When You Need Answers, Search for Better Questions

What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.

Businesses and leaders always want answers. In fact, leaders are supposed to have all the answers, right? We have complete industries built on providing them: thought leaders, influencers, motivational speakers, preachers, salespeople. How-tos and tips-and-tricks are some of the most hotly pursued content types produced. They provide the methodology to get to strategy, solutions, and products, which are all answers.

We live in an age of answer proliferation. We have them in abundance. We love our answers and venerate the experts who spew them. Questions, on the other hand, are discounted. Somehow, we've come to the conclusion that they equate to weakness or make the one seeking answers seem lesser than whoever might provide them.

We value answers so much more than the questions that lead to them, and I believe that's detrimental to long-term growth and, ultimately, to the wisdom, not simple answers, we need.

We Need Better Questions

I really don't enjoy speaker panels. They tend to feign interactive, candid communication but rarely result in anything insightful being shared. Instead, they turn into sound-byte bingo, filled with platitudes and all the latest catchphrases. They regurgitate talking points and scripted language, because the questions being asked are framed to provide prescribed, binary answers. It's just not real conversation.

I have a friend who describes me as a professional question asker, and he's at least partially correct. I believe questions are one of the greatest tools we have at our disposal as individual learners and as leaders. The problem is that we can shape our questions to produce the answers we want. We can become too binary in our asking and miss out on the depth the activity of thinking should produce. We can also become so focused on simply finding the answer that we miss out on the glorious process of learning that great questions provide.

Peter Thiel argues the importance of asking the right questions in Zero to One: "This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things. It is not a manual... but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas."

I like that: question received ideas. Search for the new, or more deeply developed and refined, ideas that come out of well-crafted, honest questions.

Unmasking Our Queries

I was married for 24 years to Gretchen, and we have four daughters together. Over those 24 years, she would regularly ask me a particularly loaded pair of questions: "Do you love me?" and "Do you hate me?"

Early on in our marriage, I would overreact and freak out a little bit whenever she asked either one. I'd find myself wondering, "What just happened? We got married. We have four kids. I work hard. I come home eager to participate in our family. How could she not know the answers to these questions?"

It took me a while to realize that she wasn't really asking those questions. They were loaded, and she was really asking, "When are we going to get some quality and quantity time together?"

The questions we naturally ask are never just questions. They are always loaded. They tell us so much more about who we already are and how we already see the world than what we might learn from their answers. They betray our assumptions, our expectations, our hopes, and our fears.

Many of the earnest and sincere questions that we ask God, mentors, pastors, bosses, parents, and close friends are loaded with our own personal spiritual logic. We pose them this way because we deeply desire binary answers for some of the most important practical questions in our lives. We crave simplicity and ease. But easy answers aren't what we really need.

In the Context of Business and Spiritual Life

Management has a lot to do with answers. But leadership is a function of questions.

We love experts, gurus, influencers, consultants, pundits, and forecasters because we want to believe someone has the answer. We pay them. We listen to them. We read their books. And we take their answers as gospel.

The problem comes when the variables change, time goes by, dynamics kick in, and the simple answer no longer works. We quickly become disillusioned, burn the books, quit the company, end the relationship, rewrite history, and return to our search for simple answers, when we should be searching for better questions.

We don't want to work hard for our answers.

The Bible uses structure-resisting genres to make us work hard for them. Where I would want chapter and verse to point me to simple, direct answers, I continually find parables, poetry, proverbs, and stories that mess with my categories and expectations. The Bible is effective for spiritual growth because the words are ultimately untamable.

It is hard to get clear answers from parables, poetry, stories, and proverbs. But it is the most loving thing God could do for me, because it drives me deeper into a relationship with him and trains me to wrestle with truths in ways that pay off long term.

The most practical book of the Bible, Proverbs, is notoriously unstructured. Its arrangement encourages and confounds, so it never becomes too familiar, comfortable, or expected. Wisdom literature as a category uniquely provokes and prods readers to ask new questions, better questions, and sometimes questions that undermine answers previously constructed.

A proverb is like a jewel, and the book of Proverbs is like a heap of jewels. Is it really such a loss if they are not all laid out in pretty symmetric designs or divided into neat little piles? The heap itself has the lushness of profusion and the charm of a sweet disorder.

A pile of buried treasure is beautiful, and the disordered discovery is good for us. Asking questions is the path to learning and understanding, as well as an expression of learning and humility.

Every successful journey begins not with answers, but with questions.

When answers are multiplied, you have found a meaningful question.

The best questions mark new beginnings.