Silicon Valley and other centers of innovation are embracing a new approach to innovation in which the focus is on questions, rather than answers. The reason for this is that, if you look at innovations and breakthroughs and trace them back to their origins, you will find, at the root of the each of them, a great question.

Warren Berger, “Questionologist”, and author of The Book of Beautiful Questions, says:

Questioning enables us to organize our thinking around what we don’t know, so at a time when information is all around us and answers are at our fingertips we really need great questions in order to know what to do with that information and find our way to the next answer.

By asking questions we can analyze and better understand, helping us to move forward in the face of uncertainty. The act of questioning can guide us to make smart decisions and to take a sensible course of action, while the right questions can cut to the heart of a complex challenge or enable us to see an old problem in a new way.

Curiosity-Driven research

An average four-year-old starts out asking about 300 questions a day, and between this and high school age, we see a steady decline in the number of questions. Schools place more value on answers than questions. This is a problem in our education system, and it can even affect our worldview.

It is not easy to ask meaningful questions, but doing so is of fundamental importance for the advancement of any field. Neurobiologist, Stuart Firestein (2012), has argued that within the natural sciences it is “the right question, asked the right way, rather than the accumulation of more data, that allows a field to progress.” In recent times we have seen an exponential growth in the amount of accumulated data, and it seems that making good sense of that data is largely dependent on the kind of questions we ask.

Still, many leaders shy away from encouraging curiosity because they believe the company would be harder to manage if people were allowed to explore their own interests. Often, they believe that disagreements would arise and that the ability to make and execute decisions quickly would be adversely affected, thus raising the cost of doing business.

Research finds that although people list creativity as a goal, they frequently reject creative ideas when presented with them. This could be because curiosity and creativity often involve questioning the status quo and don’t always produce useful information, at first. Creativity sometimes requires time. It is important to allow naïve questions, to play with and develop them (like we did as children) and not to settle for the first possible solution. Digging deeper is what yields the buried treasure.

Tools of Titans

Tim Ferris, author of Tools of Titans, interviewed high achievers of all kinds to find commonalities to emulate among the top one percenters of the world.

If you look at these business icons one of the most common factors is their absurd questions: “If a gun were held against your head and you had a short amount of time to grow your company to X amount of rands, how would you do that?”

“What would this look like if it was easy?”

“Am I making this harder than it needs to be?”

The basis of these types of questions is that they do not call for your default framework – they force you to think laterally and break boundaries, and that makes them powerful.

In this short video, Tim gives tips on how to ask other, better questions.

Another tool that Ferris says he took away from his research, was the power of journaling as an adjunct to asking these questions. He practices this every day, asking a question and writing a few pages free hand, and although he says just about ninety percent of what he comes up with is junk, it’s that ten percent that often takes your business to the next level.

Questions are tools that allow you to grow. They are a survival skill for all of us and this becomes even truer in a time when we must deal with lots of change and solve many problems. Questions are the new answers.