A Curious Mind (17 page)

I like when people at Imagine ask me questions for many reasons, but here's the simplest and most powerful reason: if they ask the question, then they almost always listen to the answer.

People are more likely to consider a piece of advice, or a flat-out instruction, if they've asked for it in the first place.

Imagine is hardly a perfect workplace. We have our share of dull meetings and unproductive brainstorming sessions. We miscommunicate, we misinterpret, we miss out on some opportunities, and we push forward some projects we should let go.

But nobody is afraid to ask a question.

Nobody is afraid to answer a question.

Making questions a central part of managing people and projects is hard. I do it instinctively, from years of using questions to draw people out, and from a natural inclination to hear how projects are moving along rather than giving orders about them.

I think questions are an underappreciated management tool. But if it's not the way you normally interact with people, it will take a conscious effort to change. And you have to be prepared that, initially, asking questions slows things down. If you really want to know what people think, if you really want people to take more responsibility, if you really want a conversation around the problems and opportunities—rather than having people execute marching orders—that takes more time.

It's like being a reporter inside your own organization.

If asking questions isn't your typical style, this approach may puzzle people at first. So the best way to start might be to pick a particular project, and manage that project with questions. If you can start using curiosity in the office, you'll find that after a while, the benefits are remarkable. People's
creativity gradually blossoms. And you end up knowing a lot more—you know more about the people you work with every day, and how their minds work, and you know more about what's going on with the work itself.

The most important element of this kind of culture is that you can't simply unleash a welter of questions—like a police detective or a lawyer doing a cross-examination in court. We're not asking questions for the sake of hearing ourselves ask them.

There are two key elements to a questioning culture. The first is the atmosphere around the question. You can't ask a question in a tone of voice or with a facial expression that indicates you already know the answer. You can't ask a question with that impatience that indicates you can't wait to ask the next question.

The point of the question has to be the answer.

The questions and the answers have to be driving a project or a decision forward.

And you have to listen to the answer. You have to take the answer seriously—as a boss or a colleague or a subordinate. If you don't take the answers seriously, no one will take the questions seriously. You'll just get the answers calculated to get everyone out of the conversation quickly.

The questions, in other words, have to come from genuine curiosity. If you're not curious enough to listen to the answer, all the question does is increase cynicism and decrease trust and engagement.

•  •  •

ONE OF MY CHILDHOOD
heroes was Jonas Salk, the physician and scientist who figured out how to create the first vaccine that prevented polio. Salk was a towering figure.

Today, it's hard to imagine how much fear polio instilled in American parents and children. A devastating disease, polio is a viral infection of the lining of the spinal cord, and it killed children, left them permanently crippled, or left them paralyzed so severely that they had to live their lives inside an iron breathing machine called an iron lung. Polio is incurable and untreatable. Kids with a stiff or painful neck would be raced to the doctor or the hospital, and in some cases they would be dead within a few hours.

And polio is contagious, although how exactly it spread wasn't clear during the height of the epidemics. So when epidemics swept through the United States, people would keep their kids home from any place where crowds gathered—kids didn't go to the movies, summer camp, the beach, or the swimming pool.

In 1952, the year after I was born, there was a major epidemic of polio in the United States—58,000 people got the disease, 3,145 died, 21,269 were left with some level of paralysis.
³

Just in the entertainment world, the number of people who survived polio gives a vivid sense of how widespread and dangerous it was. Alan Alda had polio as a child, as did Mia
Farrow, Mel Ferrer, Francis Ford Coppola, Donald Sutherland, Johnny Weissmuller. Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction author, had polio, as did the great newspaper editor Ben Bradlee, and the violinist Itzhak Perlman, who still requires braces and a crutch to walk.
⁴

Jonas Salk was a determined and fairly independent-minded virologist who developed a “killed-virus” form of the polio vaccine while working at the University of Pittsburgh. The vaccine used inactivated particles of polio virus to stimulate the immune system, so people who received two doses of the vaccine were immune to infection.
⁵

When the Salk vaccine was announced in 1955, Salk became a nationwide, and then a worldwide, hero. Immunization programs were launched immediately, and by the end of the 1950s, there were only a few hundred cases of polio being reported in the whole country. Tens of thousands of people were saved from lives of challenge, or from death. Everyone was able to go back to living without the shadow of polio over their lives.
⁶

Dr. Salk was born in 1914, and he was just forty when the vaccine was announced. By the time I decided to meet him, he had established a scientific research center called the Salk Institute for Biological Research in La Jolla, California, just north of San Diego.

Salk was then in his late sixties and hard to reach, almost impossible.

I worked for more than a year just to get the attention of
someone in his office. Eventually, I discovered that Dr. Salk's assistant was a woman named Joan Abrahamson, who was herself a MacArthur Award winner, a so-called “genius grant” winner.

I talked to her regularly. She knew how much I admired Dr. Salk, and also how interested I was in meeting him. And she knew that Dr. Salk, while he kept a low profile, was not a classic absentminded scientist. Dr. Salk had a wide range of interests, and might enjoy learning something about the movie business.

It was 1984, not long after
Splash
had been released, when Joan told me that Dr. Salk would be speaking at a scientific meeting at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, in Beverly Hills, and that if I wanted to meet them there in the morning, he could spend some time with me between sessions.

Not perfect, of course. Huge association meetings tend to be crowded, distracting, and filled with hubbub. But I certainly wasn't saying no. The morning of the meeting, I woke up feeling a little fluey. I was tired, light-headed, my throat a little tickly.

By the time I got to the Beverly Wilshire that morning, I think I looked a little sick. If it had been anything but meeting Jonas Salk, I would have wheeled around and headed back home.

I met Joan, and I met Dr. Salk. It was late morning. Dr. Salk looked at me with a little concern and he said, “What's wrong?”

I said, “Dr. Salk, I'm just not feeling that well this morning. I feel a little light-headed, a little sick.”

He immediately said, “Let me go grab you a glass of orange juice.” And before I could say anything, he popped off to the restaurant and came back with a big glass of orange juice.

This was long before most people had heard about the research that orange juice could really help perk you up if you were just getting sick. He said, “Drink this, it will bump up your blood sugar, you'll feel better quickly.”

I drank the entire glass, and he was right, it worked.

It was kind of a surprising first encounter. Dr. Salk was so accessible, so human, so perceptive—he wasn't some genius off in his own world. He behaved, in fact, like a physician. He noticed immediately that something wasn't right, and he wanted to take care of me.

That morning, our conversation was brief, no more than thirty minutes. Dr. Salk was a slight-framed man, very friendly, very engaged, very intellectual. We talked a little about his research at the Salk Institute (he spent a lot of time trying to find a vaccine for HIV near the end of his career), and we talked about the impact of saving so many people's lives. He was completely modest about that.

Dr. Salk ended up inviting me to visit the Salk Institute, which I did, and we developed a friendship. He was intrigued with the idea of my curiosity conversations, and he proposed an expanded version. He suggested that the two of us each invite a couple of really interesting people to a daylong
conversation, to be held at my Malibu house. So there would be six or eight of us, from totally different disciplines, spending the day in a relaxed atmosphere, trading our problems and our experiences and our questions. What a fabulous idea. And we did it.

Dr. Salk invited a robotics expert from Caltech and Betty Edwards, the theorist and teacher who wrote the book
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
. I brought director and producer Sydney Pollack (
Out of Africa
,
Tootsie
) and producer George Lucas, the creator of
Star Wars
and
Indiana Jones
, and George brought Linda Ronstadt, the singer who was his girlfriend at the time.

The whole thing was Dr. Salk's idea. He was curious—in particular, he was curious about how the “media mind” worked, how people like Lucas and Pollack thought about the world and what they created, and he was curious about storytelling. It was very relaxed, very unpretentious. We didn't solve the problems of the world, but we sure did put in one room a half dozen people who wouldn't typically encounter each other.

The time I remember most vividly with Jonas Salk, though, was the first moment we met—that honest, simple, human connection right at the beginning. Although he was just in the process of meeting me, Dr. Salk noticed I was looking down and was considerate enough to ask why—and immediately offered help. These days, it seems, it's almost a shock when people ask questions about you, and then stop long enough to absorb the answer.

Curiosity is what creates empathy. To care about someone, you have to wonder about them.

Curiosity creates interest. It can also create excitement.

A good first date is filled with a tumble of questions and answers, the fizz of discovering someone new, of learning how they connect to you, and of how they are different. You can't decide whether it's more fun to ask questions of your date, or to answer your date's questions about you.

But what happens months or years later is that your boyfriend or girlfriend, your husband or wife, feels familiar. That's the beauty and safety of a solid, intimate relationship: you feel like you know the person, like you can rely on the person and their responses, that you can, perhaps, even predict them.

You love that person. You love the version of that person that you hold in your mind and your heart.

But familiarity is the enemy of curiosity.

And when our curiosity about those closest to us fades, that's the moment when our connection begins to fray. It frays silently, almost invisibly. But when we stop asking genuine questions of those around us—and most important, when we stop really listening to the answers—that's when we start to lose our connection.

What happened at the office today, dear?

Not much. How about you?

If you picture for a moment the image of a married couple, in their mid-thirties, they've got the two kids put to sleep, it's nine o'clock at night, they're tired, they're cleaning up the kitchen or they're folding laundry or they're sitting in the family room, or they're getting ready for bed. They're thinking
about all the ordinary things that crowd into your brain when the day quiets down: Did I remember to RSVP for that birthday party? How am I going to deal with Sally at that project review tomorrow? I wonder why Tom has been so chilly recently? I forgot to make those plane reservations again! The conversation between the couple is desultory, or it's purely pragmatic—you do this, I'll do that.

Maybe it's just a moment of tiredness and quiet before bed. But if you string a month of evenings like that together, if you string a year of evenings like that together, that's how people drift apart.

The familiarity is comfortable, even reassuring. But the couple has stopped being curious about each other—genuinely curious. They don't ask real questions. They don't listen to the answers.

It's a little simplistic, of course, but the quickest way to restore energy and excitement to your relationships is to bring some real curiosity back to them. Ask questions about your spouse's day, and pay attention to the answers. Ask questions about your kids' friends, about their classes, about what's exciting them at school, and pay attention to the answers.

Ask questions like you would have on a first date—ask about their feelings, their reactions.

How do you feel about . . . ?

What did you think of . . . ?

What doesn't work are the classic questions we all ask too often: What happened at work? What happened at school?

Those questions can be waved off. “Nothing.” That's the answer 95 percent of the time. As if your wife spent eight hours at the office or your kids spent eight hours at school staring silently at a blank wall—and then came home.

You need questions that can't be answered with a single muttered word.

What did Sally think of your new ideas for the product launch?

Are you enjoying Mr. Meyer's history class?

How are you thinking about your speech at the convention next week?