2018 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner
What if you could unlock a better answer to your most vexing problemâin your workplace, community, or home lifeâjust 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 Amazonâs exponential growth: âGetting the right question is key to getting the right answer.â
Great questions like these have a catalytic qualityâthat 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 clearâbut it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldnât 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 questionsâand breakthrough insightsâand how anyone can create them.