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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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?

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?

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

What do you want to say? Why does it need to be said

To the extent a school is like a factory,

What might the potential for humans be if we really encouraged that spirit of questioning in children, instead of closing it down? I

neoteny

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.

Always the beautiful answer Who asks a more beautiful question. —E.E. Cummings

We come out of the womb questioning,” noted the small-schools-movement pioneer Deborah Meier.

Noonan observes that if you never actually do anything about a problem yourself, then you’re not really questioning—you’re complaining

or flashlights that, in the words of Dan Rothstein of the Right Question Institute (RQI), “shine a light on where you need6 to go.

A question can reside in the mind for a long time—maybe forever—without being spoken to anyone.

embrace ignorance

One good question can give rise to several layers of answers, can inspire decades-long searches for solutions, can generate whole new fields of inquiry, and can prompt changes in entrenched thinking,” Firestein writes. “Answers, on the other hand, often end the process.

Rothstein maintains. “Just asking or hearing a question phrased a certain way produces an almost palpable feeling of discovery and new understanding. Questions produce the lightbulb effect.

In Hal Gregersen’s study of business leaders who question, he found that they exhibited an unusual “blend of humility and confidence”15—they were humble enough to acknowledge a lack of knowledge, and confident enough to admit this in front of others.

we all live in the world our questions create.

That’s because with each new advance, Thrun said, one must pause to ask, Now that we know what we now know, what’s possible now?

what the New York Times recently characterized22 as a perfect storm in which no one, whether blue-collar or white-collar and whatever level of expertise, can afford to stand pat. “The need to constantly adapt is the new reality for many workers” was the theme of the piece headlined “The Age of Adaptation.” The story had a term for what is now required of many workers—serial mastery.

In a time when so much of what we know is subject to revision or obsolescence, the comfortable expert must go back to being a restless learner.

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

(This great quote from Close was featured recently on the site BrainPickings: “Ask yourself an interesting enough question3 and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome—which I think is a more interesting place to be.”)

well-meaning people are often trying to solve a problem by answering the wrong question.

With so much evidence in its favor and with everyone from Einstein to Jobs in its corner, why, then, is questioning underappreciated in business, undertaught in schools, and underutilized in our everyday lives?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?” As

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

Our grandfathers and great grandfathers18 built schools to train people to have a lifetime of productive labor as part of the industrialized economy. And it worked.” To

What would happen if this happens?’ I do that on my own—I do all of my exploring outside of school. Because in school it’s not allowed and that just . . . really sucks.”   If

The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert.” Such a mind, he added, is “open to all possibilities” and “can see things as they are.” Suzuki

questioning is a more subtle and complex skill than many realize, involving three kinds of sophisticated thinking—divergent, convergent, and metacognitive. Some of it comes naturally to kids, but some must be learned and practiced. Since questioning seems to drop off at around age five, the innate questioning skills we start out with have long been neglected by junior high and high school. By that time, “the question-asking muscle,” as Rothstein calls it, has atrophied and needs to be built up.     Can

even when you don’t know what you’re doing, you still know what to do.

Why?”. Neurological research shows that merely wondering about an interesting question activates regions of the brain linked to reward-processing. Curiosity—the act of wondering—feels good in and of itself, and thus, questions beget more questions. Think of curiosity as a condition—“like an itch,” says the neuroscientist Charan Ranganath.

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.

It’s also critical for company leaders to be on the lookout for ways in which questioning gets punished—though the punishment may not be obvious or intentional. The operative question is If an employee asks questions at our company, is he or she asking for trouble

when we want to shake things up 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.

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

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.

Great questioners “keep looking”—at a situation or a problem, at the ways people around them behave, at their own behaviors. They study the small details; and they look for not only what’s there but what’s missing. They step back, view things sideways, squint if necessary.

I asked Meier about that second question, and she said it originally popped into her head about forty years ago, when a third-grade student at her Harlem school said to her, “What’s different about this school is you’re interested in what we don’t know, not just what we do know.” Meier was very taken with that comment; it confirmed to her, more than any of the impressive test results her school was achieving, that she was doing what she’d set out to do when she started the Central Park East schools.

Five learning skills, or “habits of mind,” were at the core of her school, and each was matched up with a corresponding question: Evidence: How do we know what’s true or false? What evidence counts? Viewpoint: How might this look if we stepped into other shoes, or looked at it from a different 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. “I believe you have to have an open-mindedness to the possibility that you’re wrong, or that anything may be wrong,” she said. “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?

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.

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

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?

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.

One of the most important things questioning does is to enable people to think and act in the face of uncertainty. As Steve Quatrano of the Right Question Institute puts it, forming questions helps us “to organize our thinking around18 what we don’t know.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

(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.”)

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.

You could ask, as Grove and Moore did, What if different leaders were brought in?, but Clay Christensen suggests a bolder version of this question: What if the company didn’t exist? That question allows you to take a clean-slate approach in thinking about the industry and your place in it. Christensen points out that thinking about your company as if there were no history enables leaders to stop focusing on preexisting beliefs and structures—“the stuff they’ve already invested in”—and consider new possibilities. That’s particularly useful “if, at any point in the future, you see the possibility that the core business might slow down,” Christensen says. (While contemplating a world in which your company did not exist, another question worth considering is Who would miss us? The answer to that can help clarify who your most important customers are and what your real purpose is.)

We’ve seen that companies sometimes use a hypothetical What If question to temporarily remove constraints that can inhibit ambitious thinking (What if cost weren’t an issue—how might we do things differently?), and the same principle applies when people are pursuing new ideas or embarking on change in their lives. Often the biggest constraint is fear of failure.

give yourself a strong incentive to want to risk failure.

We found the common ground between gun owners and nonowners by using questions,” Bond told me. Among the questions people could agree on: Do you care about gun violence? Are you for gun responsibility? “These elicited unqualified yeses,” Bond said, “whereas statements like ‘Gun owners must be more responsible’ elicited personalized, defensive answers.” Bond considers questions to be “the verbal equivalent of nonviolent conflict resolution.” The only way to get any traction on polarizing issues is to attract people on both sides, “not bully them into submission.” As he noted, questions—if worded sensitively—can show respect to both sides of an issue, invite participation, and open up conversation. Bond, the former advertiser, described it as “the art of ‘pull’ versus ‘push.’ It can’t be done without questions.

We all have goals, plans, passions, interests, concerns; we have lots to do and to think about, so why add on a big, difficult unanswered question? Because a question can be propulsive. You may have lists of things to do, goals to achieve, as we all have, in a drawer somewhere; but if you have one compelling question, it’s harder to set aside and ignore. To quote David Cooperrider, a powerful question never sleeps. It can get deep into your head, to the point that you may find yourself working on it both consciously and unconsciously.

As to which question to choose, to some degree the question chooses you. It’s the one that resonates with you for some reason only you understand. What will make it a beautiful question for you, and one worth staying with, is the passion you feel for it. Look for a question that is “ambitious yet actionable”—or, as the physicist Edward Witten puts it, a question that’s hard enough to be interesting, but realistic enough that you have some hope of answering it.

Keep yourself away from the answers,60 but alive in the middle of the question—this is the warning scrawled on the wall in the room where the acclaimed Irish novelist Colum McCann does his writing. I asked McCann what he meant by that line, and he wrote back, “We must embrace the notion that answers are in fact quite boring. The Irish are especially good or infuriating in this respect. We answer questions with questions. But in my opinion that’s a good place to be. A little perplexed by the perplexity of life.

That, right there, is a beautiful question for the ages: What do you want to say? Why does it need to be said? What if you could say it in a way that has never before been done? How might you do that?