Phil Fossa: All right, let's get started.
I'm Phil Fossa from our PM team here at Microsoft research. I had the pleasure of reading Warren
Berger's book this weekend on a digital version. Found it super interesting. I don't know if any of you
have taken this precision questioning course here at Microsoft. Most of us have had some exposure to
that. And I asked Warren what the difference was between the PQ course and what he's advocating,
and he said that PQ is more oriented towards person-to-person questioning, or like an attorney or HR
person, in that context. But this one is more self-focused. Which I think it allows us to do a great bit of
innovation and great new kinds of thinking. And some of the questions I'm sure we ask ourselves when
we really answer that are where we get the truest innovations.
So Warren's background in writing and research on questioning innovation has appeared in Fast
Company. It's also appeared in Harvard Business Review and Wired. He's the author of an acclaimed
book called Glimmer. And this was named Business Book of the Year, Best Innovation Design Books
of the Year. And Berger's appeared on Today, CNN, NPR and All Things Considered, which is a pretty
darn good resumé.
And please join me with a warm welcome for Warren Berger.
Warren Berger: Thank you. [Applause]
Thanks. It's good to be here. So my book is about questioning, so I'll start with a question. It seems
appropriate. So we all know about the app that sold through $19 billion; right? Mobile Messaging
App. And it's a good app; right? I mean is serves a good purpose. But what if you had an app that
could help you whenever you had a situation where you didn't know what to do, you had a problem that
arises, a new challenge in your work or your life, any kind of change where you don't quite know what
to deal with; right? What if you had an app that could help you start to deal with that situation and
figure out basically what you need to do next? That would be a pretty powerful app. I think of it as
maybe a $100 billion app. Because if global messaging is 19 billion, this has got to be worth at least
100. So an app that helps you figure out what to do next is basically something we all want. And the
good thing is we all have it, because we were all born with this app which is basically our natural
human aptitude for questioning and for asking questions. And it's a thing we take for granted, you
know. It's kind of like breathing. We have always asked questions and we continue to ask questions.
But when you study questioning, what you discover is that it's actually a pretty interesting mental
process and it's pretty complex. And a lot of us probably are using it to a partial extent of what we
could really do if we were really using questioning well. So I studied it a little bit with -- there's a
group called the Right Question Institute that studies questioning, and they shared with me this
definition here, which I like a lot, "Questioning is the ability to organize our thinking around what we
don't know."
That's a pretty powerful tool when you think about it. So you've got a situation where you don't know
what to do next, you've got a problem, you've got a challenge, you've got something in front of you.
What questioning does is figure out how to attack it from all kinds of different angles with "why" and
"what if" and "how" questions, and start to figure out how to deal with this situation, trying to get your
brain around it and your understanding around it. So it's very powerful and I'll talk a little bit today
about why I think -- I make the case in the book that maybe we're not using questioning as much as we
should in our lives and in our work. I'll talk a little bit about why I think that's the case, and then I'll
talk a little bit about how we can approach questioning differently and perhaps get better at it.
But first I want to just start with a story that is about how I -- it's one of the first stories that got me sort
of appreciating the story of questioning, as I was doing my research. And eventually I came across a
lot of other stories that reinforced it. But this is one of the first ones. And it involved -- at the time I
was writing a design book, so I was looking for all kinds of cool designed objects and beautifullyengineered, beautifully-designed objects. And I came upon this, a prosthetic limb that had been
designed by a guy named Van Phillips and was changing the way people used prosthetics, was enabling
them to run and jump and do things that a person could never do before with a prosthetic limb. And I
was -- I being somewhat of a questioning person myself, you know, one of the first things I wondered
is who would create something like this? Who would dream up something like this? It's interesting.
So I did some research on Van Phillips and I got in touch with him and I learned his story. And it's a
really interesting story. So Van Phillips, when he was 21 years old, he's living a great life, he's in
college, he's a broadcast major, he's a good-looking guy, planning to be a news anchor when he gets out
of college; and he's an athlete and he's a runner and a water skier. So he's water skiing one day -- I
think this is his junior year of college. And he's water skiing one day, he's being pulled by the boat
ahead of him, they're going around a blind curve in the lake and they don't see that there's another
motorboat coming very fast the other way, and there's some confusion that happens and Van Phillips
gets hit by the other motorboat. And he wakes up in a hospital the next day and peaks under his sheet.
As he said to me, you know, "I was expecting to see my foot, and what I saw was an empty space."
And this is the beginning of a big change in his life obviously.
So he goes through rehab in the hospital. And when he's leaving the hospital, he's been fitted with a
prosthetic foot, which at the time was a pretty standard prosthetic foot. As he described it to me, it was
like a block of wood that had some foam and was colored to look like flesh color. And it was
completely unresponsive to anything he wanted to do. He said the first time he wanted to walk on it he
tripped immediately and became very frustrated and said, you know, "I'm an athlete. There's no way
I'm going to live the rest of my life with this limb."
So at that point he starts to question what currently exists. And to me this is an important stage that a
lot of people who are innovators and questioners go through. And I think of it as the -- it's the "why"
stage of questioning. At some point they will move to "what if," and eventually they may get to "how."
And I think of this as sort of the holy trinity of questioning, these three questions. They often work
very well together.
So in Dan Phillips' case, the why part was just him asking, you know, "With all the technology in the
world at the time," this was the height of the space program, "with all the amazing engineering, with all
the great materials, why am I stuck with this limb that looks like it was made a hundred years ago?"
So he starts to research that "why" question. He figures out that, well, the prosthetics industry at this
time didn't attract a lot of big dollars from major technology companies and no one thought there was a
great market there. So it was kind of an ignored marketplace.
So then Van Phillips says, well, you know, "I'm going to look into this myself," and he enrolls in an
engineering course, prosthetics engineering course, one of the top ones in the country, starts working on
his "what if" questions, which is "what if we were to try different materials on a prosthetic foot? What
if we were to change the design? What if we were to borrow ideas from other areas of technology?
How might we begin to apply that?"
So he's working right now on his first versions of first prototypes, and now he gets into the really hard
part, which is the "how" stage and he has to figure out how is he going to make this work. And, you
know, very, very difficult -- very difficult stage for him. And for a lot of innovators and a lot of
creators, the "how" part is the hard part. You've questioned what exists already, you've questioned what
might be through ideation, through your own imagination, but making it work is when you start to get
into some serious prototyping and failing and trying things that don't work.
In his case he would create prototypes of a prosthetic limb that he was using. He was using a material
called carbon graphite, which wasn't being used at the time on prosthetic limbs. And he would create a
prototype. He did all of this in his home, incredibly. And the only thing he could do, the only way he
could test the prototype was to put it on and try to walk on it or run on it. And what would happen then
is it would break under him. It would malfunction and he would end up falling. It was a real problem.
And I said to him when I talked to him about this, I said "Didn't you get frustrated? You know, when
you would try to create a limb and you would end up falling on the ground?" And he said, "No,
because every time the prototype broke, I learned something. So I'd say, oh, okay, I'd see that it broke a
certain way, and I said, okay, now I know a little more than I knew yesterday."
So he eventually gets through this incredible process and he creates a -- there he is, there's Van Phillips
running on the Cheetah -- Flex-Foot Cheetah, prosthetic limb, which was really quite revolutionary.
He's gone through several versions and iterations of this. And he keeps getting better. And -- this is
one of the latest versions he's working on. Let me see if I can get this to play. You'll see him actually
testing it out. So that's Van. Guy's almost 60 years old by the way. I love that device because it looks
like an upside down question mark, so it really works with my book and my story.
But he has created -- what's going on there is tremendous compression force, spring-force dynamics
going on within that foot that he's created. So it basically explodes every time he runs on it, it just
pushes him forward. And it's really an amazing device. Oscar Pistorius used it in the Olympics. And
then of course things went bad for Oscar Pistorius, but we won't talk about that.
But any way, Van, he used -- it was really interesting, when he was developing that, some of the "what
if" questions he was asking were fascinating. I mean he shared some of them with me, and he
wondered -- one of the things he wondered is what if you could have a prosthetic limb that had some of
the same tendencies of a cheetah's hind leg, which compresses every time the cheetah jumps in a way
that releases tremendous energy. The tendons in a cheetah's leg compress and then just explode. And
he wanted to recreate that in a prosthetic foot. And he did.
So he just basically went through this kind of "why, what if, how" cycle kind of questioning. And I
later found out, as I studied other innovators, this is actually a pretty common progression of
questioning. It parallels with -- I don't know how many people are familiar with design thinking, but it
parallels with the stages of design thinking, it parallels with stages of creative classic theories of
creative problem solving that have been around for 50 years or 100 years, which is basically if you
have a problem, you have to kind of get your brain around the problem. That's kind of the "why" part.
"What is the problem? Why doesn't it exist? Why hasn't anybody solved it all right?" And then you
move to the part where you begin to use your imagination. And then eventually you get into
prototyping and practicalities, how do you make it work, how do you do it? So you sort of understand
and then you imagine and then you create.
And pretty interesting formula -- not a formula. I would say it's just a progression that shows up a lot
in questioning. And it's an interesting thing to keep in your back pocket, because it could be good to
refer back to when you're tackling a problem. But it starts with why. It starts with that "why" at the
top. And you have to be kind of inclined to ask why questions that maybe other people aren't asking.
And when I was researching the book, I thought about this, I thought about why don't we ask why?
Why is it that a lot of us kind of maybe don't use this power of questioning as much as we might. And
that took me into issues of education, which are pretty interesting, you know. Because the truth is we
do start out asking why a lot. Everyone knows about kids and asking why. It's a very common
phenomenon most of us have observed at some point.
I actually met a researcher who studied this and found that kids ask 40,000 questions between ages two
and five, about 10,000 questions a year. That's my niece Bridgette there, and through the various stages
of questioning. And I don't believe if she actually asked 40,000, but she was in the ballpark I would
say. Definitely a big questioner. The peak -- this is interesting, the peak questioning is around four.
And it's girls more than boys. A recent study found that a British girl at age four asks her mum 390
questions a day. And she doesn't ask the father as many, because when she does, he says "go ask your
mum." And that's the peak time. And of course this sometimes drives parents a little bit crazy.
This has been observed by one of the great philosophers of our time, and I'm talking about Louis C.K.,
who has pointed out that kids may keep asking why, and there's no end to it and there's no rhyme or
reason to it. And Louis C.K. does a great bit. You guys have probably heard it, but I'll just read a
couple lines from it, because it's really funny. So he's talking to his four-year-old daughter, or fiveyear-old daughter, and she's saying, "Why can't we go outside, Papa?" And he goes, "Well, it's
raining." "Why?" "Well, water's coming out of the sky." "Why?" "Because it was in a cloud."
"Why?" "Well, clouds form when there's vapor." "Why?" "I don't know. I don't know any more
things. Those are all the things I know." "Why?" "Because I'm stupid, okay? I'm stupid." "Why?"
"Because I didn't pay attention in school." "Why?" "Because I was high all the time. I smoked too
much pot." So it just goes on from there and it ends up with -- it evolves to the point where he's saying
to his four-year-old daughter, "Because we're alone in the universe and no one gives a shit about us."
But it makes an interesting point, you know, the questioning by kids can drive adults crazy. And one of
the reasons why, which he reveals in a very interesting way in that comedy bit -- it's a very deep
comedy bit, but one of the things kids are doing is they're revealing what you don't know as an adult.
They're asking you questions and you're understanding, "Gee, there's a lot of stuff I don't know. I can't
answer any of these questions."
So parents get a little bit sometimes frustrated, but the real problem seems to happen when kids go to
school. And there's basically a questioning decline that I compare to dropping off a cliff. If you look at
-- to the extent this has been measured. You see kid's questioning go from hundreds of questions a day
to, by the time they're in junior high or high school, it's like zero. So there's this really steep drop. And
there's a lot of reasons for that. Some of it probably has to do with brain development and all kinds of
things.
But it's pretty clear that the current education system is not really encouraging. It's not encouraging
questioning by kids. It's not really set up for that. I mean even though you may think "Well, I see kids
raising their hands in class." Well, yeah, but they're not asking questions, they're answering the
teacher's questions. In the typical classroom, the teacher is the one that formulates the questions, the
kids are trained to answer them.
It's not to say that that's a bad way to teach, but it was designed in a different time when we were trying
to train people to just memorize useful bits of information and easy tasks and then to become
productive workers in factories, let's say. And we're kind of in a different world right now where we
really need to do more than just train people to memorize information and give it back to you.
So we really probably should be thinking about how we can shift the education model. And people are
doing this, people are working on this; but shift the education model so at least a little bit of time with
kids trying to formulate their own questions instead of answering other peoples' questions. There's a
great quote I came across from Niel Postman, who's a social critic that says, "Children enter school as
question marks and they leave as periods."
So this is an issue that is big in the education world; but then, you know, it also continues in the
workplace. Because basically this is a lot -- an issue for a lot of people in the workplace. Can they ask
questions? Do they have permission to ask questions? If they do ask questions, what happens? Is their
supervisor going to think they're a pain in the neck? Or here's a great one. A lot of times you ask a
question in a workplace or a company environment and what you hear back from the boss is, "I don't
want people bringing me questions. I want people bringing me answers. I want solutions, I don't want
questions." Which is a really bad thing to say to your employees, because you're saying, "Not only do I
want you to identify problems and opportunities, but I want you to figure the whole thing out before
you ever come to me. I want you to have the complete answer and then bring that to me." And of
course that's not very realistic. We may be talking about very complex problems that involve -- the
whole company should be working on. So there's an issue. and I think companies are coming to terms
with it.
But we know that, you know, a lot of -- in the start-up culture, there's a great appreciation of
questioning, and I think larger companies are starting to recognize the importance of this, that there's a
real value in creating what I refer to in the book as a culture of inquiry, which is just a corporate culture
where people feel very comfortable asking questions and they feel that questions are valued almost as
much as answers. Because the questions have the potential to do a lot of things.
I noticed the other day an interview with an executive by the name of Satya Nadella, who just has taken
over at Microsoft. And he was talking about this kind of thing. He was saying, you know, Microsoft
has operated as if we had the formula figured out, and it was all about optimizing. So what he's saying
there is that he's concerned about people operating as if the answers are known already and we just
have to figure out how to maximize.
And what I think he's saying is that the questions are really important within this culture. And he also
says at one point, "How do we take the intellectual capital of 130,000 people and innovate?" And he
says, "One of the things that drives me crazy is when people say this is how we do it. This is how we
do things here."
So I think this is a common issue in corporate America, the idea that we're in an innovation society, an
innovation business culture. We know that companies have to be innovating and changing all the time.
So if we're going to tap into the brain resources of our company and the ability to ask great questions
that exist through the whole company, how do we do that? How do we create an environment where
people are going to come to work and they're going to ask questions instead of going through the
routine? I don't know the answer to it. I mean I'm working on it. It's one of the things I address in my
book, some of the ways companies can do it. But I'm just in the beginning of the research on that and I
plan to pursue that question of how companies create a culture of inquiry.
But we do know it's important. We know this is not news about the value of questioning and the
importance of questioning and the connection of questioning to innovation. I mean Einstein was telling
us this decades ago. Einstein said that he spent ten times as much time on the question as he did on the
answer. Because the question was the key. If you get the question right, it's going to lead you in the
right direction. So I think Einstein would agree with the premise of my book.
And what's going on now, in fact, is even more extreme than when Einstein was alive. Because of the
nature of change, the fact that we're in this dynamic changing world. Technology is changing things so
quickly that we now have this situation going on, which is the questions are rising in value while
answers are declining. The reason being that as you get into a world of just dynamic change, the
exponential change, what happens is the answers become so quickly obsolete, they become so quickly
incomplete, and they need to be adapted and changed constantly. And questions are the ways that you
do that. Questions are the way that you update your answers and expand upon them and figure out
what doesn't work any more and what has to work now.
I also -- you know, when I was doing the book, it was interesting too. One of the things I did was I
traced back a lot of innovations, I looked at a lot of breakthroughs and I worked backward from the
breakthrough to the origin. And it's amazing how many times, when you go all the way back to the
origin, you're at a question. You arrive at a question that somebody was working on, somebody
formulated, somebody came up with that question, and that started the whole thing that eventually led
to the breakthrough.
One of the more famous ones is -- you guys may have heard this one, but this is a question, "Why do
we have to wait for the picture?" Do you know what that led to? Or can you guess maybe?
>>: [Inaudible].
Warren Berger: Yeah. So this was a question that -- the Polaroid Instant Camera. So this was a
question that was asked by the three-year-old daughter of Edwin Land. And he was a brilliant scientist,
engineer. And he was not working on cameras at the time. He was working on -- I believe he was
working on polarized headlights for cars. And he was having a lot of trouble, because the car
companies didn't want to deal with him, they had no interest in what he was doing, his company was
kind of struggling. And he goes on vacation with his family and his three-year-old daughter, and he
takes a picture with a standard camera at the time. This is 1940s, early 40#s#, I believe. He takes a
picture and says "Okay, now we got to send it out and we'll be able to see the results in a week or
whatever." So the little girl says "Why? Why do we have to wait? Why can't we just look at it now?"
And so that question stays with Edwin Land and he eventually says -- he starts to ask why. He says,
"Yeah, come to think of it, why? Why do we have to wait? Is there another possibility? What if?" So
now he moves to the what if stage. What if we were to -- instead of taking the film and sending it to a
darkroom, what if we had the darkroom somehow inside the camera? So then he has to figure out how.
And that's the hard part. How do you get a darkroom inside the camera? Not easy. So anyway, that
led to the Polaroid instant camera.
And, you know, this question here is the question that led to the cell phone. Martin Cooper wondered
this question.
This question led to NetFlix. Reed Hastings getting hit with huge late fees by Blockbuster when he
returned some videos late. And he says, "Why? This is not a good system. People are getting hit with
these late fees all the time. This doesn't make sense." And he moves to the what if stage, the what if
stage in his case was, "Well, what if we could design a video rental system that was more like a health
club where you had like a monthly membership? What if we put those two ideas together?" And then
he was on his way. All he had to do was get to the how part, "How do I create a company like that?"
It's pretty hard.
This is one of my favorite ones. Now, this might not seem like a beautiful question when you first see
it. But it had a huge impact. So what was going on here was, there's a football coach back in the
1960#s# at University of Florida. And he is notices that the players, the football players, are drinking a
lot of water on the sidelines, but they don't seem to have to go to the bathroom that much. So he's
wondering "What's going on here? Why is it that they're drinking all this water and they don't seem to
have to go to the bathroom?" So he shares the question with a science professor at the university. The
science professor says, "Oh, well, I can explain that to you. The water is not replacing the fluids; the
electrolytes in their body is not getting replaced by water; the water doesn't have enough of the
ingredients to do that. So even though they're drinking water, they're sweating it all away. And that's
why they don't have to urinate." So that might have been the end of it, but then the professor took up
that question. He got interested in the question. And he kind of took it from why to what if? So his
thing was "Okay, we know why this is going on. But what if we could come up with a drink or a
solution that was able to replenish those fluids better than water does?" So he goes to work on it, goes
in the university lab, starts fixing things up, mixing up beakers, and he comes up with a drink, a
concoction. And he hands it to the coach and the coach says, "I'm not going to drink that. But we'll try
it on the players." And then he says "Wait a minute. We won't try it on the starters, we'll try it on the
practice squad." And so as the legend has it, the practice squad actually outperformed the starters that
day because they were better hydrated, and the result was they went ahead and developed this drink at
the University of Florida and it was called Gatorade. And Gatorade is now part of a $20 billion sports
drink industry that came out of that question.
So it's really interesting when you trace back these -- the power of a question, of asking the right
question. And the question that no one else has thought of but is out there waiting to be asked. You see
it in products like Nest. You know, this is Tony Fadell, a questioner. He's been a questioner his whole
life. He said that he's always looked at objects like his radio where he was growing up, and said, "Why
does it work the way it does and what if you did it a little differently? And what if you --" So he did
this with the household thermostat. He looked at this thing that everybody takes for granted, everybody
has one, nobody paid any attention to it. He looked at that time and said, "You know, here we are in
this age of technology and Smartphones and smart everything and we have dumb thermostats. They're
not doing anything. They just kind of sit there." So he eventually reinvents it. But the idea is he had to
ask those questions first. He had to ask why.
And the same is true for Jack Dorsey at Square. Jack Dorsey, this came out of a question that -- and a
lot of great questions come out of life experience. You see something, you're observant, you notice that
something doesn't make sense, doesn't work, and you ask why. So in Jack Dorsey's case a friend of his
was an artist and was trying to sell a work of art and had a big deal almost ready to go through. And
then the buyers of the art said, "Here's our credit card." And the artist said, "Wait, I'm not a company. I
can't take your credited card." And he lost the sale. So Jack Dorsey then asks the question "Why is it
that only companies can accept credited cards? You know, we have so many people out there doing
business on their own. Why can't they accept credit cards?" And it eventually leads to the Square,
which can be used on anybody's Tablet or# i#Phone.
You know, I wrote about this recently in the Harvard Business Review, the idea that opportunity is
often right in front of people but they can't see it. And it's because of the way that they're looking. And
I think what Jack Dorsey does and what Tony Fadell does, I think of it as kind of a stepping back
process. So they look but they step back also. They think about it. They see it, they think about it and
they ask why. And to me, that's one of the first things -- elements of great questions.
Another thing they do, which I also said in this article, is that they release their inner George Carlin.
And what I mean by that is, you know, if you know George Carlin's work, you know, he was one of the
pioneers of a certain kind of comedy that was observational. And observational of the smallest details,
the smallest human details of what people do. George Carlin would watch little things. George Carlin
would say, "Like you know when you lose your keys? And there's a certain place you always put your
keys. And you lose your keys and you look there in that place and then you'll go around, you'll check
your pockets and you'll look again. And then you'll go around your room, then you'll go back and look
again." So George Carlin was saying "Why do people do that? It doesn't make any sense. Do they
think that the keys are going to suddenly appear ten seconds later?" But just by observing that kind of
human behavior, he came up with amazing observations.
And what I am saying is that that kind of skill also applies in the world of business innovation. It
applies everywhere. Because if you can make those kind of observations about inconsistencies, things
that don't add up, things that don't make sense, things that are missing; if you can see that, if you can
question it, you've got the first step. I think this is the only multi-bullet slide I'll inflict on you. But I
think there's a half a dozen things to keep in mind about being a good questioner.
One is seeing what's there and what isn't. So you not only see the thing in front of you, but you see
what it could be, what it should be, and you ask why isn't it that way. And that's what great questioners
do. Great questioners also ask the stupid question. So they're not afraid to ask the question that seems
really fundamental and that seems really basic.
And a lot of times, like Van Phillips, when he asked his questions, he was ridiculed basically by the
prosthetics industry. When he said "Why can't a prosthetic foot allow you to jump and run like an
athlete?" I mean basically people laughed at him, because it was ridiculous. It was ridiculous at the
time.
So the questioners are willing to ask the stupid question. They're willing to dig deep and keep asking
why. You know, the five why's which goes back to the Louis C.K. thing and the little girl who keeps
asking why. You know when you do that in an innovation context, the five why's can be actually very,
very useful. You can sort of get to the root cause of things. Why is this a problem? You work your
way backwards and you get to the real cause of why it's a problem, why it's an issue.
Toyota introduced the five why's decades ago, and it was a hugely valuable thing on the production
lines of Toyota, because it would help them figure out "Why did this part -- why was this part
defective?" "Well, you know, it came off the line defective." "Why?" "Well, the worker did this and
he didn't do it properly." "Why?" "Well, because he didn't get trained on how to use that particular
part." "Why?" "Well, because we cut that training program a year ago." "Why?" "Well, because we
were trying to save money, we were trying to hit our numbers and we thought that hitting numbers was
more important than the safety of the cars." So you kind of get to the real issue behind the issue.
Another thing that good questioners do, they imagine what if. I talked about this already. They go
from "why" to "what if." And another thing they do is they live with the question. So we kind of live
in a culture right now, in a world where we expect instant answers to our questions and we think that
searches -- search engines and whatever, using Google, using Bing, whatever, we can punch in
whatever question we have and get a answer like that. But the really difficult questions, the ones like
all the ones that we've been talking about today, there's people living with those questions for a long,
long time and they're iterating through the question. The question is changing; it's evolving as they're
working on it.
So it's not like an instant answer. You've got to spend time with these questions. And then you have to
move at some point from asking to action. And that's why I go back to my own little progression of
why, what if, and how. At some point you've got to get to how, how questions. Because otherwise, you
know, questioning without action, to me, is just -- it's philosophy. And that's okay. Not that there's
anything wrong with philosophy. But if you want to get results out of your questioning, you've got to
figure out how you get from why to what if to how. And how is prototyping, how is testing,
experimenting, trying things out, seeing what works.
The other day was Einstein's birthday. So Einstein again, I'll come back to him, he said "The important
thing is not to stop questioning." He also said "Never lose a holy curiosity." Einstein was like the alltime champion of questioning. So for Einstein's birthday I was thinking about some of the people I
admire or some of the people who were great questioners today. And it's not just innovators. It's
people in the arts, it's people in entertainment. So I decided, you know, I'm going to do a fun thing with
what happens when people -- or the people out there who are releasing their inner Einstein. And since
we live in a buzz-feed world, I decided to do this with some celebrities.
So this guy's interesting. I don't know if you can identify who that is. That's Benedict Cumberbatch.
So Benedict Cumberbatch, he's an actor, but he's asking questions about government, politics. He's a
really engaged, interesting guy, who's out there questioning everything.
Anyone know who that is? It's Laura Linney. So Laura Linney, this is a great example of how actors
use questioning. "After taking a part I read the script and ask why. I ask why until there's no more why
to ask." Every detail she's questioning. So it's interesting, you know, the same kind of questioning
techniques that apply to invention and innovation apply to art, apply to performance, they apply to so
many things. They apply to music.
That's Kanye West releasing his inner Einstein.
This is a guy who questions not only music, but then he goes into other fields where he is a beginner's - where he brings a beginner's mind and he's questioning those fields, which I think is pretty great.
Anybody know who that is? He's in my book. That is Matt Damon releasing his inner Einstein. Matt
Damon, you know, he's involved in this water.org cause which he's trying to bring water to people who
need clean drinking water around the world. He's working with a guy named Gary White. And
everything they do is through questioning. They start with "What is the problem? Why aren't people
getting the water right now?" And it's amazing what the reasons are you find out. It's not always the
obvious thing you think. They discovered that political corruption plays a huge role. Because what
will happen is someone will come in and build a well system or a water system, but then somehow
people get in the middle of keeping that water from getting to the people who need it, and all of a
sudden graft becomes involved and all kinds of things. So they have to question "Why aren't the
existing systems working and what if we try something different?" In their case what they're trying to
do is figure out what if local communities can create a source of water themselves if they have the right
funding? So that's the beautiful question that he's working on and that water.org is working on.
My own beautiful question is how might I get more people interested in the power of questioning. So
with one of the things I'm doing is working with this Right Question Institute group. And they work
with kids, they go into schools, including inner city schools, and they teach teachers how to do
brainstorming questions where kids just ask questions. That's all they do. No answers allowed. You
just have to come in with a problem and try to come up with as many questions as you can and try to
attack the problem through interesting questions. And it's pretty great what you see happen when kids
start doing that, because they get really invested in their questions. They started to love the question.
And then they want to work on the question after the session's over. They like the question so much
they say "I want to work on that question." So it's pretty great system.
So I right now have a site called The More Beautiful Question. If you have a more beautiful question
or you want to talk about a question, I'm creating a community and a discussion around questioning.
And I collect beautiful questions from people. And this is how you can get in touch.
The only thing I would say, in closing; is it's really great to find yourself a question to work on and to
live with. I don't know how many of you are doing that already, if any of you are, but it's a powerful
thing. Questions are very powerful. If you get invested in a question, it will kind of lead you along and
it will stay with you. It's interesting, you know, questions are more powerful than statements. They're
more powerful than resolutions. You know, you make a New Year's resolution and say "I'm going to
drink more water, because it's good for me." And then you never do it. If you asked yourself -- if you
pose yourself that as a challenge in the form of a question and you say "how might I drink more water
in the future?" It's pretty amazing the effects that will have. Your mind will tend to work on that. And
there have been research studies that show that when you pose something to yourself as a question as
opposed to a statement you're more likely to do it. And the reason is you activate this process where
your mind starts to work on the puzzle. It's a question, "How am I going to do it? What are some
possible ways? What if I try this? What if I try that?" So you've activated this process that may be
going on in your subconscious. And it's a very effective thing. And particularly if you give yourself a
big ambitious question, "How might I create some kind of change in my life, in my community, in my
workplace?" It can be a very, very powerful thing.
And you can also share questions. Questions are more shareable than answers. You know, people will
-- if you tell other people, "You know, I'm working on this question. I really want to figure out how we
can do a better job of this or that," all of a sudden people are going to be inclined to think about that
question as well, and they might want to actually help you. They might want to help you pursue that
question.
So I would say find yourself a beautiful question, live with it, you know, take it for walks, sleep with it.
Because a lot of times when you have a beautiful question and you're working on it, your subconscious
is working on it all the time. And just live the question and never lose that curiosity. And that's it.
So we can take questions. I think. [Applause]
Warren Berger: Do we have time for questions? Does anybody have a question? After all that.
>>: Why?
Warren Berger: Right, "why". More specifically.
>>: If you get into the habit of asking questions, which is good, and you run into a problem where you
are asking too much questions and not doing anything, and then you have a practical choice to make,
"This is the question I want to dig deep into, these are the questions I'm not going to dig deep into," and
why choose question A and not choose question B. And it's a big dilemma.
Warren Berger: Well, it is. I think you do have to choose. That's part of the -- you know, like I talked
about that process of why, what if, and how, of starting out exploring and then trying to converge. So
you start out -- it's like divergent thinking, right, the beginning of questioning. You're exploring as
many possibilities and you may be exploring multiple questions. But at some point you have to
converge and you have to decide -- well, I think you just have to think about the questions that are most
important or the ones that make the most sense to pursue first, as opposed to later. And I think you
have to make some choices. I mean you have to decide which questions you're going to pursue. And
then I think you have to think about how you're going to pursue them. And that's why I think it's really
important -- the thing about questioning is you can get trapped in endless questioning. That's why, I
think, it's really important to think of questioning as being action oriented. So once you have arrived at
a question that is interesting to you that you think is worth your time, you start to think about how to
move forward on it. Even if it's small steps, small initial steps. And I think that's a big challenge for
people.
>>: I never got the convincing on why to choose something or best or -Warren Berger: Why choose one question over another? Well, yeah, that's totally subjective. The only
thing I could say is I think it's a matter of priorities. You know, some questions are more important
than others. And you have to figure out what they are. Some questions have much more promise
within them than others. You know, "What am I going to have for breakfast" is a question that doesn't
have much promise; right? It doesn't lead to anything. But, you know, so it's all relative, it's all on a
scale. So as you proceed through questions, some are going to have more potential than others. And
that's part of the challenge is figuring out which ones have the most opportunity in them.
>>: So as an example, when you have a question -- when I have a question and I want to share it with
an audience, right, when does group think happening, and how do you break out of a group think mode
in that question, right, where you're posing, you're sharing it, and you become the stumbling block in
that question because all the audiences are converging and you started to dumb down the value of the
question.
Warren Berger: Well, I think the group think is -- I think of it as a positive actually. I think what
happens is when you put the question out to the group, if you can get everyone invested in the same
question, and I mean really seriously invested; if you can create that dynamic, I think it's hugely
powerful. Because now you're going to have people thinking about the question from different angles,
from different perspectives, different -- they're bringing a different history to it, they're bringing a
different expertise. Now the challenge is to get people to agree on the question. Because a lot of times
people will say "I don't really think that's the right question." So that can be a challenge, getting the
question -- getting a consensus around what is the question is we should be talking about. And the
other challenge I think with questioning in like a group setting is, you know, people say there's no bad
questions. I think there are bad questions and I think that some people use questioning the wrong way.
So they use questioning to play devil's advocate or they use questioning to say "Well, how much is it
going to cost?" They're totally focused on practical questioning, which has a place, but not necessarily
when you're trying to do expansive thinking. Here you kind of want more open-ended questioning. So
those are some of the problems I see with group questioning is getting people to agree on what are the
right questions to ask and getting people to approach questioning with the right spirit of, you know,
we're actually curious, we're all curious, we're trying to get to something better. We're not trying to
score points, we're not trying to shoot someone down or whatever. So that to me is one of the
challenges.
Yeah?
>>: I have a comment on your answer. You said there are bad questions. The examples that you give,
I believe they're not necessarily bad questions. The situation is bad that the -Warren Berger: Right, it could be. You're right. That's actually true. But I do think though that there
are some questions -- you know what's a bad question to me is like a question that doesn't really -where the person asking it isn't really curious about the answer. In other words, they're asking the
question to make a point, to show off, to put someone in their place.
>>: Yeah, I understand that. I was just particularly commenting on those questions.
Warren Berger: I agree. Like you're probably talking more about the practical questions. And the
practical questions definitely have a place, although what I think with practical questions is you have to
separate them out sometimes and they come in later, you know, the how. They're in the how stage. But
when you're in the why and what if stage then you kind of want to push those practical questions aside
a little bit.
In the back?
>>: So this question around emergent curriculums for kids, like in particular curriculum that supports
more questioning [Inaudible].
Warren Berger: Well, yeah, there's a lot right now going on with sort of inquiry, learning by inquiry.
And I think that's what's being referred to there. And people are trying all different approaches. And I
think they're all worth trying. I don't think anyone has the answer on it yet. I think a lot of
experimentation has to be done about how to best use questioning within an academic setting. And
there's probably a lot of ways to do it. I mentioned the Right Question Institute and what they're doing.
That's one way. They have these question -- they have these exercises that they do that last a half-hour
or whatever. So there's one way, but there's all kinds of ways. Montessori does interesting things with
learning by inquiry and learning by experimentation. So there's all different approaches. And I think
that schools are just going to have to figure it out over time. And I think a lot of them are trying to,
they're starting to work on it. But the big challenge maybe is teachers have to -- it's a big adjustment
for teachers. Teachers have to -- and I totally sympathize with teachers, because it's hard. I mean if
they open up the classroom to more questioning by students, there's a certain amount of control that
they're giving up. And also there are time issues. They have to meet a certain amount of the
curriculum within a timeframe, and if they open it up for questioning, it's not as efficient, because kids
may be asking questions that are a little bit off topic. So then what do you do? So it's very challenging
for teachers to sort of do that reversal where they give up some of the authority, they give up some of
the power of questioning and they turn it over to the students. Very challenging. But I think it's worth
trying to do.
>>: So you mentioned questioning behavior dropping off as children go through adolescence. But
then you frame it up in an academic context. And I was wondering if you looked for the status of
experimental behavior amongst adolescents across different cohorts over time. Are teens today more
likely to do what they're told or are they still picking up crap and raising hell the way they always
have?
Warren Berger: Well, yeah, if you're talking about questioning as a form of behavior, not -- see what
I'm talking about with that chart is actually verbally asking questions of the class.
>>: I know what your chart said. What I was asking is if you look at the nature of the human animal,
are they truly getting less inquisitive?
Warren Berger: No, I don't think so, no.
>>: Are they -- [indiscernible]?
Warren Berger: It's just how -- I think it's about how it gets -- it's about how it gets expressed, I think.
In fact I talked about this with one teacher, big expert in the education world, and they said, you know,
"When we think those kids are asking less questions, they're still asking questions, they're just not
doing it in class. They're finding other ways to explore, they're finding other ways to ask questions, but
they're not doing it in the classroom." So I think what's going on in the classroom is just about whether
or not kids feel comfortable raising their hands and asking a question. And there's all kinds of things
that impact that comfort level. And one is peer pressure from the other kids. Because I talked to -- I
talked to this guy Jack Andraka. He was on 60 Minutes. He invented -- he's 16 years old and he
invented a new way of screening for cancer. And it's pretty amazing. And he did this while he was in
high school. And so I figured, you know, he's like one of the smartest high school kids in the world;
right? And I asked him, "Do you ask questions in class?" And he said no. And he's incredibly curious.
Outside of class he's questioning all the time, he's doing experiments, he's exploring. And in school he
doesn't, and he said the reason why is because, number one, is teachers don't -- he can tell his teachers
aren't interested in his questions. And number two, he said the other kids think it's really uncool to ask
questions. So you're dealing with a multi-dimensional problem there.
I was writing about this the other day in the blog MindShift and I was saying that what teachers -- one
of the things teachers need to do, in addition to creating the space and the safety and all of that, is
somehow they need to make questioning cool. And that's really challenging. Because if all the kids
think it's uncool to raise your hand and ask questions, how do you reverse that? And I was saying that
maybe one of the things do you is you help kids understand that all this cool stuff that they love came
out of questioning. All these gadgets and all these products that they love are a result of questioning.
And maybe that's one of the ways you start to change the viewing of questioning. But any way.
Yeah?
>>: Quick one. It says parents, you know, they try to start asking questions about the age of two and
three and [indiscernible] and the reactions try to -- what's generally your research in [inaudible] dealing
with kids as they grow up through these phases?
Warren Berger: Well, all I have is anecdotal stuff. Like for instance, I mentioned Jack Andraka. And I
was curious about his parents, because obviously he's a great questioner. So what his parents do is
they, from a certain age -- and I'm not sure exactly when, but maybe when he was six or seven, they
stopped answering his questions and started encouraging him to answer his own questions. I thought
that was a really good method. So he was a really curious kid and whenever he would come up with a
question, they'd say, "Okay, why don't you start working on that question? Figure out how to answer
it." And, you know, their rationale was that they wanted him to take ownership of his questions at an
early age. I think that's pretty smart. I think it's -- initially you can't do that with kids that are too
young; obviously there's a certain age when a kid is able to start exploring his own questions. But as
soon as that age happens -- I'm not sure exactly, it's probably different for different kids. But as soon as
that age happens, I think that's a great thing, to encourage kids to answer their own questions and
explore their own. And before that I think it's just patient, being patient enough to field and answer the
questions that you can without going crazy. Because you definitely want to send that signal to kids that
the question is welcome. And it's -- unfortunately they will be getting that signal, the opposite signal in
other parts of the world. So at least at home you would want them to get the signals that questions are
a good thing, they're not annoying, they're not bad, they're not -Yeah.
>>: In one of his Ted Talks, Ken Robinson spoke about how school kills creativity. And I start
wondering can you articulate on is creativity indirectly related to the ability to ask questions or the
want to ask questions of curiosity in kids?
Warren Berger: Yes, I think so.
>>: From an organizational link, I mean when kids grow up -- for example, let's say, the one
generation when question marks became out as periods and now they're in the work force -Warren Berger: Right.
>>: What about breakthrough ideas, these people -- there's a whole life cycle in the work force; right?
So the younger ones are going to ask a lot of questions. You look at a lot of the tech companies now.
You have the startups with the really young bright ones asking the why question and coming out with
things like what's up. And the companies that have been around for a while, like the Oracles, and us to
some extent, are at that stage where we have to reinvent that because people have to be retrained to ask
questions or -- as opposed to following?
Warren Berger: Well, I think what happened -- to me, it seems like what happens is that everything is
in cycles, you know. So the challenge for companies that have been around a while is that they already
went through that cycle in the past of asking the why questions, and then they got into a more
established mode where they're trying to sort of protect what they have and -- or optimize what they
have, feeling, "Okay, we've built something pretty solid here. How do we optimize it and get the most
out of it?" And I think the problem with that mindset is, it's very logical, it makes a lot of sense, but it
doesn't make sense today. Like it made sense -What's that?
>>: How do you break that mold?
Warren Berger: I think it's a process. I think it starts with the leadership and the leadership has to say - has to set aside time for people to do this kind of questioning, has to make it clear that this kind of
questioning is welcome. Because I think people can all do it. I think that even if people have been
through a long period at a company where they haven't been asking those questions, that doesn't mean
they can't go back to asking those questions. I think it's just dormant. It's a skill that's dormant. I don't
think it goes away.
>>: Does it have to do with comfort zone? People just settle down, say "I've been here so long"?
>>: Yeah, creating a safe environment is a big one.
Warren Berger: What's that?
>>: Creating a safe environment to ask questions is very important.
Warren Berger: Right, yeah. It's the environment. But the main thing is like I don't think people lose
the ability to ask those questions. I just think they've gotten out of the habit of asking those questions.
Questioning is very much a habit. It's a mindset that's habitual. So if you're in the habit of looking at
things a certain way, you're just more inclined to do it. If you fall out of that habit and you're more in a
routine kind of mindset, then that's your habit. But I don't think you lose the -- I don't think you lose
the tool. To me that app, you know, that questioning app is always there. But what you've done is now
you've let it go to the back of the -- you're not using it, so it got pushed to the back. So the question,
the challenge for companies is how do you bring it forward and create the safe environment so people
are willing to try to do that kind of thing.
And one of the biggest challenges to me, I think, is middle -- it's not even the leaders -- well, the
leaders are important. The leader has to signal that this is welcome. But then the problem, the real
challenge is the middle management. It's all the people who are -- they have something to protect and
they may be afraid of being challenged. So if they have people beneath them asking questions, that is
seen as a challenge to authority or somehow questioning their expertise. Experts -- there's a real
interesting dynamic between experts and questioning. Experts often do not like to question and they
don't like to be questioned. So you have an issue with expertise and you have to deal with that. And I
think actually one of the quotes from your new CEO nicely addressed that. He basically said you have
to take that expertise that we've all earned and figure out how do we now take it and expand it and take
it in new directions, instead of using the expertise to keep doing what you've been doing. You've got to
figure out how to adapt the expertise and take it out. And that's challenging. That's a big, big
challenge.
>>: Feedback on the parenting discussion that was happening, how do kids get -- so I came across a
very nice BBC document by Richard Feynman, it's called The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out, 49minute video which is free on YouTube. I would encourage everybody in the audience, and if you have
not come with [indiscernible] how to constantly question, and keep that curiosity -Warren Berger: Did he develop this way of doing it?
>>: No, he talks about how his father taught him to start asking questions and why he's where he's at.
Done by a British guy name Christopher Sykes.
Warren Berger: What's it called?
>>: The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out.
Warren Berger: The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out. Good to know that.
>>: I'm going to ask you [inaudible].
Warren Berger: Okay.
>>: Thank you so much.
Warren Berger: Sure.