Everyday after he came back from school, the kid was asked a single question by his mom – What did you ask the teacher today? She made it really a fun session while asking this question and the kid felt happy explaining how he could ask clever questions to his teachers. But as time went by, he really fell short of good questions. He used to think a lot before making up a question worth asking. It was a good exercise for him everyday, though he really felt frustrated on days that he could not get a reasonably good question – his mom just smiled at these times and said, 'Look deeper and wider, sonny!'. A simple childhood game started to develop as a passion inside the child – he no longer asked questions that he knew answers of – rather, he tried to get more and more original in his thinking pattern, trying to find out every unanswered question around him. This small boy grew up to be a Nobel Prize winner in Physics (if I am not wrong, in all probability, he was Niels Bohr, the first Nobel Prize winner in Physics from Denmark! Please correct me if I am not right.)
What matters in the above anecdote is the fact that there is an art to observing deeper and wider around you. You get propelled towards original thinking only by asking questions. Asking relevant questions is as much an art as asking irrelevant questions is an irritation. To quote Hal Gregersen, INSEAD Affiliate Professor of Leadership, "Transformational leaders ask numerous innovative questions. Research on the entrepreneurial founders at 25 of the most innovative companies in the world — places like Apple, eBay, and Amazon — reveals that they rely heavily on countless, catalytic questions to create revolutionary new ways of doing business. Such questions help break the status quo and prompt powerful, personal action."
One good thing about a good leader is that (s)he not only asks good questions, but also genuinely makes an effort to answer them, even if the answer is preliminary. People who just ask questions are smart, but folks who try to see around for an answer are smarter.
Questions change the world.
