200. A More Beautiful Question with Warren Berger

Welcome to episode 200 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy Today's episode. I'm so excited to introduce you to Warren Berger, author of my all time favorite book, A More Beautiful Question. Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello, hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business podcast today. I'm very excited to introduce you to Warren Berger. If you know me at all, you probably know what a big deal this is for me. Warren wrote my very favorite book, A More Beautiful Question and it's something that I reference all the time on the show when I'm being interviewed elsewhere there as what book would you recommend? Is a common question that people ask when they do interviews. I also use it when teaching and have referenced it in my own books. I love questions and a huge spark for that infatuation came from Warren's book. So when the milestone of the 200th episode of the Brainy Business was on the horizon, I decided to go out on a limb and ask one of my own. I sent a message to Warren to see if he would be my guest for this episode. He kindly agreed and here we are. Dream Equals Achieved. Warren will of course introduce himself in the episode, but know that he has a history as a journalist for the New York Times before writing or co authoring 10 books, including a More Beautiful Question, the Book of Beautiful Questions, Beautiful Questions in the Classroom and more. Today we're talking about questions, of course, as well as design thinking, the topic of one of his earliest books, and so much other goodness. There are lots of links to make it easy for you to learn more, connect with Warren and get his books within the show notes for the episode which are waiting for you within the app you're listening to or at the brainy business.com 200 now let's jump right in. Warren Berger, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

Thank you Melina. It's great to be here.

Yes, I am so excited. As you know from the the pre chat saying that More Beautiful Question is we'll say one of but really my favorite book and I recommend it all the time and so the audience has likely heard of you already. But for anyone who this is their first episode. Can you share a little bit about who you are and your background?

Yeah, well I'm a longtime journalist. I used to write for the New York Times and Wired magazine and a number of business publications, advertising publications, marketing publications. So that was kind of my background for a long, long time. Started to get into books more in the last 15, 20 years, and then specifically got into questioning books, I would say about 10 years ago. So I really zeroed in on that as my specialty. Before that, I had been doing a lot which is related on design. I'd written a lot about design. And I got into this area called design thinking, which some of your listeners may be familiar with design thinking, or maybe not, I don't know. But, you know, it's really just, I actually wrote a book about it, and it's really just about how designers approach problems, the kinds of the way their minds work when they're attacking problems, and this is all kinds of designers. So I tried to do a book that would say this is how designers think, and you could apply some of this thinking in your own life, even if you're not a designer or in your business. So that led to questioning because I found that designers were very focused on questions. A lot of times when they start a design project, they start with a lot of questions, asking a lot of questions. They often try to frame the problem in a certain way, and that requires them to do questioning in order to do that. And so I, you know, I noticed that these designers really interested in questioning. They were really good at it. And then I started to expand my view a little bit and I realized, well, it's not just designers. I mean, it's some of the best business people, CEOs or business leaders like Steve Jobs types, who are sort of reinventing the business world. They were also, or they are also really great questioners. They're using this as a really powerful tool. So at that point, I kind of had a light bulb moment and said this questioning thing. This idea of asking questions and trying to get to the right questions and figuring out how to ask a good question. That is a really important concept that has been underappreciated and not talked about enough. So that's when I said, I'm going to do a book on it. That book led to a second book. The second book led to a third book. And so now I call myself a questionologist. And it's just my thing. I study it, I am into it. And I actually would hope, I hope that I can encourage other people to do the same and be questionologists. I would love it if it emerged as a field of study that was recognized the same way other ologies are recognized.

And I think it should be interesting. I would love to be the second questionologist. So we'll make it happen.

Yeah, and we got to get it in schools. I mean, schools should be teaching questionology and businesses should have training courses in it. You know, it's just a. It's such a basic, important tool. And I think one of the problems is people, because it is so basic, people think you don't have to. You don't have to learn anything about it. It's basic. It's like breathing, so it comes naturally. And so really you don't have to study it. You don't have to learn anything. And that's not really the case. It is basic and it is natural to us because kids ask questions. But at the same time, it's very complex. And so you can. There's so many layers you can go into questioning and so many ways you can get better at it and understand it better. So, yeah, it's definitely worthy of a deep dive by anybody, and it should be something that we pay more attention to.

Yeah. So what is where you said you've been doing a lot of research into questions themselves? You know, what sort of avenues have you gone down in looking into that? Where do you even start if you want to be researching, you know, kind of this history of questions and how they work?

Yeah, what I usually do is I just research other people who are looking at it in some. Usually they're looking at it in some narrow aspect. So I will look at how they're using questioning or what they've discovered about questioning, and then I'll pull it into my broader. So I may have someone who, for instance, looks at the role of asking questions when you're making a decision. And I'll take that information and then fold it into my larger thing about how questioning affects everything in your life. And then I can say, well, here's how it affects making decisions. So that's basically what I do right now. That's what I see it. I see it as being very splintered right now. And lots of people know a little bit about questioning in some area. And what's lacking is the overview or the somebody pulling it all together in one place. And that tends to be what I do. And there's a couple of other people doing it, too. I'm not the only one. There's a couple of other kind of questionologists out there who are doing something similar to what I'm doing, and they're around the world too. They're in different parts of the world. So I will just look for whatever's been published, whatever's out there. I talk to people, I interview people, I talk to psychologists, I talk to people who. Anybody who I think is using questioning in an interesting way. Like for instance, I interviewed a hostage negotiator, I interviewed an FBI agent. And they all have their own ways that they use questions. Therapists use questions a certain way, coaches use questions a certain way. So I will take from all those people and they all know, they each know something about questioning, like the magic of questioning. And so I'm kind of pulling from all of them.

Yeah. And so do you have any go to articles or you know, the journal of anything that you go and look at in like academic type research or.

No, it's a mix of everything, you know. So I think Harvard Business Review has done some good work around questioning. There's been some. There are a couple of people, a couple of professors at Harvard who are doing some studying of it now and they've written a couple of things. And I've written a couple of things in the Harvard Business Review. So I think that's a publication that looks at it. I think Psychology Today looks at it a lot. And I actually write something for them, a regular blog online column. So there's just different sources that will delve into it. Oprah Winfrey was really into questioning at one point. So she on her magazine O and I don't know if she's doing this anymore, but she used to once a year dedicate an entire issue to questioning. And so it was all about, you know, the most powerful questions in your life and you should be asking this. And she would interview celebrities and say, you know, find out what question they were really working on or asking themselves. So yeah, I just try to find different sources like that. There's no, I don't think there's any go to thing. There's no one. I don't know that there's one thing that has staked out questioning as their main thing, but lots of people deal with it on a part time basis. And I also say with books it's really funny because there's something on questioning in a lot of books, but there's no books on questioning or very few books on questioning. So it'll end up being a chapter. It's very common to see, for instance, a business book or some type of psychology book or something that will have a chapter on asking questions, why it's important to ask questions, but it won't go any further than that. So it'll be like, pretty basic, and it'll sort of make the case of why questioning is really important, but it won't go too deep into it. So that was my challenge, you know, is like, go from a chapter to a book, you know, and so. And then go from a book to three books. So it's like just take it as deep and as wide as. As I possibly can. And that's, that's what I continue to do. And there's no limit to it. There's no, you know, it's such a big subject that I can go as far as I want with it.

Yeah, well, and I love that. You know, when I did my thesis, I did one in my undergrad, and I remember going through the process where I had the idea that was just, you know, and my advisor kept saying, it's way too big, it's way too big, it's way too big. It's way too big, way too big. And you end up with this teeny, tiny little thing that feels like. And I remember at that time saying, how am I supposed to write, you know, 20 pages on this? Which now.

Ha.

Right. Like write 20 pages like it's nothing.

Right.

And then you write books on stuff and it's just so much.

And yeah, you realize the more you learn about it, the more you realize there is to learn. And so. And that's certainly true with questioning, which is such a big. I mean, it's such a big idea. And that's, that's the. One of the challenges with something like questioning is that it is a pretty big, broad idea. So it's hard to get your arms around it, you know, and for me, you know, that was always one of the challenges. Like, how do you talk about something so big like questioning? And so the way I did it was really to try to break it down into different areas. You know, we're not. We're talking about this kind of questioning, and then we're going to talk about that kind of questioning. And you almost have to do it because it means so many things. When people think about questioning, it means so many things to different people. For some people, it's about doing an interview. That's what questioning means to them. For other people, it's about the kind of questions I ask myself. Reflection. So for some people, it's about spirituality, the big questions you ask, or philosophy. So it can mean so many things to so many different people that I think for me, what I have to do is break it into silos and vertical things that are all connected to each other. But to say there's a certain kind of question that's important in this area, and then it can also be important in this area and that area, and they are all related to each other.

Right. And so in our intro talk, you were talking a little bit about how the three books that are on questioning, as we said, you've written many books and co authored or contributed to lots and lots of books. But these three that are on questioning, we have a more beautiful question, the book of Beautiful questions and beautiful Questions in the classroom. And so do you want to share a little bit about each one? What they're targeted to, how they're different?

Yeah, they relate to each other in an interesting way. So when I came to the subject, I came at it from a very general overview kind of standpoint. I had this, like I said earlier, I had sort of a light bulb moment. I had like an epiphany where I realized, wow, this tool of questioning is really important among all these really creative people I know, like, or I've interviewed. And they're business leaders. They may be engineers or designers, inventors, entrepreneurs, and they're all using questioning in this really powerful way. And so that drove the first book. So I would say the first book, a more beautiful question, is just kind of announcing to the world, hey, there's this underappreciated tool called questioning. And it's, you know, how to do it in a way, you were doing it when you were a child, but there's so much more to it that you can learn. And so that's kind of what that book was about. And if it had one other focus, it was the innovation idea. It was the idea that questioning leads to innovation, it leads to change, it leads to breakthroughs. And you can go through and look at a bunch of innovations or startups or creations, and if you trace them back to their origin, which I did in the book, in many cases, you'll find that it starts with a question like somebody was asking a really interesting question, and that was the thing that triggered everything. So that's what the first book is about. It's both general and then with a little focus on innovation, I would say. Then I decided, as I was going around and doing talks about it, I realized that everybody comes at questioning from a different angle. So, like, if you're among creative people, they want to know, well, what's the relationship between questioning and creativity? How does asking the right question fuel your creativity? And then when I was around more sort of analytical people. They'd be like, well, I'm interested in questioning and decision making. Like you're trying to make the right decision. So how do you use questioning in that way? And then if I was around therapists or just regular people who have a husband, wife and family and all this stuff, they want to know, well, how do I use questioning to relate to other people? Is it a good tool for conversation or what if I can, I use it to get to know people. And so I was finding these different areas, and maybe the biggest one of all was leadership. It kept coming up over and over. Like people were saying, like businesses were hiring me to come in and say we want our leaders, all our managers, or our senior vice presidents, we want them to be better at asking questions. So I realized that that was an important piece. So then with my second book, what I did was I identified four areas that seemed to be coming up a lot that people were interested in. And I said, okay, I'm going to. Now I'm going to do a book on questioning, but it's going to just focus in on these four areas. And it was creativity, leadership, relationships with other people, and decision making. So how could you use questioning in each of these four areas? And what are some examples of the types of questions that are really useful in those areas? And so that was the second book, and that one's called the Book of Beautiful Questions. So that one's a little different. I mean, I would say it has a lot more questions in it. Like, the first book is more like telling you the power of questioning and giving you some tools, but it not so much offering you actual questions. There's probably more saying you should come up with your own questions. And then in the second book, I was still telling people they should come up with their own questions, But I was also offering some lists and saying, by the way, here's five great questions that people use with making a certain kind of decision or whatever. So there's a lot of that. And then the third book is a little different. What happened was those two books were out in the world and some education people came to me and said, you know, this book is very. This book is very popular among teachers, which I knew. I kind of knew that teachers were really responding to it. I could see it on social media and I was getting asked to come to schools and stuff. So an educational publisher said, why don't you just adapt all of this for the education? You can take some of these concepts and present them in a format that works for teachers. Like, how can they use this stuff as they're trying to get their students to ask more questions and to ask beautiful questions. So that's what I did. And that became the third book, which is an education book. And it's really geared to the idea that we have all these kids in classes and taking in information. But they would benefit, and we'd all benefit if they were more in the habit of asking questions. Too often they just sit there and kind of absorb. And they really need to be using their curiosity and engaging more with the material. And that means they should be asking more questions. So what can we do about that? Like, can we encourage that? Are there ways to make kids feel more comfortable asking questions in a classroom? And so that's what the third book is.

Awesome. And it seems like. Then there's the. I would think the parenting book of kids with questions is a little bit different maybe, than the teachers helping the kids to ask questions. Or would it be along the same lines?

Parenting? I would say parents could pick up a lot from probably the second book, which has all of the decision making and relationships and all of that. It's all key stuff with parenting. And then they probably could pick up some from the education book, although it's more geared to teachers. It's really about, you're a teacher, you've got a classroom. What are you trying to do to encourage that behavior within the classroom? Although there definitely are lessons that. And things that teachers use that could just as easily be done in the home. Like, for instance, you know, teachers. One of the things I talk to teachers about is you have to model the behavior. You model the behavior of being a curious, questioning person who doesn't have all the answers. And, you know, we're used to teachers behaving as if they have all the answers. And so you want to model and show young people that it's okay to not have all the answers. You know, it's okay to be a person who's on a journey to find out stuff and a person who's interested and who looks up things and asks questions and wonders. And so if you can model that behavior, then young people pick up on that and they realize, oh, that's a good way to be. I don't have to be, like an answer person. I don't have to be an expert on everything. I can also be a person who's wondering and growing and learning. And that works for teachers, but I think it also works for parents. So that idea that you want to demonstrate this behavior to young people.

Yeah, well. And very much aligned with what I've seen of what you talk about in the leadership portion of the book of beautiful questions. Right. This balance of humility and confidence.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a big thing with questions, questioning. I think one of the reasons why we tend to ask less questions as we age, because we all know that kids start out asking tons of questions when they're four or five years old. They're asking hundreds of questions a day. One piece of research points to a four year old girl as the ultimate questioning machine. So it's like the questions are just coming constantly and the four year old boy is pretty close, he's not far behind. So we have this questioning, unbelievable explosion of questioning in young kids and then it goes down, down, down for many kids. So why is it going down? Well, I think a lot of that has to do with fear of revealing that you don't know something. When you're really young, four or five, you don't care about that. But as you get older, you care more and more that by asking a question you might be revealing something about yourself, you might be making yourself look foolish, whatever. So there's all this fear associated with it. And I think that when you then move to the adult world, that's still there, some of that fear is still there. So that's why this idea that you have to have a balance of confidence and humility to be a questioner in general, and particularly if you're a leader, you have to, and you're going to ask questions, you have to have both confidence and humility. So you have to be humble enough to admit that you don't have the answers and that you're still learning. And you have to be confident enough to do that in front of other people and believe that they'll still follow you even though you're asking questions. So the best leaders have that they have supreme confidence. I mean, I always go back to Steve Jobs because he's such a model of business leadership. You think about Steve Jobs, tremendous confidence. So he's not going to be afraid to ask a question in front of people. Because if people think, gee, Steve Jobs doesn't know that, so what? He's still the smartest guy in the room. And so he's very comfortable doing that. And at the same time, he's humble enough to know there's so much stuff he doesn't know and there's so much he can learn constantly, every day. And so he was doing that. And so that's to Me, that's the model for great leaders, is to have that ability to learn constantly and be learning in front of the people that you're leading. That's okay. You know, they should see you learning. And that's actually inspiring to them. I mean, it shows them that you're not this know it all guy or whatever. You're. You're someone who's on a journey, too. And it makes you more approachable. It makes you. It just makes you seem like a better. A better leader.

Yeah, I feel that TED Talks are such a prime example of that. And, you know, with the founder of TED saying some, you know, bragging about how he knows less than you. No, right, exactly.

Yeah. That's Richard Saul Wurman. Yeah, he was a very interesting guy and he was the founder of the TED Talks. And one of his big things is about the power of knowing what you don't know. And as Richard would point out, the smartest people are aware of how much they don't know. You know, you go to Einstein or whatever and, you know, Einstein was more aware of what he didn't know than anybody because he knew that there was so much out there. There was so much stuff out there in the universe, and his brain was amazing enough to realize that there was this incredible amount of stuff going on out there and sort of take it in. And so. But it also makes him aware of how much he doesn't know. And so that's a very interesting kind of surprising counterintuitive thing there, which is that ignorance, being aware of your own ignorance, is an indication of how smart you are. And it's a hard concept for people to get hold of, though, because people are used to thinking of not knowing, the condition of not knowing as a weakness. And so it's hard to get them to flip that and get them to see, well, we're all not knowing. We're all in the condition of not knowing. And the smarter person is the one who's aware of it and realizes some of the things they don't know. And then they can go work on it. They can start to learn, they can try to find out more. But if you don't know what you don't know, then you really, what can you do? Then you're not really going to learn about it. So it's a very, you know, it's an interesting kind of idea to try to get across to people and to leaders especially, because it's a big shift for them to move away from the knowing model. You know, the expert model. I am the guy who knows. I am the person with the answers to move away from that a little bit and to say, nope, I do have some answers. That's why I'm a leader. But I'm also. There's a lot I don't know and I have to keep learning and I have to do that with my team, with other people.

Yeah. And it's almost as if I planned it. That episode 198, which is two episodes before this one, is on the Dunning Kruger effect, which is for everyone who hasn't listened to that episode yet. It is the balance between confidence and competence. And when we have very low competence, we are overly confident. And then there's this weird paradoxical point where you learn how much you don't know and you get a little bit more competent and your confidence tanks before you can start to come back up the path. So I have a whole episode talking about the Dunning Kruger effect, which will be linked in the show notes for everybody who wants to learn more about knowing what you don't know.

Yeah, and that's an important point for questioning, is that it is a little bit of opening a Pandora's box. Because as you become a more questioning person, or let's say we talk about an organization or a small company or something, if you get other people asking more questions, if you make this part of your culture, there are going to be points where people will start to feel like, wow, now that we're questioning things more, it feels like we have less answers than ever. Like the things we were taking for granted about how we're supposed to do stuff, all of a sudden we're questioning it and we're like, wow, do we know anything? Does anything work? And you can hit that point a little bit where it starts to feel that way. And I think you have to push through it with your questioning and with your learning. And eventually you're in a much better place than you were at the beginning, because now you know a lot more. You're aware of your strengths and weaknesses. You've looked at things you were taking for granted, like your assumptions, and some of them were probably bad and wrong, and you've kind of able to adjust now, but you do have to get through that period where you say, boy, if we're starting to move away from the old rule book and we don't have a new rule book yet, you know, that's kind of a scary place to be. And that's. That's a lot of what questioning does involve. It involves getting comfortable with uncertainty.

Yeah, well, and I think what I found in helping people to ask more questions is they you get concerned and worried that you're going to get stuck asking too many questions and how do we know when it's time to that we found one to start answering and how to not be bike shedding on questioning too much. What sort of tips do you have for that?

I think everyone has to more or less come up with their own rules and guidelines for that. It can be the rules could be based on time. They could say, we are going to spend X amount of time exploring questions on this aspect of the business. But we have in mind that we have to start producing something by such and such a time. And so there is going to come a point where we have to move toward action. And I think you can set up those kinds of guidelines. One of the things I tried to do in the first book was I tried to create a framework that's almost like a universal framework. Now, it's not going to work for everybody and it's not going to work in every situation, but it's a pretty basic framework that says, okay, you can divide the questions you're asking about a problem in your business. Let's say you can divide them into three categories. You can have the why questions and you can have the what if questions, and you can have the how questions. Okay? So these three questions, if you use them together, they tend to go in a cycle that pushes you forward and so you won't get stuck too much in the. And the reason it works that way is, okay, let's take the one. So when you're asking why now you're in that sort of philosophical or understanding stage, right? You're trying to say, okay, why does this problem exist? Why is it important to us? So you're trying to understand, and that is a very important stage. However, you don't want to get trapped there because then, like I say, it's sort of philosophical, right? So you could, theoretically, you could get stuck in asking why forever. And you could just be asking, well, why are we doing this? Well, why are we doing that? So the idea is to think of it as the first step. And once you take that step and you've spent some time thinking about the whys, you now have to move on. And so for me, the next logical stage is what if? So you've asked why, you understand the problem a little bit. Now you start to ask what if? Well, what if is all right, it's speculative. We understand the problem. Let's Speculate a little bit on what we could do. What if we tried this? What if we tried that? This almost could be thought of as the brainstorming part of questioning. So you want to do that, but again, you don't want to do that forever. You don't want to be brainstorming forever and just coming up with wild speculation. What if we tried this, what if we tried that? So you want to limit that and move to the next stage at a certain point in time. And the next stage would be how and how is about implementation, it's about practicality. How are we going to do this? How much is it going to cost us? How do we get started? And so I think if you follow some type of a framework like that one, then questioning instead of holding you back, pushes you forward. You say, ok, we're going to start with Y then. Then we're going to move to what if? And we want to get to how. And by the time we get to how, we're going to be doing stuff, we're going to be making stuff, we're going to be solving problems. And I think as long as you approach questioning that way, that it has to be actionable, it has to be moving forward. As long as you approach it that way, then you won't get trapped in philosophical wondering and speculating forever.

Yeah, and so would you break those up amongst different days, you know, have some time for things to breathe is like, we're going to focus on why for a while and then next week we're going to talk about what if.

Yeah, I would. I think it all depends on the individual or the group and what they feel comfortable with. But you know, it's, it's. What I will say is don't shortchange any one of those stages. Like, don't just rush through one of them because they each are very important, they each serve an important role. If you jump past the why stage too quickly, it means you're going to be working on something you don't really understand. And you may not understand the rationale, you may not understand the nature of the problem. There's a lot of things you might be misunderstanding and you need to use that why stage to make sure you get it. Oh, I understand. By the time you're done with why questions, you say, okay, I get what this problem is about, I understand why it's happening, I know what the obstacles are, I understand all that stuff now. Now you're in a much better position to start to work on it because you have an understanding and similarly, you don't want to rush through the sort of speculative blue sky, what if stage, because you may come up with a great idea there, but you got to give yourself the freedom to. To explore and brainstorm and really be imaginative before you get to practical. The problem is people want to rush to practical things. It's natural. It's in our natures. We say we want to do how right away. We want to jump right to how because we want to kill that problem. We want to get rid of it, take it off the table. So it's like, how becomes the thing we want to do first and how is not the thing we should do first. How should be last and get the other ducks in a row and make sure you understand the problem. Make sure you've explored ideas. Now you can get to how.

And yeah, I think that people too. It's like, well, I asked three why questions. It's time to move. Right. We did it. Right. But it's more like, no, you need to ask 100 why questions.

Yeah, you may need to ask a lot of them. You know, and I think a lot of that is there's no rule. There's no hard and fast rules. There is the five whys. There are exercises. There are things that people have said, well, if you ask why five times, you'll get to the real truth of it. And that was. The Toyota company came up with that model years ago. Hey, it's fine. The five whys works. I mean, it's great. It's very effective. Asking why five times about the same problem. It will sometimes lead you to the root cause. It will help you get under the surface. But that doesn't mean that that's a magical number. There is no magical number and there's no formula. It's more like you just want to put the work in. You want to make sure you've thought and you've talked about it as a group and that you've spent enough time really exploring it. And then it's probably more a feel. There's a feel for. Okay, I think we've explored this pretty well now. I think we have a pretty good understanding of some of the issues. So now I think we're ready to move on. And that could either. So you could either give yourself a deadline or you could just say, we're going to trust our gut and we'll know when it feels like we've spent enough time on this stage of questioning.

Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about design thinking. And it ties in with When I started working at an advertising agency just out of college, and one of my mentors there, we're looking at taglines for slogans, whatever, for a company. And he said, you know, spend an hour writing and then put it away, and then spend an hour brainstorming things and then put it away. And then the next day, spend an hour. And on day four, you might have something worth using right after you've come back, come back, come back, because you have to get all that other junk out of the way. And questions are so important too. Of like, sometimes the purpose of a question is to help you get to the next question. You don't have to answer them all. That's something I know that people struggle with when you're. When I've talked with them about questions, at least.

Yeah, well, questioning is. And I do a lot of exercises or workshops where I use this technique, which I got from a Harvard based group called the Right Question Institute. And it has to do with brainstorming in questions. Okay. So you take a problem and you put it out there. And everybody, instead of trying to come up with ideas, tries to come up with as many questions as they can about this issue or this topic. And then you're trying to come up with 10 questions and then 20 questions and 50 questions. And then you go and you look at your questions and you kind of work, analyze them and work on them and combine them and do stuff to them. And so when we do that, that exercise, and I've done it with all kinds, I've done it with the NASA space program, I've done it with Starbucks, I've done it with all these companies, when you do that, it uses your thinking in a different way. And that's the thing about questioning. It's kind of interesting. It's almost like a different muscle that you're using from your idea generating muscle. When you're trying to come up with ideas or solutions, you're using one way of thinking. And when you're asking questions, you're using a different way of thinking. And I'm not saying one is better than the other because the problem solving or the solutions thing is important, but I'm saying they're different. And the question, when you're using the question muscle, one of the things that happens is, and I've seen it over and over, you start to see things differently as you're trying to formulate questions about something. It's like you're looking at it sideways and upside down because you're trying to come up with Questions.

And.

And as you do that, you just see things you didn't see before, your awareness kind of grows. And so it's really powerful, and it's a really good tool. Even if the questions don't produce answers right away, that act of asking questions and wondering about something and almost interrogating a problem, the act of doing that will make things visible to you that you didn't see before, and it's really, really valuable.

Absolutely. As we're closing out, and I think I could ask questions with you all day long. We have talked a little bit about design thinking on the show, but not a ton. And so would love to have some of the insights from you, having written a book on it of what that means to you and what people should know about design thinking.

Yeah. So there's a lot of definitions of design thinking. And I used to, when I'd go and give talks about it, I'd put these definitions up on the PowerPoint screen, and they were so wordy and so jargony and so clunky, and they'd go on for, you know, 27 words, and half of it you didn't understand because it was being written by consultants and. Or really wonky designers. And so I finally, I would put these complicated definitions up on the board and say, you know, this is how IDEO defines design thinking. And then I would put my definition up and it would say, design thinking equals how designers think. Right. And it's really that simple. Because if you think of it that way, that's all design thinking is. It's how a designer would go about approaching a problem. And what can we learn from the way designers approach a problem? And can we apply that? And so I broke it down. There's like four or five things designers do when they're using this kind of design thinking. They usually start with questioning, which was one of the first chapters of my design thinking book. See, like everybody else, I thought questioning should be a chapter, and so it was one of the first chapters, and then I realized, wait a minute, this is worth its own book. So. Yeah. So one of the first things they do, though, is they try to frame the problem. They ask a lot of questions, they try to get their arms around it, they try to understand it, and they try to get it into a concept that they can work with. And then they're doing a lot of the what if stuff. They're doing a lot of brainstorming, and that's a design thinking technique somewhere in there. They do design research, and that may involve going out and observation. They observe people, they try to watch the problem in action so they can understand it better. And then they eventually move to what I would call the how stage, which is prototyping. And that's where they start to, you know, they'll say, okay, I understand the problem. I've gone out into the world, I've seen it in action. I've seen things. I've done a lot of brainstorming. And in my brainstorming, I've come up with a possible. A couple of possible ideas. Now we're going to start building little versions of those ideas so we can test them, put them out in the world and test them. So they do prototyping and then they test the prototypes, and then based on that, they go back and they finish their design. So it's a cyclical process that designers use, and any business or anybody can really do the same thing. I mean, you know, we can follow those steps of asking the questions and doing deep research and then creating some type of a prototype. Maybe you. You may not be able to create prototypes the way a design firm can. They have laser technology to create little models of things, but you can create a mock website that's a prototype. You can write an outline for something and share it with people. That's a prototype. So I was just, in my book, I was just making the case that we can all use this mindset and this process to. As we try to take on problems.

Wonderful. Thank you for breaking that down. And of course, there will be links to at least five of your books in the show notes.

That's enough.

I don't think so. No, we want all of them. We'll read them all. And so as well, before we go to close out, I want to ask, as someone who spends so much time with questions, do you have your own beautiful question that you're continuing to work on or kind of just living in everyone else's questions most of the time?

No, I do have my own, and I'm really glad you asked that, because it's an important thing to leave with people is that if you want to think about the idea of creating your own beautiful question and taking ownership of it. Right. So it's not. It may not be a question you have to answer right away, but it can be really powerful to think about something you really want to do or a challenge, a big challenge that you're interested in pursuing and working on. Think about how to frame that as a big, ambitious question. You might want to start it with the word how might I, the words how might I? Or if you're doing it with a team of people, it becomes how might we? And that can be the beginning of the question. And then you figure out how to phrase the question in a way that articulates the problem. And it can be as complex as you want or as simple as you want. It may be that you're trying to do a multi part thing, solve a problem that has three parts to it. So your question might be how might I do X while also making sure I do Y. And at the same time I have to keep track of Z. And you put it all together into one big question and that's a thing you can share with people, put it on your bulletin board, have it in your brain. It's just a good motivator. My own, I have one, my own one is how might I spread the word about the power of questioning? So this is a question I can work on for my whole life if I want to. Because there's no one answer to it. Right. It's like there's no one answer of oh, the way you spread the word is X and that's it. No, I could spread the word about questioning in countless ways and there's new directions I could go in and there's new things I could try. So it's very motivating, it's very open ended. I can stay with it for a long time and so it becomes a thing I can just continually pursue. And if you can find a question like that for yourself, it's worth doing. It's a mission, by the way. You can do it for your company too. I always say to companies, forget the mission statement. What's your mission question?

Oh yeah, good.

Why doesn't your company have a question that says how might we as a company achieve X, Y or Z? How might we find a way to do this? And that becomes the thing that drives. Well, it becomes the mission. Because the mission your company is on. If you think about it, it's kind of crazy that missions are put in the form of a statement because a mission is something you should be on. It's this thing, it should be ongoing and you haven't gotten there yet. So it's natural for that to be a question. So I think, yeah, think about your own beautiful question. And if you have a business, think about what might be a mission question. Or it could be several mission questions that could drive your business and motivate your people.

Wonderful. Well, in our efforts to help spread the word about the power of questions what is the best way for everyone that's so excited to learn more and connect with you? Where should they go?

Probably the best place is I have a website that kind of brings it all together. It's got a lot of my articles. It's got just a lot of fun stuff about questioning as well as a lot of practical, useful stuff. And the site is amorebeautiful question.com so just put those words all together amorebeautifulquestion.com and yeah, you'll find basically everything, everything I've worked on is somewhere in that site and it's a good kind of crash course in questioning.

Perfect. And of course we will link to your Twitter handle Glimmerguy.

Right? That sounds good.

So everyone can share their beautiful questions with Warren.

Yeah, absolutely.

And how much importance and value you've gotten in listening to the episode. Please be sure to tag him on Twitter. Glimmerguy and myself, Hebrainy Biz and we'd love to hear from you.

Oh well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, it was so wonderful to talk with you and thank you for joining me here for episode 200 of the Brainy Business.

Great to be here.

Thank you again to Warren Berger for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation for me, I'm guessing you already know that my brain is buzzing about all of it and has been for days. I of course love how deep questioning can get and how much value there is in asking the right questions at the right time. That there are categories of questions and just how much they can do for us personally and in business. I also really love this idea of being a question ologist and having questionology departments at schools in the future. Wouldn't that be amazing? I am determined to join Warren as a questionologist. It just sounds like such a fantastic way to live life. If you know anyone who is currently researching questions, whether it's you or someone else, please do put them in contact with me. I really am interested in doing some research into questioning. I had some additional conversations with Warren about the research that's being done and the opportunities there. So please, please send them my way either through connections on LinkedIn you can find me as Molina Palmer on most of the other socials is the Brainy biz. Or you can send me an email melinathebrainybusiness.com and what about you? Do you want to be a questionologist or do you just have a little tidbit that maybe you want to share about that you loved from the show, something that resonated with you. Share it with us on Twitter. You'll find Warren as Glimmer Guy and I'm the Brainy Biz. Take us both and chat with us there. And don't forget about those show notes which are waiting for you atthebrainybusiness.com 200. In them you'll find, of course, a link to get your own copy of five of Warren's books, including a more Beautiful Question, as well as to other related past episodes, ways to connect with Warren, including that Twitter handle, and more. Thank you again to Warren Berger for joining me on the show today for episode 200 of the Brainy Business. And thank you so much for being a fan and listening listening to the show. I appreciate you and look forward to the next 200 episodes. What do you want to learn about what episodes would you like next? What topics? Let me know on the socials or within our free behavioral economics community. The Be Thoughtful Revolution links for that in the show notes. Of course, this show is for you at the end of the day and I always love hearing from listeners. So please do connect and thank you. Thank you again for making this show possible. And next week join me for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You won't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness. Com.