



Questions Are the Answer
A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
2018 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner
What if you could unlock a better answer to your most vexing problem—in your workplace, community, or home life—just by changing the question?
Talk to creative problem-solvers and they will often tell you, the key to their success is asking a different question.
Take Debbie Sterling, the social entrepreneur who created GoldieBlox. The idea came when a friend complained about too few women in engineering and Sterling wondered aloud: "why are all the great building toys made for boys?" Or consider Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, who asked: "would it change economic theory if we stopped pretending people were rational?" Or listen to Jeff Bezos whose relentless approach to problem solving has fueled Amazon’s exponential growth: “Getting the right question is key to getting the right answer.”
Great questions like these have a catalytic quality—that is, they dissolve barriers to creative thinking and channel the pursuit of solutions into new, accelerated pathways. Often, the moment they are voiced, they have the paradoxical effect of being utterly surprising yet instantly obvious.
For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions has always been clear—but it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn’t we know more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest ultimately including over two hundred interviews with creative thinkers. Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions—and breakthrough insights—and how anyone can create them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this helpful book, Gregersen (The Innovator's DNA), executive director of the MIT Leadership Center, posits that true breakthroughs come through questions instead of the simple, workable answers most self-help gurus lay claim to. "Questions have a curious power to unlock new insights and positive behavior change in every part of our lives," he counsels, not just in the business setting but in personal lives as well. Setting the traditional model of regimented self-help advice on its ear, Gregersen shows that breakthroughs begin with reframed questions. To start the process, he suggests an exercise: readers should choose a challenge they feel deeply about, convene a small group to brainstorm, then discuss ideas and study the results of their thinking. Intended for both groups and individuals, more advanced methods for groups include creating safe spaces where discourse is encouraged and rewarded, and prompts for group thinking. Changing routines to take new, scenic routes in an attempt to see things in new ways, creating well-crafted stories, and listening for the unexpected are Gregersen's main seeds of advice. Gregersen's strategies will serve readers looking for innovative ways of rethinking personal fulfillment.