Questioning – deeply, imaginatively, and beautifully – can help us identify and solve problems, come up with game-changing ideas, and pursue fresh opportunities, says author Warren Berger in a new book. A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas describes questions as one of the most powerful forces for igniting change in our lives, schools, and organizations. This paper is intended to review and discuss this thought provoking book as a whole.
Berger reveals that even though children start out asking hundreds of questions a day, questioning “falls off a cliff” as kids enter school. In an education and business culture devised to reward rote answers over challenging inquiry, questioning isn’t encouraged – and, in fact, is sometimes barely…show more content… Berger claims, people often try to solve problems by answering the wrong questions. People seem to get on the wrong business path by asking a wrong question. The masses have been simply trained to have the right answer for the questions asked. This brings us back to the factory school mentality where teachers are forced to cram the right answer to the questions they feel are relevant or that the state mandates thru state tests making the teachers feel as if there are only specific questions/answers are relevant. Transferring this thought process to the principles of business from the factory school mentality makes it clear why some businesses fail.
Most companies are simply not set up to have questions brought to them. They have a clear chain of command that isn’t flexible enough to allow the company to adapt and change to the fast paced economy and business needs. As the author describes businesses are set up on a model from World War II. This old model doesn’t allow for the right questions to be passed up the chain as they are lost in the command structure. To get the right questions to the right people can simply take too long in the old structure of a