Quotes from Warren Berger

If you can't imagine you could be wrong, what's the point of democracy? And if you can't imagine how or why others think differently, then how could you tolerate democracy?" As

In order for imagination to flourish,37 there must be an opportunity to see things as other than they currently are or appear to be. This begins with a simple question: What if? It is a process of introducing something strange and perhaps even demonstrably untrue into our current situation or perspective.

Then Grove posed an interesting question to his partner: If we were kicked out of the company, what do you think the new CEO would do? Grove and Moore reasoned that a new leader would feel no emotional attachment to the declining memory-chip business and would probably leave it behind. So they did likewise, shifting Intel's focus to microprocessors—which set the stage for remarkable growth in the years to follow.

Keith Yamashita says companies can try to find their cause by asking, What does the world hunger for?

David Kord Murray, a former rocket scientist42 who worked on projects for NASA and later became the head of innovation at Intuit, made a study of connective creativity in his book Borrowing Brilliance. According to Murray, "The nature of innovation [is that] we build new ideas out of existing ideas." Murray cites Einstein, Walt Disney, George Lucas, and Steve Jobs as prime examples of innovators who "defined problems, borrowed ideas, and then made new combinations.

What does the world need most . . . that we are uniquely able to provide? Shaich says he wrestled with that question for a while, then worked his way to an answer with the launch of Panera Cares—an initiative to open a number of pay-what-you-can cafés that are identical to the chain's other restaurants, except customers pay what they wish or can afford (based on suggested donation amounts).

well-meaning people are often trying to solve a problem by answering the wrong question.

This great quote from Close was featured recently on the site BrainPickings: "Ask yourself an interesting enough question3 and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you'll find yourself all by your lonesome—which I think is a more interesting place to be.")

if you never actually do anything about a problem yourself, then you're not really questioning—you're complaining.

With so much evidence in its favor and with everyone from Einstein to Jobs in its corner, why, then, is questioning underappreciated in business, undertaught in schools, and underutilized in our everyday lives?

The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer observed that questions "are the engines of intellect5—cerebral machines that convert curiosity into controlled inquiry.

Yet chances are, for the rest of her life, that four-year-old girl will never again ask questions as instinctively, as imaginatively, or as freely as she does at that shining moment. Unless she is exceptional, that age is her questioning peak.

In some ways, it can be more difficult or risky for those in authority to question. In Hal Gregersen's study of business leaders who question, he found that they exhibited an unusual "blend of humility and confidence"15—they were humble enough to acknowledge a lack of knowledge, and confident enough to admit this in front of others.

Being willing to question is one thing; questioning well and effectively is another.

The How stage of questioning is where the rubber meets the road or, in Nanda's case, the clock hits the floor. It's the point at which things come together and then, more often than not, fall apart, repeatedly. Reality intrudes and nothing goes quite as planned.

One of the difficult early challenges at this stage is to make a commitment to one idea. At the wide-open What If stage of inquiry, one tends to ask many questions, to explore multiple possibilities—from practical to far-out ideas. But when it comes time to act on an idea, you have to narrow possibilities and converge on the one deemed worthy of being taken to the next level.

All of which means that, whereas in the past one needed to appear to have "all the answers" in order to rise in companies, today, at least in some enlightened segments of the business world, the corner office is there for the askers

Cooperrider says that "organizations gravitate toward the questions they ask.

A prototype is a question, embodied."60 Given a body, the question becomes harder to ignore. Nanda's question—What if a clock had wheels?—became much more compelling to people when they actually saw a clock with wheels.

In a time when so much of what we know is subject to revision or obsolescence, the comfortable expert must go back to being a restless learner.

questions challenge authority and disrupt established structures, processes, and systems, forcing people to have to at least think about doing something differently. To encourage or even allow questioning is to cede power

Our grandfathers and great grandfathers18 built schools to train people to have a lifetime of productive labor as part of the industrialized economy. And it worked." To

when we want to shake things up and instigate change, it's necessary to break free of familiar thought patterns and easy assumptions. We have to veer off the beaten neural path. And we do this, in large part, by questioning.

The clients who hired Drucker may have started out expecting the great consultant to offer brilliant solutions to all their problems. But as he told one client, "The answers have to be yours.