When You Need Answers, Search for Better Questions
What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question. -Jonas Salk
Businesses and leaders always want answers. In fact, leaders are supposed to have all the answers, right? We have complete industries built on providing the answers—thought leaders, influencers, motivational speakers, preachers, sales people—They’re all answer people.
How-tos and “tips & tricks” are some of the most hotly pursued content types produced. They provide the methodology to get to strategy, solutions, & products, which are all answers. Culture & society are an answering machine, providing cues, clues, and direction for the curious soul.
We live in an age of answer proliferation. We have them in abundance. We love our answers and venerate the experts who spew them. Questions, on the other hand, are discounted. Somehow, we’ve come to the conclusion that they equate to weakness or make the one seeking answers seem lesser than whomever might provide them.
We value answers so much more than the questions that lead to them, and I believe that’s detrimental to long term growth and, ultimately, the wisdom—not simple answers—we need.
We need better questions.
I really don’t enjoy speaker panels. They tend to feign interactive, candid communication, but rarely result in anything insightful being shared. Instead, they turn into sound byte bingo, filled with platitudes and all the latest catchphrases and meaningless lingo. They regurgitate talking points and scripted language, because the questions being asked—the ones that are meant to be hard-hitting, perplexing, and important—are framed to provide prescribed, binary answers. It’s just not real conversation.
Of course, I am biased. I have a friend who describes me as a professional question asker, and he’s at least partially correct. I believe questions are one of the greatest tools we have at our disposal as individual learners and as leaders. The problem is that we can shape our questions to produce the answers we want (or don’t, as the case may be). We can become too binary in our asking and miss out on the depth of the answer—in the activity of thinking the question(s) should produce. We can also become so focused on simply finding the answer that we miss out on the glorious process of learning that great questions provide.
Peter Thiel argues the importance of asking the right questions in his book, Zero to One, writing
“This book [this week] is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual...but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas…”
I like that—”question-received ideas.” They’re the new, or more deeply developed and refined, ideas that come out of well-crafted, honest questions. Instead of a business manual, Thiel prefers a better way—excellent questions.
Unmasking our Queries
I was married for 24 years to Gretchen, and we have 4 daughters together. Over those 24 years, she would regularly ask me a particularly loaded pair of questions: “Do you love me?” and “Do you hate me?" Early on in our marriage, I would overreact and freak out a little bit or just nervously laugh whenever she asked either one. I’d find myself wondering, “What just happened? We got married. We have 4 kids. I work hard. I come home eager to participate in our family. How could she not know the answers to these questions?!”
It took me a while to realize that she wasn’t really asking those questions; they were loaded, and she was really asking, “When are we going to get some quality and quantity time together?”
The questions we naturally ask are never just questions. They are always loaded. They tell us so much more about who we already are and how we already see the world than what we might learn from their answers. They betray our assumptions, our expectations, our hopes, and our fears. “Loaded questions attempt to limit direct replies to be those that serve the questioner's agenda [logic]." It’s true in family, business, faith—every area of our lives.
Many of the earnest and sincere questions that we ask God, mentors, pastors, bosses, parents, and close friends are loaded with our own personal spiritual logic. Some of it is good, some of it is bad, some is truncated—but all of it is loaded.
We pose our questions in that way because we deeply desire binary or discrete answers for some of the most important practical questions in our lives. We crave simplicity and ease. But easy answers aren’t what we really need.
In the context of business and spiritual life…
Management has a lot to do with answers. But leadership is a function of questions.
—Max DePree
It doesn't help that our desire for pat answers is indulged by many well meaning people and the market. We love experts, gurus, influencers, consultants, pundits, and forecasters because we want to believe someone has the answer. We pay them. We listen to them. We read their books. And we take their word—their answers—as gospel.
The problem comes when the variables change, time goes by, dynamics kick in, and the simple answer no longer works. We quickly become disillusioned, burn the books, switch churches, quit the company, end the relationship, rewrite history, and return to our search for simple answers, when we should be searching for better questions.
We don’t want to work (think) hard for our answers.
Some of you reading these words are involved in technology, especially information-based technology, so you're familiar with Unstructured Data. For any who may be unfamiliar with the term, it refers to “information that either does not have a predefined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner."
In your work, unstructured data is a problem to solve. You and your company spend hours upon hours mining, structuring, recognizing patterns, analyzing, and organizing data to make it productive. It reminds me of the historical, foundational work scholars have been doing for centuries to understand and apply the Bible—hours and hours, arguments, interest, curiosity, digging in, debating, and overcoming frustration.
The Bible uses structure-resisting genres to make us work hard for our answers.
As a Christian, I’ve wondered at times why God made the Bible so difficult to extract simple answers for our complex lives. Where I would want chapter and verse to point me to simple, direct answers, I continually find parables, poetry, proverbs, and stories that mess with our categories and expectations.
I—like most people—prefer to organize and control information and data in my own way. But I get bored when I understand and things become familiar—when I can size it all up. If growth is the purpose in reading scripture, then it’s ultimately counterproductive for me. The Bible is effective for spiritual growth because the words are ultimately untamable. It is hard to get clear answers from parables, poetry, stories, and proverbs. But it is the most loving thing God could do for me, because it drives me deeper into a relationship with him and trains me to wrestle with truths in ways that pay off long term.
The most practical book of the Bible, Proverbs, is notoriously unstructured. Its arrangement encourages and confounds, so it never becomes too familiar, comfortable, or expected. Wisdom literature as a category uniquely provokes and prods readers to ask new questions, better questions, and sometimes questions that undermine answers previously constructed.
"A proverb is like a jewel, and the book of Proverbs is like a heap of jewels. Indeed, it is a heap of different kinds of jewels. Is it really such a loss if they are not all laid out in pretty symmetric designs or divided into neat little piles? The heap itself has the lushness of profusion and the charm of a sweet disorder in the dress." (pg 481)
A pile of buried treasure is beautiful, and the disordered discovery is good for us. Asking questions is the path to learning and understanding, as well as an expression of learning and humility.
Every successful journey begins not with answers, but with questions.
When answers are multiplied, you have found a meaningful question.
The best questions mark new beginnings.
I’d be remiss to talk about an issue such as this, to warn against a lot of messaging (and messengers providing it) out there, and to ask you to address it differently without offering some direction I think is helpful to get you there. So, I put together a quick document to address several questions I believe can assist you as you search for the right questions.
You can download it here, if you’d like.
