Beautiful Questions, with Warren Berger

Warren Berger: The more curiosity there is, the better your questions will be. If your questions don’t have curiosity in them, then they’re almost not even questions. They’re inauthentic.

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Lynn Borton: This is Choose to Be Curious, a show all about curiosity. We talk about research and theory, but mostly it’s conversations about how curiosity shows up in work and life. I’m your host, Lynn Borton. Welcome. Come, choose to be curious with us.

Some years ago, I interviewed UK-based philosopher Lani Watson, who was, at the time, conducting a global survey to help answer the question: what is a question?

This is a little like me asking my guest to define curiosity. There are a lot of working definitions out there. We struggle with the particulars, the nuance of it all.

She posited, if a [00:01:00] question is an act performed to elicit information, a good question is an act performed competently in order to elicit worthwhile information.

Which raises the obvious next question: If that’s a good question, what’s a great question, or, to get right to today’s topic, what might make a question beautiful?

Ten years ago, journalist, author, and self-declared questionologist Warren Berger published A More Beautiful Question, The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas.

When I first got started with this show eight years ago, his book, which had a relatively quiet launch, was then rapidly ascendant. He tapped into something, the world didn’t even know it desperately needed. He’d uncork the genie bottle of thoughtful questioning.

So now, on the 10th anniversary of that original publication, he’s gifted us with an update. What started with a [00:02:00] focus on innovation in the first edition has expanded to look at leadership, critical thinking, and how we might use questions to better engage with and influence other people.

Updates notwithstanding, the central message hasn’t changed: questioning can be a powerful force in our lives. One that can spark learning, change, and growth. And, to get to the breakthroughs and answers we’re all seeking, we have to start by asking thoughtful, imaginative, beautiful questions.

And what of the intersection of curiosity and those beautiful questions? What’s their relationship? How might we leverage both in service of the things we value?

I’m delighted to have America’s favorite questionologist, Warren Berger, join me today. So welcome, Warren!

Warren: Hi, Lynn. Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Lynn: Oh, it’s really exciting to have you. So, okay, we have to start with some basics. How do you answer the question, what is a [00:03:00] question?

Warren: Well, it’s complicated because I think of two kinds of questions, okay? I divide the world of questions into two types. The questions we ask other people and the questions we ask ourselves. And so they’re different, you know? I mean, when they have different purposes.

Using Lani’s definition, I think, was a little more geared to the questions we ask other people about eliciting our information or drawing out information. That’s what we’re trying to do when we ask questions of other people.

When we ask questions of ourselves, sometimes what we’re trying to do is make sense of the world. That’s one of the things questioning does. So, when we ask questions of ..,You can think of question as like a flashlight, and we shine it into the darkness of the unknown and it is what helps us figure stuff out and learn and find out [00:04:00] about stuff. And it also helps us to make sense of the world around us.

You know, we encounter something and we ask questions like, what does this mean? How should I respond to this? It can help us to solve problems we might. Look at a situation in the world that is imperfect and we can ask, why does this situation exist? Why hasn’t someone fixed it? If we were to try to fix it, what might we do differently? So that’s why questions become a big tool of innovators and change makers.

So as you can see, my definition of questioning is sort of rambling and it goes all over the place. But, in the end, you know, I guess it’s a tool.

I do have a definition for a beautiful question.

Lynn: That was going to be my next question, so go!

Warren: I will. I will share with you my definition because when I was writing the book, I [00:05:00]had almost before anything else, I had the title of the book, A More Beautiful Question. And it was because I came across a line, in a poem by E. E. Cummings, and the line was, “Always the beautiful answer/who asks a more beautiful question.”

And I really liked that phrase, “a more beautiful question”. I thought that would be a really good title for a book. So I started using it and before I even wrote the book, I said to my publisher, this is the title of the book.

Lynn: I like that you had this idea before you necessarily had a fully cooked definition of it.

Warren: Yeah. Yeah. No, the title was there. I mean, I knew I wanted to do a questioning book. But the title was there very early on. And then I had to live up to my title. And so one of the things I had to do is say, okay, if I’m going to have a book called A More Beautiful Question, I better be able to define what is a beautiful question.

So I came up with this definition and. I say right up front, this is [00:06:00] very subjective, right? There might be a thousand different definitions of a beautiful question, depending on if you were a philosopher, you might have one definition. If you were someone who’s very spiritual, if you’re a teacher, you know, you could have all different kinds of definitions.

This is my definition I came up with, which is “A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something and might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.” You can see from that definition I’m talking about ambitious; I’m talking about actionable because I didn’t want this to be a book about philosophy, or about, you know, sort of pondering questions that have no answer. I did not want that. I wanted it to be much more practical book.

So I wanted to talk about questions that even though they’re [00:07:00] big, ambitious questions, they’re also realistic and they’re actionable and you can do something about them. And then the other big thing is change.

I’m very interested in the relationship between questions and change and how the idea that just by asking a question, if it’s the right question, you can set the wheels in motion for some kind of a change. It might be a change in the way you think. It might be a change in the way other people think. It might change the world.

You know, some of the questions I feature in my book, they change the world because someone said, why, why isn’t there a better way of doing this thing? Then they went ahead and answered the question and the world was different, you know? So I, I really like the change, the power of change that lies within certain questions.

So anyway, that’s how I define a beautiful question.

Lynn: There are several things that I really like about this definition. And one of them is oddly how prosaic it is. [00:08:00] It’s a workman’s definition, right? It’s a “roll up your sleeves and you don’t have to be fancy” kind of a definition.

And, it makes clear that the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That what is for me a beautiful question is the one that is for me ambitious and actionable and catalytic, potentially transformative, might not be for you — might not be for anybody else listening to this conversation.

Warren: Right, right.

Lynn: And I think that combination of kind-of workman-like and highly personalized is also very approachable. And therefore, it doesn’t feel like it’s something, “oh, somebody else who’s smarter and can craft a more pretty question”. Let’s put it that way.

Warren: I wanted to make that point very clearly that it’s [00:09:00] not about the language in terms of the poetry of the question or you know, it’s really about the potential within that question for you that this question could unlock something. It could create something, something different. And then, you know, once I arrived at that definition, that then allowed me to say to people, to the readers, “and you should try to find your own beautiful question!” You know, all of us can find a beautiful question and then we can pursue it.

My beautiful question might be, you know: how might I spread the word about questioning in as many ways as possible to bring about a change in the way people think about questioning? So that could be my beautiful question. And, I could spend my life pursuing that. And it’s the same with someone might come up with a [00:10:00] beautiful question that involves changing their community they live in or something like that. You know, it’s unlimited. You could, there’s almost anything, any direction you could go in, but the idea is to find something that has potential, you know, and then live with it and then stay with it, take ownership of it. So that’s one of the things I really urge people to do.

Lynn: Yeah. Yeah. A former guest who is now a friend, Larry Robertson, has what I think of as kind of a beautiful question that he has just as a standing question, which was: what will you soon realize that you already know?

I’m thinking of that now in this context with your book and the first edition. And I’m wondering, what did you soon realize that you already knew about questions? I mean, I’m sort of wondering about these 10 years.

Warren: Yeah, what I realized was, was, uh, the power of questioning extends even further than I could have [00:11:00] imagined and it affects our world and our lives in so many ways.

I mean, I kind of knew it did, but I didn’t know for sure. And then in the last 10 years, I was talking to someone about this, like, why did I feel the need to change the book or add to it? I think it was because the world changed so much in 10 years. I was going to just update it and take out things that were no longer accurate.

And that normally when you would update a book, you might change about 10 percent of the book, it wouldn’t be that big a deal. But I realized that I had to change about 50 percent of the book because the world had changed so much. Either some of the concepts needed to be changed. Some of them needed to go away. You know, they didn’t really… they weren’t as relevant in 2024 as they were in 2014.

And then I had to make room for some new things that are much more important now, or at least [00:12:00] they’re more central to our world now than they were in 2014.

So, just as the most basic example, when I wrote the book, everybody was kind of obsessed with innovation, like the tech companies were flourishing and it was a time of everybody talking about innovation in much of the original book and still it’s still a lot of it is there in the current book. But much of the original book was very focused on what is the connection between questioning and innovation. So I really was spending a lot of time on that.

And now today, I think innovation is still on very much on people’s minds, but there are all these other issues that weren’t so big in 2014. Like: how do we make sense of all the information that’s coming at us? You know, now it just ups the [00:13:00] game. Like, how do we deal with information overload? And how do we have a common understanding or a shared understanding with other people in the world when we all seem to be seeing things so differently? And then how do we communicate and connect with people when there seems to be a divide between us?

So, these seem to be the questions that are on everyone’s minds now, and I put those through the lens of questioning and realized questioning is central to all of those things. Now, you could say, I’m biased, I’m a questionologist, therefore, I’m going to look at every issue…. It’s like that old saying about the person who has a hammer and everything’s a nail.

And so, you could say that I will look at any issue or any problem and what I will see is. how questioning can solve it. And that’s probably true. But I do look at all of these modern [00:14:00] issues and I see that there’s a component of them that involve questioning, that involve, or are failure to, to use this questioning tool in the way we could.

Our failure to do that is causing these problems to be much, much worse.

Lynn: Well, I share your bias, I guess, but, but I think, I think you’re absolutely right. And I don’t remember now whether it was your language or somebody talking about your work, who described sort of some of these new areas of focus as “subtle skills”, which I really appreciated — as opposed to “soft skills”, often things like listening, which is on your list there, get cast as soft skills, which I think way under-sells [that] they’re important. And “subtle skills”, I think, really goes to this question of, one, it’s a skill. It’s something you can actually get better at. There’s things we know about how to do this, and you can, you can practice this thing, [00:15:00] but it’s nuanced. And the practice really does require paying attention to the nuance. And it feels like maybe as you were talking, I thought, well, maybe that’s part of what these areas of focus of, listening and the follow up question and, and kind of building rapport.

They’re all about the nuance.

Warren: Yeah. They’re all about the nuance. They are. They are. And, and it’s all about being willing to have a check on your ego. You know, a lot of times questioning is tied to ego because when you’re asking questions, you’re not just talking about yourself. You are asking questions maybe about other people, or, and also when you’re asking questions, you’re admitting that you don’t have the answer, and so you are being vulnerable. So a lot of questioning [00:16:00] has to do with, I’m going to try to put my ego in check, and I’m going to be an open minded, curious, vulnerable person in the world who’s willing to learn, who’s willing to listen.

Sort of questioning can be thought of as a form of slow thinking.

Lynn: Mm-Hmm.

Warren: You kind of have to slow down and reflect and do all these things that in a fast-paced world we’re encouraged not to do, and the media encourages us to have snap judgements and, yeah — quick reactions to things.

So you’re trying to go counter to all of that as a question or you’re trying to say No, no, I’m not going to give in to my emotional outbursts as it was, you know, that they want me to have based [00:17:00] on this headline. And instead I’m going to try to ask questions about what’s coming at me and ask fair minded, reasonable questions about it.

And then when I’m talking to people, instead of yelling at them or telling them my opinion, I’m going to be curious about their, the way they see the world and ask about what connects their vision with my vision and where’s the,… what can we agree on? What, why did we both arrive at these different views of the world?

So I think that’s kind of what the world is very much in need of right now. Whether we can bring that into the world or not is an open question, because there’s a lot of forces working against questioning and against curiosity and against open mindedness. There’s a lot sort of conspiring against it.

Lynn: Yeah. Well, let’s lean into that curiosity part of it a little bit. You talk kind of [00:18:00]consistently in the book about curiosity as an ingredient in this. And I found myself thinking like, Okay, what’s the Venn diagram that he would draw between questions and curiosity? What’s the relationship?

Warren: The relationship is interesting.

I would say, you can think of it as curiosity is the state, and questioning is the action that results from that state or that condition. So you are curious, that leads you to ask questions. There was a psychologist, I believe, who put it in great terms. He said that you can think of it as curiosity is the itch and questioning is how we scratch the itch.

Lynn: Hmm. So is there a definite chicken or egg in your mind about curiosity questions?

Warren: Probably the curiosity probably comes first. Curiosity is when a [00:19:00] child is asking their first questions, it’s probably because of curiosity.

But, you know, they, they can build on each other because if you are a questioner. And you’re asking questions. A lot of times that is feeding your own curiosity. So you can get more curiosity because you’re asking questions.

So there is an interesting Related, but very different.

Lynn: You have a nice focus on the underappreciated follow up question. And this is where I get kind of tangled up on the question of the chicken and egg on these things, because I think, well, sometimes people start not necessarily curious, but with a question. And then in actually listening and formulating a follow-up question, I think some curiosity begins to emerge.

And so there’s a….maybe it’s like a little oyster, right? You know, [00:20:00] it builds its shine, its luster, these passes.

Warren: Yeah, it’s true. It goes back and forth, but I tend to put the curiosity first because if you think of curiosity…I like to think of curiosity as a driving force behind questions, okay, and as the central ingredient. So you have to start, you start with curiosity. And then that informs the questions you ask. That will make the questions you ask better. The more curiosity there is, the better your questions will be. And in fact, I kind of say to people all the time, you know, if your questions don’t have curiosity in them, Then they’re almost like not even questions. They’re like inauthentic.

Lynn: You call them counterfeit questions or something, right?

Warren: Yeah Yeah I should say that there are situations where someone may ask a question that [00:21:00] doesn’t have curiosity behind it in a professional context like a lawyer who is cross-examining someone will ask a question that he or she already knows the answer to, but there’s a reason why they’re asking the question. They’re trying to get you to say something. And sometimes, you know, teachers using the Socratic method will use questions that they know the answers to, but they’re trying to get the students to think about it. So, yes, there are ways from almost a professional standpoint that someone might use questions without having curiosity behind the question.

But in most cases, and for most people, all of our questions should be rooted in curiosity. And when they don’t have curiosity behind them, that’s when we end up asking bad questions. Like when someone says, what were you thinking? What on earth were you thinking when you did that? There’s no curiosity in that question. They don’t really [00:22:00] want to know what you were thinking. They just want to criticize you, right? A lot of times that’s what counterfeit questions are. They’re questions that are dressed up as a question, but they’re really a criticism or something like that.

Lynn: So what’s the future of questionology? Where do you see it going next?

Warren: Well, it all depends on whether people pick up this as a movement and decide to carry it forward — whether I can convince enough people that it is worthy of its own field of study, where we treat it as a thing that we teach people…we have classes in it…we make it a part of the skill set for everyone.

And listen, I think that’s part of how we’re going to save the world. Because — and I know that sounds like an overdramatic, but it isn’t really, you know, because if you look at the directions we’re heading in, if we don’t have critical thinking and know how to ask the [00:23:00] right questions, which is what critical thinking is, if we don’t have that, we’ll never be able to address those issues.

We won’t be able to address climate change because we won’t even be able to agree on it. We won’t even be able to define it in a way that everyone says, Oh, yeah, that’s what it is. Much less will we be able to agree on strategies or possible things we could do. And the same with any major issue. If we don’t have critical thinking, we won’t even be able to tackle these issues in any way, so you have to start with that.

That’s like the basic question that you have to begin with, in order to get anywhere.

Lynn: Well, thank you for getting us all started on the formalization of the study of questions! I think that’s not a bad goal.

Warren: Yeah, I think it’s something we can teach kids in school and people should teach it in the workplace and it’s just so important for people to be able to use that kind of thinking and that kind of communicating.

It’s going to [00:24:00] serve them their whole lives, and it’s going to help our society to function better. It’s going to lead to better ideas, all of that kind of stuff. So, it’s such a basic, important thing. The challenge is it’s so basic. that it’s like telling people how important breathing is, you know, and they’ll say, well, yeah, I know, I know it’s important, but I don’t have to think about it. You know, I don’t have to worry about it. I just breathe. That’s all.

Well, questioning is a little different from that. We will question no matter what. We will ask questions, but probably won’t ask the best ones and we won’t ask often enough. And we need to sort of strengthen it. Strengthen the muscle.

Lynn: Yeah. Well, I’m going to ask you to strengthen another muscle. It’s kind of a question of “how is one thing like another?” Will you join me in my Big Jar of Wannabe Analogies before you go?

Warren: Okay.

Lynn: Okay…so a literal big jar. I have slips of paper in here. I’m going to take out one for you, one for me [00:25:00] and one for the audience, and we’re going to make an analogy to curiosity with whatever is on these slips of paper. Okay. Yours is a printer. How is curiosity like a printer? Mine is the subway. And I have one for the audience.

So do you want to go first or do you want to give me it?

Warren: Sure, let me see. How is Curiosity like a printer?

Curiosity is, is like a printer in that it, it, it helps us bring ideas into the world.

Lynn: Nice.

Warren: So printers, you know, make, take ideas and they make them visible for all to see. And, and curiosity also takes things that may be in your head and it causes you to sort of bring them out there into the world. And all of a sudden they become seen by other people, shared, and it kind of spreads around great ideas.[00:26:00]

Lynn: Nice! Nice. A perfect analogy on the 10th anniversary of your first publication. I like that. I like that. Very nice.

Okay. Subway. How is curiosity like a subway? Well, subterranean, but…but it’s going to move us from one place to another, right? And I think curiosity is like that. It’s often kind of underground and yet it moves us and it can move a lot of people when we build a good system for it. So, to your point, building the systems, building the infrastructure, building the skillset to do this, the printing process and the subways.

Warren: Yeah, I love that. It really is like a subway. That’s a, that’s a, you got a good one.

Lynn: I did. I did! And, audience, yours is cactus. How is curiosity like a cactus? Let us know on social media # analogy.

Oh, I can see Warren’s face. He’s working on this one.

Warren: I’m thinking of a number of ways. It’s like a cactus. That’s great.

Lynn: Well, Warren, thank you so much for this. [00:27:00] This has been delightful.

Warren: Okay, Lynn. Thank you. I enjoyed doing it. And stay curious. I will, too.

Lynn: You’ve been listening to Choose to be Curious. I’m your host, Lynn Borton. Thanks for joining us here today. You can find all of my shows on my website at choosetobecurious.com. I hope you’ll follow me here, there, and on Facebook and Instagram at Choose to Be Curious, where you can share your cactus analogy, #analogy.

Many thanks to my wonderful guest Warren Berger, links to his work in the latest edition of A More Beautiful Question on my website, where you’ll also find my conversation with philosopher Lani Watson.

Thanks too to Sean Ballack for our theme music, and this is The Envelope by Aeronaut via Blue Dot Sessions.

I hope you’ll join us again next time. Until then, choose to be curious.

Listen to Choose to Be Curious #232: Beautiful Questions, with Warren Berger

NEW: Check out the transcript, below.

BEAUTIFUL QUESTIONS, WITH WARREN BERGER

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