2018 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner
What if you could unlock a better answer to your most vexing
problem--in your workplace, community, or home life--just by changing
the question?
Talk to creative problem-solvers and they will often tell you, the key
to their success is asking a different question.
Take Debbie Sterling, the social entrepreneur who created GoldieBlox.
The idea came when a friend complained about too few women in
engineering and Sterling wondered aloud: "why are all the great building
toys made for boys?" Or consider Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, who
asked: "would it change economic theory if we stopped pretending people
were rational?" Or listen to Jeff Bezos whose relentless approach to
problem solving has fueled Amazon's exponential growth: "Getting the
right question is key to getting the right answer."
Great questions like these have a catalytic quality--that is, they
dissolve barriers to creative thinking and channel the pursuit of
solutions into new, accelerated pathways. Often, the moment they are
voiced, they have the paradoxical effect of being utterly surprising yet
instantly obvious.
For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions
has always been clear--but it took some years for the follow-on question
to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn't we know
more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest
ultimately including over two hundred interviews with creative thinkers.
Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about
the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions--and breakthrough
insights--and how anyone can create them.
