By: Reham Essam
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Questions Are The Answers By: Hal Gregersen
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For one thing, they have a paradoxical quality of being utterly surprising in the moment they are asked but in retrospect seeming obvious. In other words they carry with them a quality of inevitability without having been inevitable at all. For another thing, they are generative. They open up space for people to do their best thinking. They don’t put anyone on the spot, demanding correct, often predetermined answers under threat of public humiliation. They invite people down an intriguing new line of thought that offers some promise of solving a problem they care about. They act like catalysts in chemical processes; they knock down barriers to thinking and channel energy down more productive pathways. On a personal level, I keep discovering how crucial it is to raise the right questions—sometimes by being caught out by not asking them.
What’s Harder than Finding New Answers?
The key to find better answers is to start by asking better questions, and it is possible to build habits of pausing to revisit questions before rushing to formulate new answers, you need to appreciate first the power of a certain kind of questioning, and avoid the traps of only working to solve problems presented in the same old ways.
Behind Every breakthrough Is A Better Question
There are things that are important to your success that you know all about, and other things unknown to you. The other axis reflects how cognizant you are of those knowledge assets and gaps; that is, you may or may not be aware that there is a piece of information out there that you need to solve your problem. Thus, there are things you know you don’t know. Better Solution are possible with a better question.
It Pays To Focus on Questioning Skills
By getting better at questioning, you raise your chances of unlocking better answers. A lot of times the question is harder than the answer, we typically worry about answers more than questions. On the other hand, some people think that computers are useless; they can only give you answers. You might start to see calls for better questions everywhere. Understanding the power of questions and emphasizing that you should get better at asking them offers a critical choice. You can begin to ask: What am I doing today and tomorrow and the next day so that better questions come into my work and my world?
Not All Questions Are Good Ones
Meanwhile, the goodness or badness of a question is also determined by the spirit in which it’s asked. The best questions are catalytic; that is, they dissolve barriers—which, in idea generation, usually come in the form of false assumptions—and channel energy down new, more productive pathways.
Great Questions Break down 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. Always, the effort starts with an attempt to map the problem space correctly before jumping into building a solution. If for example, a company produces cars, it should not fall into the trap of saying “what would make our cars better?” It should take the larger perspective of remembering that a car is just a solution the customer hires to get a job done, which is to transport people to where they need to go. Think in terms of “How can we transport the customer better?” and the frame for innovation in the company’s offerings suddenly will become vastly larger.
Great Questions Engage and Energize
Questions, when they are seen as sincere requests for help, invite creative contributions from others rather than merely campaigning for their support. In most cases that additional thinking makes for better solutions, but if nothing else it generates more active support. People who cognitively engage with an issue become more invested in getting it resolved. Since so much of what we struggle with in life and work is bigger than we are, it is essential that we use the tools we have to recruit help from others, and good questions are among the best of those tools.
Time to Go Beyond Answering
Importantly, though, he always stresses the need to approach these questions with a “beginner’s mind”—constantly seeing the world with fresh eyes. You need to have a beginner’s mind to create bold innovation. Focusing on answers to settled questions is fine in many situations. In fact, it’s essential that good questions. In fact, it’s essential that good questions should lead to periods of good answering. The point is not to remain in constant questioning mode, always stepping back to rethink things instead of stepping up to make a decision and get on with life. But answering yesterday’s questions is not good enough at times when we are feeling stuck, or when innovation is imperative, or when change must happen more continuously.
The More Ways we are Stuck, The More Questions We Need
As it happens, we are collectively—and in many cases individually—in need of the power of innovation in numerous realms. There are scientific mysteries to unravel, social issues to resolve, personal difficulties to overcome. In many of these areas, progress has stalled as old ideas have run their repetitive course. Only new questions can shows the ways forward. Nothing fixed, someone seeing a problem that has others throwing up their hands, and then finding an unexpected new angle to approach it from.
Time to Get Better At Questioning
Indeed, the questions raised in many settings are time-wasting diversions if not downright toxic. Instead, it’s a certain kind of question that inspires creative problem-solving because it energizes collective thinking, inspiring collaborative work to make serious progress. By keeping a focus these questions, we can learn how to bring more of them to the surface of our lives and work.
Why Don’t We Ask More?
Learning Not to Ask
The first reason that questions don’t spring naturally to many people’s lips is that, early in life, the natural desire to ask them was checked many time— so much so that questioning impulses weakened and the desire withered away. The process takes place at school and at home, and continues as young people head off to work. By the time they are in positions where they feel at liberty to ask challenging questions, and are even required to do so for their own good that of others, they don’t know how to do it.
Anyone who has spent much time around kids knows that humans start out full of questions and are uninhibited about asking them. Most of this questioning is simple knowledge seeking and sense making, but mixed in with the factual questions are inevitably some discomfiting ones, and now and again there’s one that touches a third rail, however inadvertently. As their questions provoke responses, kids learn on two levels. They get answers (when they’re lucky) to what they are curious about, and at the same time they get signals about whether they should keep asking. Stopping to consider how a problem might be solved differently, or how a different problem might be solved differently, or how a different problem might get solved, is a regrettable cause for delay and, if the question is re-ally challenging, can bring activity to a halt, this love of productivity is a reason why questioners are discouraged, but usually it is not the whole reason. The bigger, darker reason for shutting down questioning is that these settings are also rife with power struggles.
Power Corrupts the Questioning Process
These are a more common kind of question— a kind that is easily deployed as a weapon. We see this all time in a political affair. Those attempting to gain or maintain power don’t use questions to ask permission, gain others’ perspectives, and get to know other better, or seek their counsel. They use questions to put others in their places, to catch them out and make them look stupid, or to remind them that they are obliged to stop whatever they’re doing to respond. The power hungry aren’t seekers of truth; they are seekers of advantage. Power-seeking people are tuned in to the fact that questions steer the course of conversations and that the ones doing the asking are therefore in the driver’s seat. They use questions to maintain control and, when others pose questions, ignore them or try to turn them to their advantage.
There are good questioners and bad questioners, and the worst questioners make use of questions to dominate others. But most people never pause to think that questions come in different shades of good and bad, and therefore the stinging effects of toxic questioning taint all questioning activity for them. On a deep level the come to believe that to ask a question—especially one that challenges an edge of the status quo—is to behave obnoxiously. The higher that people rise in hierarchies—based on position, expertise, ownership, charisma, or heaven forbid, all four the more their questions tend to pack a wallop and fail to encourage the challenging inquiry that could lead them and others to better ways of thinking and doing. Power tends to corrupt the questioning process and absolute power corrupts the questioning process absolutely.
Lacking the growth Mindset
Our need to safety plays itself out at many levels other than the original, familial one, and this is why we follow leaders in everyday life. To be a well-behaved child is generally no to question the teacher even when the teacher is somehow bad. When we are adults on the job it’s the same: By and large we toe the line. We do what we’re told and play by the rules, even when the rules are unfair, and those who set them badly equipped or disposed. We follow because the cost of not following is, more often than not, high.
People often hesitate to ask questions because they would rather not gain information that would make them confront a need for change. Even when, rationally, it is evident that things are not going as well as they could, there is something within individuals that is ferociously protective of the status quo. For most people, that territory is blocked off by various barriers, including emotional ones that keep them from wanting venture into it.
Where in the World Do Questions Thrives?
Questions tend to suffer, as people value the stable knowledge that is foundational to their mutual understanding and cooperation over transformative knowledge that might disrupt many existing arrangements. For those of us particularly interested in questioning behaviors, it also reinforces the notion that the natural curiosity humans are born with can be encouraged or discouraged to very different degrees depending on the circumstances in which they find themselves. If we acknowledge that whole societies, and certainly whole organizations, can trend toward keeping questions from surfacing, that should reinforce our resolve to crave out the special places in which we know they can flourish.
Cleaning a Space for Inquiry?
Parker palmer, an educator and activist when he was offered a plum job as a college president. He asked to have a “clearness committee” a process in which he group refrains from giving you advice but spends three hours asking you honest open questions to help you discover your own inner truth. Human begin life as active questioners, but as childhood progresses and the years pass that quality fades. We may not be able to change the whole world into a questioning place, but we can carve out spaces in which we establish question-friendly conditions.
What If We Brainstormed For Questions?
Over the years, I have come to realize that it is a simple matter of creating a different kind of space for people, in which the usual rules and norms are suspended and different behaviors are encouraged. More broadly, the small-scale exercise has convinced me that breakthrough thinking isn’t just a product of superior gray matter. It’s not all about the cognitive processes going on inside people’s heads. To a great degree it’s a matter of the conditions in which they find themselves—which usually discourage questioning but can be altered to invite it. If you want different behaviors to take hold, you must start by changing the setting in which people find themselves by creating a space for conversations that will spark ideas and therefore yield what we call a return on collisions.
A Small- Scale Reset
Question Burst may be an exercise that you will want to try if you are, individually or as part of a group, looking for new insights to solve a problem you care about. It consists of three steps:
1. Set the Stage
Select a challenge you care deeply about, you give it your full attention and want to engage others in thinking about it, and check your emotions about it because emotions have an impact on creative energy.
2. Generate the Questions
Brainstorm some questions within 4 mins, and once the timer goes off, do the second quick emotional check about the challenge, and get rid of negative feeling of being stuck.
3. Unpack the Questions
Study the questions and make a new path after feeling more energized by the possibility of making progress. This exercise produces at least one question that usefully reframes the problem and provides a new angle for solving it; it can help create a boarder culture of collective problem-solving and truth seeking. So these artificial conditions make people value questions and think more broadly about the conditions that favor them.
Other Forcing Functions
Some people don’t know that they don’t know the answer, so a father credits a series of gathering in places away from home where the family engaged in activities they didn’t usually pursue, creating a climate in which they could ask the right questions. If you want people to think differently, you need to put them in a different space.
Safely Unsafe Spaces
What I am advocating are spaces where people can dare to take in disconfirming information and where the questions occurring to them as a result—questions that might well be perceived as contrarian, or annoying, or flaky—can be voiced and heard. These are spaces for exploration beyond safe comfort zones. The key to feel safe was having a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.
Creating Conditions for yourself and others
The space in which question thrive are spaces where different conditions prevail, individuals can get themselves into such productive circumstances in three ways:
First, they can consciously seek out more settings where questioning conditions prevail—a carved-out safe space for questioning that doesn’t resemble the normal conditions in which one operates.
Second, you can create those conditions in pockets around you—and not only for yourself but perhaps for other as well.
Third, in your daily comings and goings in circumstances you can’t easily change, you can pack a long the condition of assuming greater wrongness as a purely personal perspective. You can make a questioning space for yourself to refuse to capitulate to the conditions that are suppressing your imagination and voice.
Who revels in Being Wrong?
The point is acquiring the questioning habit, and to keeps looking at problems from different angles. This is why a different question could penetrate thoughts in the first place, and it’s also why some people stopped to engage with it. And it’s a habit we should even love to see in others. The model of colleagues are challengers—since they challenge the status quo— who wake up in the morning asking questions, because they understand that the world is bigger than what they can see. They accomplish great things because they always suspect there is some other, better way to get something done, or another thing they can do, and they put a question mark on everything we are doing, all the time.
Wrongness As A Condition
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. Questions don’t arise whenever we are wrong. It’s only on those rare occasions when we think we’re wrong. And for most of us it’s only when we are practically hit in the face with how wrong we have been that questions start to get our attention. Sometimes new information makes it obvious. This tends to be the way with scientific discovery. If you want to find a new angle on a problem and ultimately find a breakthrough solution, you must rid yourself of the impulse always to display deep competence. For the right questions to surface, you must spend more time feeling mistaken.
Stale Mental Models
By focusing on mental models, you go straight to the deepest level of potential wrongness, the level that is hardest and most valuable for us to question in ourselves. It’s hardest for a few reasons: it requires not just learning but unlearning; it’s the kind of questioning that we get the least practice doing; and it exposes a layer of knowledge most people give no thought to all.
Try Being Wrong More
You should be very thoughtful about how to overcome this natural resistance to push yourself to move further into the territory of what of what you don’t know you don’t know, always listening for the weak signals you might be missing. In order to develop a more prevailing suspicion that you might be wrong—and not just at the top layer of facts but at the deeper layer of assumptions and mental models—is to educate yourself about cognitive biases. This is the very human habit of seeing what we want to see. Having formed a hypothesis that something is true about the world, we are more apt to note and file away evidence that helps to confirm that while passing over the evidence around us that would suggest otherwise. This isn’t a deliberate refusal to acknowledge the challenging data; missing it is an unconscious phenomenon. That’s just one from cognitive bias; some attempts to list all the others run to over a hundred entries.
Check Your Certitude
Despite there are many books about our limiting cognitive habits, and despite the fact that we live in an era where it is easy to access information that could reveal so much of our wrongness to us, people become less willing to entertain doubts about their rightness. Our increasingly digitally intermediated lives also grant us a greater ability to surround ourselves with inputs that only reinforce our going-in assumptions and exclude ones that challenge us. Some people spent most of their lives being wrong, and the whole story is about civilization’s progress, is repeated discovery that some beliefs, assumptions, or conventional wisdom that guided people in the past were deeply wrong. Yet we go through life without doubting that these days we have it right. If you are certain that you are looking in the eyes of the truth, you won’t even attempt to find a better solution, and you will be trapped into either/or decisions.
Getting Systematic About It
Five ways to learn that you are wrong and adjust your path, a state of doubt about your rightness:
1. Ask fir brutally honest reports from the people who work directly for you
2. Check in with different vantage points
3. Explain to people why you depend on them to educate you
4. Find ways for people to say you don’t get it
5. Encourage the issue raisers in the ranks
Why Would Anyone Seek Discomfort?
You should know that where you stumble, there your treasure lies, if you want to come up with better questions and better solutions—you should spend more time in conditions where questions thrive.
Beware the Bubble
Privileged people now live in a bubble, but no wonder moving out of your element transforms you into a more active seeker. You need to go to places that you are not feeling comfortable; you need to try to push and find out where are the boundaries to pinpoint the blind spot there.
Benefits of Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone
Famously, discomfort spurs a lot f innovation. Problem-solvers habitually focus on pain points.
The Element of Surprise:
It’s challenging to work with others, who don’t resemble you on multiple dimensions, but from that discomfort, catalytic questions arise and creative insights are born.
The Power of Distraction:
Better results came with task switching, because distractions create time and space for mind the surface questions and insights that otherwise can’t happen.
The Benefit of Conflict:
Many of us feel discomfiture when we suddenly see an assumption we have been making or something we have been missing, and we feel awkward or guilty about it, and then we realize how we are profoundly disconnected from consequences of our own choices and actions. So don’t surrender to normal circumstances and isolate yourself, you should hear and see things you normally won’t know about them.
Practice to Do This with Some Discipline
Few suggestions to understand logically how uncomfortable conditions can yield benefits and another to actually seek them out:
1. Live somewhere else far away
2. Take the scenic route
3. Shake your entourage
4. Face your critics
5. Head for the cheap seats
6. Don’t overdo it
7. Audit your comfort level
The Dreaded Comfy Chair
The point of travelling is to journey into complication, even contradiction; to confront the questions that you never have to think about at home and you are not sure can ever be easily answered.
Will You Be Quiet?
Successful individuals compose and wait. Composing these steady-state layers deliberately, think conditions of being more wrong and uncomfortable, they can then wait—impatiently, but with confidence that some valuable insight will materialize.
1. Transmission Trouble
2. Listen For the Unexpected
3. Silence Your Own Voice
4. Get Ready For Surprises
5. Become Approachable
6. Actively Seek Passive Data
7. Silent Mode Thinking Time
8. Read Daily, Read Deeply
9. Clear Your Head and Heart
10. The Sound Of Silence
How Do You Channel The Energy?
People who are able to transform their questions and ideas into actual accomplishments are people who really uplift society.
Six Stages to channel the energy:
1. Escalating the Questions: Look for the next, bigger implication of the question to solve it.
2. Cascading the Questions: Use energizing question to achieve impact.
3. Managing the Emotional Arc: Unlock answers hold the power to spark our imagination, and give us reason to hope. But, negative mood makes us miss interesting solution.
4. What A great Coach Does: A Coach changes the internal environment of people by questions to be productive.
5. Questioning Capital: Same question is posed by different people creates very different responses.
6. Learning to tell the tale: Use character-driven stories with emotional content to make key points.
Can We Raise A Next Generation of Questioners?
Most of the great innovators in multiple stages of their lives were around adults who taught them the act of asking and gave them opportunities to engage in the act of creation.
Seven stages to raise whole generation of good questioners:
1. Schooled in Questioning
2. Drawing on a Box of Questions
3. Nothing The Question That produced The Answer
4. Increasing Wait time
5. Celebrating Questioners
6. Learning on Ed Tech to Achieve Answer Recall
7. Shifting to Project-Centered Learning
What Age Can you Start Being an Artist?
Giving voice for voiceless will create many better questions among them from the very beginning through the following:
1. Extracurricular Questioning: Create better space for questioning in schools.
2. A Digital Heaven for Questioning—Or Hell: Although it empowered conservative people to ask questions regarding sensitive subjects, but it let some wait for the right answer, instead of trying.
3. Questioning Begins At Home: The greatest thing is to grow up in a family that encourages intellectual curiosity.
4. The Campus Challenge: As a student, you are judged by how well you answer questions .But in life, you are judged by your questions.
5. Never Too Late: Speak up in support of the questioners among your colleagues.
6. Expect Different Questions: Don’t shut down any voice.
Why Not Aim for the Biggest Questions?
The bigger the problem or the opportunity in the world, the bigger the insight we need—and the bigger the questions we should be prepared to ask.
• To Ask A Mighty Question: If you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.
• Learning To Live the Questions: Have patience with everything unsolved in your heart, then you will find the way into the answer perhaps someday far in the future.
• Stepping Up to the Big Picture: The process of asking questions helps make sure that we haven’t missed larger and fundamental issues.
• In The Business of Questioning: They ask big questions even as they are making the world much more aware of the power of raising them.
• Asking the Big Social Questions: Use the power to translate the questions into a serious sense of resolve and find their ways to energizing answers.
• Big Means Fundamental: Powerful questions should be long term, and strong enough to survive and surpass setback, delays, pain, and failure.
Epilogue
What Will You Ask of Yourself?
We all have keystone questions guiding us through life—whether or not we are consciously aware of them. People who have spent time clarifying their purpose have often distilled it down to a compelling motto of some kind, or declaration of intent. Nevertheless, with what you have you can reflect light into the dark places of this world—into the dreary places in the heart of others—and change some things in some people. Perhaps other may see and do likewise. Ask yourself what dark place will I find in need of light, and how will I manage to reflect some into it?
It’s a wonderful thing when someone perceives at early age the question that drives their journey of discovery through life. On the other side of the coin, failure is not trying, and if you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space; you should try new things to spread your wings in life. If you didn’t try, you would realize later it was because you had let the wrong question take hold of your life early and never brought it clearly out into the cold light of the day to examine it.
Learning to compose and wait means consciously deciding to spend some period of time being rather quiet, feeling rather uncomfortable, and accepting that you might just be wrong. It directly serves the purpose of forging better questions. Look for the photograph in a different way, inviting people to challenge your fundamental assumptions with their content.
You can shift your keystone question, moreover, fate and endless conversation with friends will open up your heart to live on its outside to enjoy the complex beauty of the door’s surface and not be pulled into the darkness of that hole. Discover the questions to live by, and allow them to reflect light in your life.
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