I came across A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger in a podcast with Warren Berger. I was intrigued by this - a book that is about questions. And there was this statement in there that said, You don’t learn unless you question. So off went the book to my TBR shelf.
According to Warren Berger, the more beautiful questions we ask, the more better answers we get.
He defines a beautiful question as “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.”
He provides a lot of stories about innovations that came about due to a beautiful question.
- Why should I have to pay these late fees? (the question behind Netflix)
- Why do we have to wait for the picture? (the question that led to Polaroid)
- Why aren’t the players urinating more? (the question that led to Gatorade)
To get us in that mode on inquiry, he describes a three-part Why–What If–How model for forming and tackling big, beautiful questions:
- The Why? and its counterpart, Why Not? helps us in seeking understanding about a situation or a problem.
- The What If? question allows us to imagine possibilities.
- The How? question allows figuring out and making one or more of the possibilities a reality.
I felt that this model makes perfect sense to me and Questioning is at the core of the Design Thinking process.
And what is a book about questions with some questions? Berger has littered the chapters with around 370 questions and has collected them all as part of a Question Index which I felt was a great idea.
- If facts are entitled to an index, then why not questions?
As someone who likes questions a lot, this book explains the process of thinking behind the questions lucidly.
As I read this book, I started coming up with a set of questions that I want to keep asking myself. And I want to work through them to understand and come up with answers. and also try thinking and answering some of the questions that Berger has asked.
- In a world that expects us to move fast, to keep advancing, and to just ‘get it done,’ who has time for asking why?
- Most of the times, our impulse is to keep plowing ahead, doing what we’ve done, and rarely stepping back to question whether we’re on the right path.
- What if you sleep with a question? Will you wake with an answer?
- This is an interesting question and one that I plan to experiment with.
- What if a job interview tested one’s ability to ask questions, as well as answer them?
- We’ve heard the standard question: Do you have any questions for us from the interview panel. Some jump at it and some don’t. This is an interesting question to me as I am involved in interviewing people for my team. How do I test if people have the ability to question? How do I draw out that ability?
As a side-note, Randall Munroe’s What If? book answers absurd hypothetical scientific answers. One question in that book was: What would happen if you tried to fly a normal Earth airplane above different solar system bodies? Well now we know the answer to that with Ingenuity. 🙂
2021-06-05: I talked about this book in a Clubhouse session.