A More Beautiful Question (15 page)

Why must we “question the question”?

Questions that challenge the prevailing assumptions are useful and sometimes catalytic—but they can also be flawed themselves. Assumptions and biases of our own may be embedded in the questions we ask. One of the ways to find out is to subject those questions to . . . questioning.

Robert Burton, the aforementioned neurologist who writes about the “certainty epidemic,” the widespread tendency of people to question less than they should, says that even when people do ask questions, they’re often relying on those same unreliable gut instincts and biases. “Everything that’s ever happened to you or occurred to you in your life informs every decision you make—and also influences what questions you decide to ask. So it can be useful to step back and inquire,
Why did I come up with that question?
” Burton adds, “Every time you come up with a question, you should be wondering,
What are the underlying assumptions of that question?
Is there a different question I should be asking?
”

Questioning one’s own questions—as in,
Why am I asking why?
—might seem like a circular exercise, bound to lead nowhere and yield dizziness. But there are practical, constructive ways to do this, and they can help produce a more insightful or more informed question. They range from simple practices such as “the five whys” to more exhaustive methods such as contextual inquiry, wherein we take our questions out into the larger world to see how they survive contact with reality.

The five whys methodology originated
²⁷
in Japan and is credited to Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota Industries. For decades, the company used the practice of asking why five times in succession as a means of getting to the root of a particular manufacturing problem. When, for example, a faulty car part came out of a factory, asking why the first time would yield the most obvious answer—say, that someone on the assembly line had made a mistake. By then asking why that mistake occurred, an underlying cause might surface—such as insufficient training on a task. Asking why again, the company might discover the training program was underfunded; and asking why about that could lead back to fundamental company priorities about where money should be spent and what was most important in the end.

The value of this kind of excavation-by-inquiry is becoming more widely recognized in the business world, most recently as part of the Lean Startup methodology taught by the author/consultant Eric Ries, who is a big proponent of the five whys. I asked Ries why a simple, almost-childlike practice seems to work so well. “It’s a technique that’s really designed to overcome the limits of human psychology,” Ries explained. By this he means that people are inclined to look for the easiest, most obvious explanation for a problem. On top of that, “we tend to personalize things that are really systemic.” It’s easier to just blame that poor assembly-line worker than to consider all the complex, interrelated factors that may be contributing to the problem.

The five whys
²⁸
can be used outside of business, as well. IDEO has used it to address a number of behavioral issues. The firm offers this example of how it can be applied to a lifestyle issue.

Why do you exercise?

Because it’s healthy.

Why is it healthy?

Because it raises my heart rate.

Why is that important?

So that I burn more calories.

Why do you want to do that?

To lose weight.

Why are you trying to lose weight?

I feel social pressure to look fit.

One might ask,
Why stop at five?
That designated stopping point does seem arbitrary (in actual practice, you may get to something important after three whys, other times it might take six—and, admittedly, sometimes the technique doesn’t work at all). But if you don’t stop asking why at some reasonable point, you may end up, like Louis C.K. in his “Why?” comedy bit, lost in cosmic questions about why the universe is the way it is.

However many times you do it, asking “Why?” repeatedly does seem to have value in all kinds of endeavors that require getting at deeper truths. The Hollywood character actor and author Stephen Tobolowsky
²⁹
uses this kind of sequential questioning to burrow down to the core of each character he plays—and said it usually takes “three levels of questions, three assaults on the fortress, before you get to something useful and specific as an actor.”

Why isn’t the water reaching the people who need it?
³⁰

With the creation of Water.org, the engineer/activist Gary White teamed up with actor Matt Damon to tackle the problem of nearly one billion people lacking access to safe water. The conventional approach was to raise charitable donations to drill wells “and basically give water projects away.” Seeing this wasn’t working, White and Damon inquired,
Why aren’t charitable efforts succeeding in getting water to where it’s most needed
? Turns out the subsidies were going to local middlemen who ran the utilities—while the poor were still left having to overpay or walk great distances to get water. Eventually, White and Damon focused on this empowering question:
What if local communities could have the means to create their
own
sources of water?
Water.org’s innovative “Water Credit” makes small loans available to people (mostly women) who can then develop or acquire their own water sources. So far it has helped more than a million people worldwide.

If Tobolowsky is playing, say, a doctor, he may start by questioning the character’s current motivations, but he’ll gradually use levels of inquiry to go deeper and deeper: “I’ll ask myself,
As a doctor, what am I really good at and not so good at?
Then I’ll go to a deeper level of questioning:
Why did I want to become a doctor in the first place?
” When told about the five whys methodology, Tobolowksy hadn’t heard of it—but said he’s been doing his own version of the three whys for many years because it works.

There are various other ways to “work on” a question you have chosen to pursue—to deconstruct it, or to alter its shape and scope. At the MIT Media Lab, Tod Machover teaches students to broaden their questions in some instances, and narrow them in others. You might broaden a question to make it more applicable to more people, and therefore more significant. For example, the Airbnb founders could have limited the scope of their question to
Can we set up an online accommodation-sharing system in San Francisco?
—but they quickly broadened it to
Can this idea work worldwide?
On the other hand, as Machover notes, to move forward on a big question sometimes it’s necessary to break it down into smaller, more actionable questions—as in,
Before we try to do this thing worldwide, how might we make it work in our own backyard?

Another method of tinkering with questions has been developed by the Right Question Institute, which has discovered, through its research, that you can improve a question by opening and closing it. For instance, suppose one is grappling with the question
Why is my father-in-law difficult to get along with?
Like most Why, What If, and How questions, this question is open-ended because it has no one definitive answer. But note what happens when we transform this into a closed, yes-or-no question:
Is my father-in-law difficult to get along with?

Worded this way, the question almost forces one to confront the assumption within the original question—and to consider that it might not be valid (because the father-in-law, in this scenario, might have other relatives and friends with whom he gets along swimmingly). So this might cause me to go back and revise that original question to make it more accurate:
Why is my father-in-law so difficult
for me
to get along with?
In its research, the RQI has found that this process works both ways—closed questions can also be improved by opening them up.

While you can do much tinkering around the edges of a question using such methods, perhaps the best way to question a question is to take it out into the world with you—and see if the assumptions behind it hold up when exposed to real people and situations. Often, what seems to be the right question in one context proves to be the wrong one in another.

The developing world has a shortage of incubators for infants. For years, health organizations and philanthropic groups asked the logical question:
How can we get more incubators to the places that need them?
A relatively straightforward answer to that question was—donate them. But that was the right answer to the wrong question. This led to thousands of incubators being donated to poor nations, “only to end up in ‘incubator graveyards,’”
³¹
as the
New York Times
reported. This was part of a larger problem that went far beyond incubators; one study found that 96 percent of foreign-donated medical equipment ended up being used for a short time, then abandoned.

The better question, which was eventually asked by health officials working on the problem, was
Why aren’t people in developing countries using the incubators they have?
On-the-ground observation revealed that the incubators were prone to breaking down and locals didn’t have the parts or know-how to fix them. Having answered the Why, the health officials moved to the What If, specifically,
What if we could provide incubators that were easy to maintain and fix?

One doctor working on the initiative, Jonathan Rosen, knew from his own study of the problem that cars and car parts were readily available in many of the areas with incubator problems. So the ultimate question became
How can we make an incubator out of car parts?
A nonprofit design group was brought in to tackle that question, and they eventually pieced together the “car-parts incubator,” which was inexpensive, easy to use, and could be fixed by anyone with basic mechanical skills, using parts from a local junkyard.

In the philanthropic world, as well as in business, medicine, and science, there are many stories like the car-parts-incubator story—in which the wrong question is asked, based on incomplete information or faulty assumptions, often because those formulating the questions are too far removed from the problem they’re trying to solve. One of the best ways to overcome this is to try to close the distance between the questioner and the problem.

Contextual inquiry
is about asking questions up close and in context, relying on observation, listening, and empathy to guide us toward a more intelligent, and therefore more effective, question.

In the business world, IDEO has
³²
been a pioneer of this type of research. As the design firm was being formed twenty-odd years ago, its founders, including the designer David Kelley and his brother Tom, realized that to solve human engineering problems (such as,
How do we make gadgets that fit into people’s lives?
), the company would have to employ the kind of psychological and behavioral inquiry normally done by social scientists. So the firm hired psychologists and other students of human behavior and began to develop its own methods of observing people.

IDEO understood that to question effectively, one couldn’t do it from inside the bubble of the company, or in artificial settings such as focus groups. To understand how people live, you have to immerse yourself in their lives—watch them in their kitchens, follow them as they go to the supermarket, and so forth. The company’s researchers sometimes go to great lengths to experience things firsthand.

One classic example involved a hospital
³³
group that hired IDEO to help answer the question
What is our patient experience like?
The hospital executives were surprised when IDEO, instead of doing a snazzy PowerPoint presentation, showed them a long, deadly dull video of a hospital ceiling. The point of the film: “When you lie in a hospital bed all day, all you do is look at the ceiling, and it’s a really shitty experience,” IDEO’s Paul Bennett explained. The firm understood this because someone from IDEO actually checked into the hospital, was wheeled around on a gurney, and then lay in a hospital bed for hours. This kind of “immersive” approach enables the firm to consider a question or problem from the inside out, instead of from the outside looking in. (Soon after seeing the video, the hospital’s nurses took it upon themselves to decorate the ceiling tiles in each room.)

To do contextual inquiry well, you don’t need a team of trained researchers. What’s required is a willingness to go out into the world with a curious and open mind, to observe closely, and—perhaps most important, according to a number of the questioners I’ve interviewed—to
listen
. Listening informs questioning. Paul Bennett says that one of the keys to being a good questioner is to stop reflexively asking so many thoughtless questions and pay attention—eventually, a truly interesting question may come to mind. The Acumen Fund’s Jacqueline Novogratz,
³⁴
whose nonprofit group tackles social problems by first spending extensive time on the ground in the villages and communities they’re trying to help, talks about “listening with your whole body”—using all senses to absorb what’s going on around you.