The DNA of a master questioner
Guess what’s one of the 5 essential skills great innovators share?
Had a great talk the other day with Hal Gregersen, one of the co-authors of the book The Innovator’s DNA. If you haven’t read the book, I recommend it highly: It analyzes the five essential skills that great innovators seem to share (based on thousands of interviews with business executives, including highly creative leaders like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos).
Of course, the reason I’m most interested in the book is that one of those five skills—indeed, the one that is arguably most important because it “turbo-charges” all the others, according to the authors—is questioning. The book has a full chapter on questioning in business, and here are a few of the more interesting points:
- For leaders of companies to question well, they must have a “combination of self-esteem and humility.” Meaning, they must have enough confidence that they’re willing to appear naïve or stupid, yet also “be humble enough to learn from anyone, even people who supposedly know less than they do.”
- Innovators tend to ask “what if” questions that either impose or eliminate constraints. (An example of imposing constraints: What if we could only charge one dollar for our product—what would we do differently? And as for eliminating constraints, as Steve Jobs used to say to his engineers: What if money was no object? How would you then design the product?)
- Disruptive innovators, according to the authors’ studies, tend to have a high “Q/A ratio”—meaning their questions usually outnumber their answers.
Gregersen, who also consults with top companies and is a business professor at INSEAD, has remained fascinated with questions since completing the book. In our talk, he told me about an interesting and ambitious project he’s currently launching, known as the 4/24 program. The idea is, if everyone in the world spent just 4 minutes a day writing down their questions about problems that deeply matter to them (or to their companies, communities, or to the world at large), it would add up to 24 hours of questioning, per person, over the course of a year.
But more importantly, Gregersen believes, it would encourage us to focus more on formulating good questions and help us get better at it—a skill that “could be passed on as a legacy to the next generation.” Gregersen will be debuting the 4/24 website soon (I’ll keep AMBQ readers posted on that) and hopes it will become a space where people can learn about questioning, share stories, and even tackle real-world issues and problems, using questioning as a primary tool.
Find Hal on The Innovator’s DNA website and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HalGregersen
“Why has a book like this never been written before? Here is a persuasive case for the simple and yet extraordinary power of a question. Fascinating, engaging stories give life to a strong argument about how much can be accomplished, in every domain of our lives, ‘just’ by asking questions. Innovators, entrepreneurs, citizens, parents, teachers, idealists and realists—all of us have much to gain by reading 
“Questions have literally moved mountains, powered rockets, and instantly developed images. Berger focuses on what he calls ‘Beautiful Questions’… that can lead to game-changing answers and results. These are questions that, once raised, tend to get people thinking in a different way.”
“The desire to ask bigger and better questions is on the rise… Warren Berger has been tracking a movement toward questioning that is running very strong in Silicon Valley, but also seems to be spreading throughout the business, nonprofit and education sectors.”
Warren on the web