A More Beautiful Question (33 page)

“We found the common ground between gun owners and nonowners by using questions,” Bond told me. Among the questions people could agree on:

Do you care about gun violence?

Are you for gun responsibility?

“These elicited unqualified yeses,” Bond said, “whereas statements like ‘Gun owners must be more responsible’ elicited personalized, defensive answers.” Bond considers questions to be “the verbal equivalent of nonviolent conflict resolution.” The only way to get any traction on polarizing issues is to attract people on both sides, “not bully them into submission.” As he noted, questions—if worded sensitively—can show respect to both sides of an issue, invite participation, and open up conversation. Bond, the former advertiser, described it as “the art of ‘pull’ versus ‘push.’ It can’t be done without questions.”

As both Peavey and Bond have noted, those questions must be culturally aware, insightful, respectful, and inviting. This may require contextual inquiry on the part of those doing the questioning. The approach used by Peavey, as well as another expert boundary-crosser, Novogratz, shows that there’s no substitute for journeying into the world of people who hold different views from yours, “sitting on the floor with them,” and trying to see the various issues from that perspective.

Short of doing that, at the very least we should heed the advice of
⁵¹
Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, who, in a recent commencement speech, urged graduating students to “create some habit that makes it easier to get out of your bubble. Follow someone you disagree with on Twitter.”

Hughes would no doubt agree that we should also question the views of those with whom we disagree—yet with an open, curious mind:

Why might they see the issue this way? Why do I see it differently? What assumptions are we each operating under?

In this vein, one other question comes highly recommended
⁵²
from Michael Corning, a top engineer at Microsoft, who said he has relied on this in both his work and his life:

What are the odds I’m wrong?

As Corning points out, just pausing every once in a while to ponder this question can provide a check on our natural tendency to be overly certain of our own views. Plus, Corning adds, it can help to avoid all manner of trouble around the home, such as lengthy arguments that begin with a false accusation about who moved the car keys.

The empathetic questioning that can help in “reaching across the chasm” on divisive issues can also be useful in “reaching across the room” to better connect with those closest to you—a close friend, neighbor, co-worker, brother, sister-in-law, eldest son, whomever. Questioning can be applied in various ways to get a better understanding of relationship challenges and to begin testing out possible remedies. If we take that hypothetical question raised earlier—
Why is my father-in-law so difficult
⁵³
to get along with?
—it should be checked for faulty assumptions by “questioning the question” (Is it true? Is he really hard for everyone to get along with?). If he gets along just fine with some people, including, say, another son-in-law about your age, then the better Why question is
Why is it difficult for my father-in-law to get along with me?

One might also inject a few other Whys into the mix, as part of contextual inquiry:

Why, exactly, do I feel as if we’re not getting along?

Why do I want to try to change that?

Why does the relationship with the other son-in-law seem to work better (and can I learn anything from that)?

The answers to these early questions can feed the next set of hypothesis questions (
Considering we only see each other at chaotic family gatherings, what if we could arrange to meet in a more relaxed setting?
) and How strategies (
How might I lure him to such a meeting—perhaps by inviting him to watch the ball game on my new big-screen TV?
). Through inquiry, you can begin to dissect the nature of a relationship problem, see things from the other person’s point of view, and use tactical questioning to delicately float possible ideas and solutions.

Finding common ground with anyone is the key to connecting. With your family as a whole, it may require asking questions together. Bruce Feiler, author of
The Secrets
⁵⁴
of Happy Families
, dramatically improved communication in his family just by making time for regular weekly meetings—during which the same three questions were considered each time by the group:

What went well in the family this past week?

What could we do better?

What things will we commit to working on in the coming week?

Updating an idea that originated with the author Stephen Covey, Feiler also suggests families create their own “mission statements,” similar to those used by companies. The idea of having a shared sense of familial purpose is a good one—but perhaps a “mission question” might be more engaging than a “statement.” A family mission question could be
How might we, as a family, better serve the community?
Or
How might we carry on the tradition of our forebears?

Part of the rewarding experience is figuring out, together, what might be the most meaningful, enjoyable, and promising question to pursue as a group. When searching for such a question—whether as a group or as an individual—you don’t want to make the choice lightly.

How will you find your beautiful question?

When Doug Rauch came to the end
⁵⁵
of a successful career as the president of the Trader Joe’s supermarket chain in 2008, he could simply have retired and played golf. But like a lot of people, Rauch wasn’t comfortable with the traditional concept of retirement. “I think most of us find purpose when we engage with something bigger than ourselves,” Rauch said. “If you’re lucky in life, maybe you get to move from one area of significance—your career—to another.”

But how would he find that new “area of significance”? Rauch wasn’t sure, but as he began his search, he heard about a Harvard fellowship program formed to encourage retired business executives to take on worthy causes and projects, on the assumption that savvy, capable retired people are looking for big questions to pursue. The Harvard program was set up to provide coaching and university resources to the enrolled retirees as they tried to identify specific challenges of interest, but each individual in the program, Rauch included, had to figure what issue he or she wanted to tackle.

“I started looking at lots of challenges but I kept coming back to the idea of ‘go with what you know,’” Rauch recalls. “And what I know is food.” Something else he knew: “There are fifty million Americans who are hungry.”

As Rauch began to think about this problem, he cycled through various Whys, What Ifs,
and
Hows (he was no novice when it came to questioning—he had practiced and honed the art at Trader Joe’s based on his belief that “questioning is the heart of innovation”).

He started with
Why do we have a situation in this country wherein one in six people is hungry?

Compounding the mystery were other questions Rauch began to explore as he did his contextual inquiry into the nature of the problem. As he observed that hunger and obesity sometimes exist together in this country, he found himself asking,
How can an obese person be hungry?
In working through that one, Rauch had to get past some basic assumptions, one being that hunger is a shortage of calories. The reality is, people of limited means may tend to fill up on empty calories because that’s more affordable. “If all you have is three dollars, you can consume a lot more calories with chips and soda,” he said. But from a nutritional standpoint, you’re still starving.

The most maddening question sprang from the realization “that 40 percent of what we grow in this country is never consumed,” Rauch said. “And of course this causes you to wonder,
Why does so much good food end up in landfills?
”

What came next was a nice little bit of connective inquiry on Rauch’s part: “You start to put the pieces together, then you think,
What if you could use one problem to solve the other?
”

Being a supermarket guy, he knew one place where there was plenty of food—on store shelves—which led to
How do we get that food from the supermarket to the food desert?

Rauch eventually came up with a potential solution—create an operation that would buy unused food at deep discounts from the supermarkets and from other producers, repackage it as convenient and nutritious take-home meals, and offer it for pennies on the dollar in a large, indoor farmers’ market in Boston.

By mid-2013, Rauch was well on the way to turning the idea into a reality. He had raised the funds needed to launch the enterprise and he had a space picked out, with plans to give it a neighborhood feel with murals and community art on the walls. Rauch wants the food market to capture some of the allure of Trader Joe’s, the sense that you’re getting quality food at a bargain price.
Why not give the food away?
Rauch worked through that question and decided it’s not sustainable, businesswise, nor is it what people necessarily want. Many tend to eye food giveaways with suspicion; but all people like to think they’re getting a deal. This realization sparked one of Rauch’s hypothetical questions:
What if we offer a bargain instead of a handout?

The ending of Rauch’s story is still to be determined—he was in the midst of the always-difficult How stage as of this writing (
How do we do the launch? How do we get people in the door? How do we make the numbers add up?
). But his story offers a good example of how one can come at the challenge of finding a beautiful question to pursue.

Rauch was bold and ambitious in staking out his question—he took on one of the biggest, thorniest issues around. He did so at a stage of life when, according to conventional wisdom, we should be pulling back from the hard and the new, to settle into a life more comfortable and familiar. In seeking out his question, he looked to others (the Harvard fellowship program) for help and counsel. He also looked around to see what was most needed in the world. But he looked inside himself as well—to inquire about what he was good at and how he might apply those skills in a fresh and meaningful way.

Finding that one big, beautiful question to pursue isn’t easy. So—starting as always with Why—let’s first consider why it makes sense to do so. We all have goals, plans, passions, interests, concerns; we have lots to do and to think about, so why add on a big, difficult unanswered question? Because a question can be propulsive. You may have lists of things to do, goals to achieve, as we all have, in a drawer somewhere; but if you have one compelling question, it’s harder to set aside and ignore. To quote David Cooperrider, a powerful question never sleeps. It can get deep into your head, to the point that you may find yourself working on it both consciously and unconsciously.

Should we retire the concept of “retirement?”
⁵⁶

The aging of the Baby Boomers raises the question,
Can we still afford to have so many people retire in their sixties?
Moreover,
Is retirement really the most satisfying, productive way to spend one’s later years?
Marc Freedman, founder of Encore.org, looks at the growth of the over-sixty population and asks:
Why can’t we turn this dependence into abundance?
Freedman thinks older workers have a wealth of experience and knowledge that could be used in “encore careers” with nonprofits, charities, and schools, all of which have a growing need for high-level skills. Freedman’s Encore.org movement offers support, job leads, fellowships, handbooks, and classes, readying millions of longer-living boomers to be a vital workforce for change. He also believes we should encourage people of all ages to plan for the “encore” stage of life by setting up Individual Purpose Accounts (patterned after IRA’s) to help cover the inevitable costs of transitioning and retooling.

Articulating a personal challenge in the form of a question has other benefits. It allows you to be bold and adventurous because anyone can question anything. You don’t have to be a recognized expert; you just have to be willing to say,
I’m going to venture forth in the world with my question and see what I find
. As you do this, you’re in a strong position to build ideas and attract support. Because, whereas people are more likely to ignore or challenge you when you come at them with answers, they almost can’t resist advising or helping you to answer a great question. All of this helps to build momentum. Questions (the right ones, anyway) are good at generating momentum, which is why change-makers so often use them as a starting point.