Museums are the custodians of epiphanies.”)

Drucker “understood that his job wasn’t to serve up answers,” according to Wartzman. Drucker once remarked that his greatest strength was “to be ignorant and ask a few questions.” Often those questions were deceptively simple, as in Who is your customer? What business are you in? The clients who hired Drucker may have started out expecting the great consultant to offer brilliant solutions to all their problems. But as he told one client, “The answers have to be yours.

incumbency has an interest in maintaining the status quo. To question well, you must have the ability to say, ‘It doesn’t have to be that way.

Everything that’s ever happened to you or occurred to you in your life informs every decision you make—and also influences what questions you decide to ask. So it can be useful to step back and inquire, Why did I come up with that question?” Burton adds, “Every time you come up with a question, you should be wondering, What are the underlying assumptions of that question? Is there a different question I should be asking?

One classic example involved a hospital33 group that hired IDEO to help answer the question What is our patient experience like? The hospital executives were surprised when IDEO, instead of doing a snazzy PowerPoint presentation, showed them a long, deadly dull video of a hospital ceiling. The point of the film: “When you lie in a hospital bed all day, all you do is look at the ceiling, and it’s a really shitty experience,” IDEO’s Paul Bennett explained. The firm understood this because someone from IDEO actually checked into the hospital, was wheeled around on a gurney, and then lay in a hospital bed for hours. This kind of “immersive” approach enables the firm to consider a question or problem from the inside out, instead of from the outside looking in. (Soon after seeing the video, the hospital’s nurses took it upon themselves to decorate the ceiling tiles in each room.)

But this much can be said of Phillips, Polaroid’s Land, Netflix’s Hastings, Acumen’s Novogratz, the Airbnb founders, and others in this book: Confronted with a problem that was larger than themselves, they decided to make that problem—and the question that defined the problem—their own. The difference between just asking a question or pursuing it is the difference between flirting with an idea or living with it. If you choose the latter, the question will likely become what the psychotherapist Eric Maisel calls a “productive obsession.”35 It will surface, recede, then surface again. It will invade your dreams as it embeds itself in your subconscious. You’ll wrestle with it, walk with it, sleep with it.

The What If stage is the blue-sky moment of questioning, when anything is possible. Those possibilities may not survive the more practical How stage; but it’s critical to innovation that there be a time for wild, improbable ideas to surface and to inspire.

To get a picture of what’s going on, Heilman says, start by thinking of the brain as a forest full of trees. “Think of a neuron, or a nerve cell, as one of those trees,” he says. In this analogy, the cell body forms the tree trunk; there are major branches, known as axons, and smaller branches, dendrites, that extend out to the farthest reaches. “In the brain, some of those trees are closer together than others, and the branches communicate with each other.” As this happens, “neural connections” are formed, which can produce new thoughts, ideas, and insights.

the conscious brain is resistant to wide-open idea generation and far-reaching connective inquiry. The mind is inclined to try to solve problems by doing the same things over and over, following familiar and well-worn neural paths. The idea, then, is to force your brain off those predictable paths by purposely “thinking wrong”—coming up with ideas that seem to make no sense, mixing and matching things that don’t normally go together. Proponents of this approach say it has a jarring effect on creative thinking; in neurological terms, when you force yourself to confront contrary thoughts or upside-down ideas, you “jiggle the synapses” in the brain,51 in the words of author and adult learning expert Kathleen Taylor. In so doing, you may loosen some of the old, stale neural connections and make it easier to form new ones.