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The Power Of A Question
When I was 27, I moved to Warsaw, Poland to work in the nascent media industry that was developing there. I had experience working in media in New York, so I was excited to share what I’d learned and was confident that my knowledge and expertise would be well received.
It wasn’t. Whenever I began to explain how a media business was supposed to work, people would ask me, “why?” That forced me to think about it and, when I did, I began to realize that many of the principles I had taken for granted were merely conventions. Things didn’t need to work that way and could be done differently.
That’s when I first learned the power of a question. As Warren Berger explains in A More Beautiful Question, while answers tend to close a discussion, questions help us open new doors and can lead to genuine breakthroughs. Yet not all questions are equal. Asking good questions is a skill that takes practice and effort to learn to do well. Here’s where to start.
Why?
When we are young, we ask lots of “why?” questions. Why is the sky blue? Why can’t we fly like birds? Why do I have to go to bed at a certain time? It is through asking why that we learn basic things about the world. Yet as we get older we tend to think we know things and stop questioning fundamental assumptions.
