QRCA Views Magazine, Spring 2016

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K nowing how to structure, contex-
tualize, and ask questions is an
integral component of being a
qualitative researcher. Making
sure we don’t fall into a rut and stop
evolving ways we ask questions is key.
In A More Beautiful Question: The
Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough
Ideas, Warren Berger, a noted journalist
and expert on innovation and design
thinking, provides a how-to grand tour of
the role of questions in innovation and
eliciting insights. Berger’s focus and many
case study examples are mostly weighted
to client-side company product/service
innovation, as well as to the world of
education. However, these wide-ranging
examples can provide the qualitative
researcher with a different perspective on
how to think about the role of questions
in exploration and about designing meth-
odology and structuring questions.
The genesis for this book was Berger’s
realization that, unlike most people,
many leading innovators and creative
minds were exceptionally good at asking
questions. He also observed that while
many preschoolers are innate question-
ers, the American education system
tends to eradicate that ability. So he
studied these innovators and creative
minds, in both business and education
settings, to better understand how the
way we choose to question has great
impact on what is shared and explored.
In order to spark insights, Berger
encourages the movement away from fac-
tual questions. As he states in his introduc-
tion, “This book is more concerned with
questions that Google cannot easily antici-
pate or properly answer for you…These
are individualized, challenging, and poten-
tially game-changing questions.”
A More Beautiful Question is struc-
tured around five chapters:
• The Power of Inquiry
• Why We Stop Questioning
• The Why, What If and How
of Innovative Questioning
• Questioning in Business
• Questioning for Life
As homage to the book’s title, the more
than 30 subchapters are all in question
format, and there is an interesting index
of questions at the end of the book.
Examples of just a few of the different
approaches to questioning and role of
questioning cited and discussed in this
book are:
• Naïve question – Paul Bennett, the
Creative Director at the innovation firm
IDEO explains, “I position myself relent-
lessly as an idiot at IDEO. And that’s not
a negative, it’s a positive. Because being
comfortable with not knowing—that’s
the first part of being able to question.”
• Vuja de – a term favored by Stanford
University professor and author Bob
Sutton that means looking at some-
thing familiar but suddenly seeing it
as fresh (and is obviously a play on the
term déjà vu).
• George Carlin – how to tap into
George Carlin’s ability to observe irra-
tional behavior and question it.
• The 5 whys – a methodology that
originated in Japan and is credited to
Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota
Industries, which is excavation-by-inquiry, a form of laddering.
• Creative Problem Solving Institute
(CPSI) – which is located in Buffalo, NY
and is considered one of the birthplaces
of brainstorming and creative thinking.
It has an annual conference and training
program many members of QRCA have
attended and found worthwhile.
• Inversion – Luke Williams, the author of
Disrupt, explores ways “what if ” ques-
tions can be used to invert reality in order
to broaden how people think. An exam-
ple: What if a restaurant provided custom-
ers with a menu only when they leave?
• Neoteny – a term favored by MIT
Media Lab’s Joi Ito. Also known as
beginner’s mind, it is a state where you
see things without labels or categoriza-
tion. Many innovators feel it is import-
ant to move away from existing catego-
rizations if you want to explore differ-
ent ways of doing things. Berger gives
multiple examples of how to do this.
• Transfer ownership – Instead of asking
the question, let the other person ask
the question. Berger references Dan
Meyer, a New York City high school
math teacher, as doing this well. Meyer
uses the math problem of how long
would it take to fill up a water tank as
an interesting example of transferring
ownership. Watch Meyer’s TED Talk—
start watching at 6:30 minutes in if you
don’t want to watch the whole talk:
• The Right Question Institute – which
specializes in teaching people how to
tackle problems by generating ques-
tions, not solutions.
The above is just a small overview of
what is presented and discussed in depth
in this book, so if you are open to possi-
bly deconstructing some of the ways you
may currently go about designing quali-
tative methodology and construct ques-
tions, this book will definitely spark
some interesting questioning.
A More Beautiful Question
Warren Berger, Bloomsbury, 2014
Reviewed by Susan Fader
n President, Fader & Associates
n Teaneck, NJ
n
n BOOK REVIEWS n