A More Beautiful Question (21 page)

The DIY design and the software for the Eyewriter are downloadable for free. “Anyone who is paralyzed now has access to draw or communicate using only their eyes,” Ebeling announced at a recent TED Conference, drawing a standing ovation from the crowd. (Ebeling closed his talk with two questions that he urged audience members to ask themselves every day:
“
If not now, then when? If not me, then who?
”
)

Ebeling is so sold on the power of collaborative inquiry that he launched a website, Not Impossible Labs, designed to help innovators connect with each other and find great problems to work on together. The name derives from his belief that “it is naïve now to think that anything, any problem we might be looking at, is impossible to solve.” Whatever ambitious question you might come up with, people are out there with the knowledge, skills, and imagination to help you work toward an answer—if you can connect with them.

Reaching out to potential collaborators can require a leap of faith for those accustomed to trying to solve problems on their own. (I’m a case in point: As an author I’ve always written books pretty much alone. But with this book, I tried a different approach, using my blog to ask if anyone wanted to contribute ideas, research, or thoughts on questioning. As a result, I ended up with more than a dozen collaborators who contributed immensely to the project.) Among the concerns/questions that may arise:
Will the idea still be “mine” if I share it? Why would anyone care enough to actually help? If I’m used to coming up with ideas alone, will I be able to do so working with others?

Tod Machover of MIT Media Lab
⁷³
has emerged as an advocate for, and a master of, collaborative inquiry in his work. Machover is both an engineer and a musical composer, whose work has ranged from creating the popular
Guitar Hero
interactive music game to composing operas and symphonies in which the audience actively participates in creating the musical performance. While almost every large-scale project he works on ends up being a collaborative endeavor, Machover stresses that it’s critical to find a balance between working alone on ideas and working with others. “There are times, especially early in the creative process, when I want to slow down and think about a challenging question by myself,” he said. (At such times, he retreats to the solitude of a barn converted into a music studio.) “As a composer I love the act of imagining a question—and even a whole world—and being able to make it real in your mind over a long period, before you share it with others.”

But there’s also a time, he said, when you must take your question “out of the barn” and begin to work with others. The Media Lab is designed to be an ideal collaborative environment, bringing together people from a wide range of disciplines. “Everyone is comfortable saying to others in the lab, ‘Here’s something I’m passionate about—would you help me to think about this question?’”

But Machover doesn’t just collaborate with other members of the lab. On one of his most recent projects, he was invited by the Toronto Symphony to compose an original piece of music for them. He decided to invite the whole city of Toronto to cocreate a symphony with him, by capturing and sharing sounds representing everyday life in Toronto. “I wanted to see what happens when you try to answer a question working with
a lot
of people,” Machover said. The collaborative query he raised:
What does Toronto sound like?

How might we cut the cord?
⁷⁴

Increasingly, it’s a wireless world—so
why are we still tethered to an outlet when recharging our devices?
This was the question Israeli entrepreneur Ran Poliakine asked in 2006, and his quest to answer it led him to Nikola Tesla’s 1890s work on wireless power. Poliakine created the “wireless charging” category with the October 2009 launch of the Duracell Powermat, which works by magnetic induction. Separately, in 2010, astrobiologist student Meredith Perry was searching for a way to beam power directly to electronic gadgets without using cords, and her Google-fueled research led her to the concept of “piezoelectricity” (electricity resulting from pressure). This dictated Perry’s next question:
How do I create vibration in the air without actually moving something?
Her uBeam recharging device, which CrunchFund’s Mike Arrington called “the closest thing to magic,” combines the fields of sound, electricity, and battery technology, and is currently under development backed by millions of dollars in venture capital.

For years, Machover has been exploring different variations on what is essentially the same question:
How might we turn music into a more participatory experience?
It springs from his sense that most people have become passive consumers of music—“it’s everywhere, on everyone’s headphones, but fewer people are studying music, making it, or participating in the full experience of music,” he said. In the midnineties, Machover created an experimental music event called the
Brain Opera
—featuring a whole orchestra of instruments the general public could play. These “hyperinstruments” were scattered around New York’s Lincoln Center, and as people wandered through the collection, they were invited to play with them (the instruments created sound in response to the user’s movements). Those sounds were then edited together for a stage performance whose composition “was half-mine and half-created by the public,” Machover said. “The point was to say, ‘If you like listening to music, you’ll like it even more if you can be part of it, touch it and shape it.”

The idea for
Guitar Hero
—which also responds to body movement, enabling nonmusicians to create their own guitar riffs just by going through the motions—came out of the
Brain Opera
experiment. And the Toronto Symphony experiment was another attempt to pose his question about collaborative music in a fresh way. Thousands participated in the project, with many writing their own musical vignettes (using melodies and chords provided by Machover) incorporating the sounds of the Toronto subway, the harborfront, etc. Machover wove the many sounds together into a single musical piece, performed by the Toronto Symphony in 2013.

Machover was surprised at first that so many participated in the experimental attempt to answer his question. “But what I’ve become convinced of is that if you’re willing to lay out something in public that you care about, people will be interested in participating. And they’re capable of remarkable things.”

Sharing a question with others is akin to issuing a challenge that a certain type of curious-minded person may find hard to resist. Just by formulating the question, you’ve taken a critical and difficult first step that others can now piggyback on. As the author Clay Shirky has
⁷⁵
noted in his writing, many people are drawn to an existing idea they can join in on and help to improve or advance, rather than starting from scratch on their own. Machover observes that in appealing to others with a shared question, “you are involving collaborators as equals in a project.” What may start out seeming as if it’s “your” question quickly becomes theirs, too; questions belong to everyone.

As for the answer, it belongs to whoever gets to it first. Holding back ideas—hoarding your beautiful questions—is usually pointless because it’s hard to make headway on something hidden in a drawer. Better to bring a question out into the light of day and trust that, with help from others, you’ll get something out of it—a solution, a learning experience, an insight, a fresh perspective, a sense of purpose—that will be yours.

While the How stage is positioned here as a third and final stage of innovative questioning, there really is no final stage—because the questions don’t end, even when you arrive at a solution.

Many successful questioners, having arrived at an “answer,” quickly return to asking questions. Often, they’re questioning the very answers they found, which may not have been definitive. There is invariably room (and the need) to find ways to improve those solutions, to expand upon them, take them to another level.

Van Phillips might have been content with the high-level prosthetic limb he designed, but from his perspective, it solved a problem for some amputees—those who could afford to pay thousands of dollars for a replacement limb—but not others. Phillips had a vision for a high-performance replacement limb that would sell for a hundred dollars, making it affordable to amputees in the developing world; he was particularly focused on helping land-mine survivors. So he began, some years ago, cycling through new Why and What If questions on a new and affordable prosthetic, and he was deep into the How stage of this line of questioning at the time of this writing. He’d already figured out how to make it, but he was still working through the details of how to bring the product to market.

Mick Ebeling, too, found himself quickly moving on to a new set of questions about his Eyewriter. The system initially worked well for Tony Quan, who controlled the mechanism through rapid blinking. But a new problem developed: As his medical condition led to degeneration of Quan’s ocular muscles, it became difficult for him to blink quickly. So Ebeling’s new question was
What if we found another way to control the laser? What if it could be done by thinking, not blinking?

To that end, Ebeling began pulling together a new team of collaborators to work on the Brainwriter—an advanced version of the Eyewriter. The idea is to create a drawing tool powered by electrical brain activity, as measured by EEG. This would seem to be even more complex and challenging than the creation of the Eyewriter, though Ebeling insisted, “It’s very doable if you have the right people involved.”

The notion of a need to keep moving ideas forward, to keep pursuing new opportunities and responding to change by way of constant, cyclical questioning is particularly relevant in today’s dynamic business environment, where companies find that “answers” are transitory and increasingly short-lived. The next chapter considers why constant questioning is more important to business than ever before.

Chapter 4

Questioning in Business

Why do smart businesspeople screw up?

Why are we in business? (And by the way—what business are we
really
in?)

What if our company didn’t exist?

What if we could become a cause and not just a company?

How can we make a better experiment?

If we brainstorm in questions, will lightning strike?

Will anyone follow a leader who embraces uncertainty?

Should mission statements be mission questions?

How might we create a culture of inquiry?

Why do smart businesspeople screw up?

Clayton Christensen is today considered one of the foremost experts on business innovation. A veteran professor at the Harvard Business School, Christensen introduced the term
disruptive innovation
¹
into the business lexicon two decades ago, and it has become both a cliché and a driving force in business ever since. His ideas have been embraced by the likes of Intel leader Andy Grove and Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.

But back in the late 1990s, Christensen was a relatively unknown professor with a question he couldn’t shake—a Why question that sprang from a phenomenon that was happening more and more in business and didn’t make sense to Christensen. He saw that a number of successful, market-leading companies in the tech sector and other industries were getting blindsided by newcomers offering products or services that may not have been as good, but were simpler, more convenient, and more affordable. Even more puzzling, the companies suffering these sudden reversals of fortune seemed to be doing all the right things: serving their customers better, improving their products, increasing their profit margins. “They were doing exactly what they were taught in business school,” Christensen says.

Christensen wondered, in particular, why the established business leaders weren’t able to respond to these challenges. “For me, it always starts with a question,” Christensen told me. “I knew the failure could not be attributed to managers’ being stupid. So I framed the question as
Why are the smartest people in the world having this problem?
Just thinking of it that way made me look in different places.”

What Christensen discovered was that while most of the companies getting in trouble were focused on innovation that aimed to make good products even better, the real potential for breakthrough innovation was at the low end of the market—this was true in business offerings that ranged from disk drives to automobiles. In an increasingly technical marketplace, if you could take a product that was expensive, complex, and exclusive and make it affordable and accessible, you could open up a mass market and change the game—toppling the established leaders. But
why were only the newcomers seizing this opportunity? Why weren’t the established leaders, with all their know-how and resources, able to dominate the low end of the market as well as the high end?

Christensen came to see this as a dilemma: To pursue disruptive innovation at the low end, companies would have to move away from all they had worked so hard to build. As Christensen puts it, they faced this deceptively tricky question:
Should we make better products that we can sell for higher profits to our best customers—or make worse products that none of our customers would buy, and that would ruin our margins?