Why You Should Start Asking a Better Question

To reach better outcomes and come up with better answers, you have to first analyze the quality of your questions. The process of inquiry is essential to the system that is creativity, but you need to inquire about the right things — if you start with unenlightened inputs, you’ll end up with unenlightened outputs.

Keep reading to learn about how inquiring correctly helps a team design and innovate better. We will also discuss why preparing optimal questions is the first step we must take to gain a new perspective on challenges and novel situations.

Understanding Questions as Inputs Into a System

The value of systems thinking comes from the ability to zoom out and see every part of a situation as components of a larger whole. In a system, all elements are connected and thus affect one another, leading to a particular outcome or event. Some systems are incredibly complex, such as the human body, the globe’s weather patterns, and the interworkings of large corporations.

Understanding how your team or organization’s system works — how different inputs lead to different outputs — is vital.

Questions are one of many inputs that affect an organization’s system, and they’re often one of the most important, as they determine what your following inputs will be. Put another way, the questions you ask will determine the type, quality, and creativity of the ideas and solutions you brainstorm and prototype. The more diverse the inputs, the more innovative the output!

To ask better questions and get more diverse inputs, teams have to practice cognitive diversity and embrace creative abrasion.

Cognitive Diversity and Creative Abrasion

Cognitive diversity is just what it sounds like, and it’s something leaders should strive for in their teams. For example, if you work in marketing, try inviting people from manufacturing and finance into your problem-solving sessions. When it comes to hiring, look for unusual suspects — for example, musicians, anthropologists, or coders. The more cognitively diverse, the better. People who have different ways of thinking and problem-solving based on their education and skill sets often come up with much better questions than more homogenous teams.

This is due to “creative abrasion,” a term coined by Jerry Hirshberg, former head of design at Nissan and author of The Creative Priority: Putting Innovation To Work In Your Business. Creative abrasion is all about friction. The friction that’s created when different minds, perspectives, and processes clash yields energy. People often try to avoid this, as they view it as unnecessary conflict between people and groups that don’t “need” to collaborate. Alternatively, this energy and friction can be turned into something positive.

For example, when Hirshberg faced a new design challenge, he insisted that people from various departments — including those which many would disagree have a place in design, such as finance — join in on the problem-solving process. The creative abrasion that occurred when people with such different perspectives had to collaborate brought new life to the question-asking and ideating sessions.

Divergent, Convergent, and Hybrid Questions

Not all questions are created equally. This is not to say there isn’t a good reason to ask every question, but there are naturally different categories of questions.

Divergent questions help you broaden your view and be much more expansive in your thinking. These are “blue sky” questions that feed curiosity, and they tend to start with “why,” “what if,” or “I wonder.” The second category of questions is convergent questions, which help you get very tactical and detail-oriented in your thinking. Convergent questions often start with “what,” “when,” or “who.” Finally, we have hybrid questions, which tend to start with “how.”

Each question category is essential to nourish the system, and the more cognitive diversity you welcome on your teams, the more variety you’ll have in the kinds of questions people ask. If you want to be more innovative and find better solutions, it’s time to start asking better friggin’ questions.

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