The Power Of Why

Simple Questions That Lead to Success

Amanda Lang

• Publisher: Collins
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781443413206
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The urge to question is natural for small children—just ask any parent. But few of us are aware that it is also one of the most vital tools for success. In The Power of Why, Amanda Lang shows how curiosity and the ability to ask the right questions fuels innovation and can drive change not just in business but also in our personal lives.

Weaving together the latest research with in-depth profiles of innovators from around the world, Lang explores how to harness and develop the power of curiosity. She reveals how a major retailer set out to discover what really makes men happy—and was stunned by the results. She finds out why, at one particular hospital, nurses think it's better if they don't wash their hands. She learns why the most common methods of brainstorming don't actually work and discovers a new soccer ball that could change the world.

A book that challenges conventional wisdom and offers practical, inspiring advice, The Power of Why shows how it's possible to reignite your innate curiosity and overcome long-standing barriers—leaving you more creative, productive and fulfilled in your job and happier in your relationships.

CHAPTER ONE

What Happens to Curiosity?

We are born curious. Thank goodness. If babies didn’t have an innate drive to figure out how the world works, they wouldn’t learn very much. Curiosity keeps them interested, alert, observant and focused. Later in life we learn to look like we’re paying attention, out of politeness, or we pay attention merely to pass the test or because we suspect the information may be helpful in the future. But babies and toddlers? They haven’t learned to fake it. If they’re not interested, they simply zone out or cry or experiment with something they are curious about, like the physics of flinging a bowl of applesauce across the room, or finding out what’s in that cupboard with the child lock.

But very early on, and often unwittingly, we begin to train curiosity out of kids. Think of the messaging: curiosity killed the cat, led Little Red Riding Hood off the straight and narrow path and didn’t work out so well for Pandora, either. Think of the warnings about talking to strangers. Think about Eve, for goodness sake, who basically got booted out of the Garden of Eden because she wondered what apples taste like. When they are still very little, children begin to receive contradictory messages about curiosity. Asking whether c-a-t spells cat is good. Asking “Why is that guy so fat?” is impolite. Asking your great-aunt whether she’d like another biscuit is nice. Being curious about and open to strangers is dangerous. Asking whether it’s all right to go in the pool is sensible. Challenging authority and tradition is disrespectful.

Admonitions about the dangers of curiosity usually kick in at about the same time that children start actively searching for causal explanations, seeking information that can help them predict and interpret events and figure out the world. Or put another way, one that’s familiar to anyone who has spent any time at all with a toddler: they ask questions. A lot of questions—dozens per preschooler per hour, according to researchers. By the age of three, quite a few of these questions start with the word why. For adults, this can quickly get irritating, especially when your best explanations just elicit yet another why. Many adults view a never-ending stream of questions as an attention-seeking gambit and brush off kids’ questions or ignore them entirely or bark, “Because I said so, that’s why!” Researchers report that almost 40 percent of the time, either adults simply don’t respond to young children’s questions or their response is some variation of “Get lost.” (You might wonder why so many adults respond this way; maybe it’s because it’s how they remember being treated as children.)

But according to a recent study that closely tracked what children do after asking questions, they are not seeking attention. Information really is what they’re after. “When preschool children ask ‘why?’ questions, they are not merely trying to prolong the conversation (as previously suspected by many parents and researchers alike). Upon receiving an explanation, children often end their questioning and react with satisfaction,” the researchers reported. It’s when kids don’t get the explanatory information they’re seeking that the endless whys start. The reason: a thirst for knowledge, not an uncanny talent for annoying grown-ups.

However, if questions don’t get answered or are actually rebuffed, many kids simply conclude that there’s no point in asking. That’s exactly what we don’t want them to do, for a number of reasons. For starters, highly curious kids learn more; the more they find out, the more they realize they don’t know and the deeper they dig for information, whether the topic they’re interested in is computers or rap or chemistry. Curiosity is, therefore, strongly correlated with intelligence. For instance, one longitudinal study of 1,795 kids measured intelligence and curiosity when they were three years old, and then again eight years later. Researchers found that kids who had been equally intelligent at age three were, at eleven, no longer equal. The ones who’d been more curious at three were now also more intelligent, which isn’t terribly surprising when you consider how curiosity drives the acquisition of knowledge. The more interested and alert and engaged you are, the more you’re likely to learn and retain. In fact, highly curious kids scored a full twelve points higher on IQ tests than less curious kids did.

Furthermore, curiosity is intrinsically rewarding. If you’ve ever watched little kids absorbed in trying to figure out how to play a new game or solve a puzzle, you know what I mean. The desire to acquire more IQ points isn’t what motivates them. What’s driving them is more self-interested: pleasure. It feels good to be interested, to be driven to explore and find out new things. Sometimes it feels risky or even aggravating not knowing what the answer is or what will happen next. But always there’s a sense of mental alertness. And that sure feels better than being bored and disengaged.

Curious kids learn how to learn, and how to enjoy it—and that, more than any specific body of knowledge, is what they will need to have in the future. The world is changing so rapidly that by the time a student graduates from university, everything he or she learned may already be headed toward obsolescence. The main thing that student needs to know is not what to think but how to think in order to face new challenges and solve new problems.

“In the industrial economy, the person who wins is the expert,” explains Claude Legrand, co-author of Innovative Intelligence. “In the knowledge economy, the person who wins is the one who has the process to solve complex problems.” That’s because, in the knowledge economy, the goalposts are shifting constantly. What’s hot today may be old news in six months. Developing the processes to cope with the challenges this will pose in terms of our jobs, Legrand believes, is all about being receptive to change, and possessing the mental and emotional flexibility and desire to continue learning—having a curious mentality, in other words, rather than an expert mentality.

THE MYTH OF EXPERTISE

Many of us are still hanging on to an expert mentality, believing that innovation is connected to expertise. Some of the time this is true. Facebook wouldn’t exist if Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t been extraordinarily knowledgeable about computers and the Internet. New drugs are developed by highly trained scientists, not high school students.

But oftentimes, innovators have no particular expertise. They simply have a lot of questions. A curious mentality, in other words.

Steve Gass, for instance, was a patent lawyer when he created the SawStop. He wasn’t an engineer and had no experience building power tools. He was able to figure out how to jerry-rig a used table saw he bought for $200 because one of his hobbies is building radio-controlled airplanes, but he wouldn’t have gone to the trouble if he hadn’t been so curious to see whether his idea could really work. He had a busy practice and lots of other interests, like kayaking. He wouldn’t have stuck with the saw experiment if he hadn’t enjoyed the process of looking for answers.

For him, real-world problems have the same allure that crossword puzzles do for other people. They’re fun, and he wants to solve them—so much that he’ll stick with a problem as long as it takes to get an answer.

Why is he like this? Partly temperament, probably. He just enjoys challenging standard thinking, and understands this is both a strength and a weakness; some people find him argumentative—”just ask my ex-wife,” he says with a laugh. But there’s another reason, too. When he was growing up, his parents let him break things in order to learn how to fix them. They encouraged his experiments (though they were pretty distressed when he demagnetized their brand-new colour TV, so that, until the repairman arrived, the images were not only black and white but also distorted). Being allowed to make mistakes, he learned to experience them as part of the learning process rather than as catastrophic events, and he learned how to persevere until he figured something out. By the time he was at university, he had his own tool box, and when he came home for visits, his parents greeted him at the door with a long to-do list: fix the busted washing machine, figure out why the refrigerator door won’t close properly … To Gass, these were less chores than enjoyable diversions.

His interest in problem solving fuels his tenacity, which is a good thing, as he’s needed it with SawStop. His invention seemed like a slamdunk, and the prototype won innovation awards and, in 2002, made the 100 Best New Innovations list in Popular Science magazine. It’s easy to see why: standard table saws are incredibly dangerous. Every single day, they cause eleven amputations and eleven fractures in the United States alone. All told, there are 67,300 “medically-treated blade contact injuries annually,” according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The total market for table saws is about $200 million, but the annual cost to the U.S. economy of the injuries they cause is ten times that—the safety commission estimates it’s $2.36 billion.

But just as automakers fought the installation of air-bags, so did the power tool industry fight—and continues to fight—SawStop. Tool manufacturers have never had to care about fingers, but about profit margins. Licensing Gass’s technology would cost them money, but that would be peanuts compared to the capital costs they’d incur overhauling their existing production lines and products. And they’d have to do it. If an injury mitigation system crept into the mainstream market, it would be impossible to manufacture a table saw without it because of the liability issues. Speaking of which, if a toolmaker marketed a “safe” saw, who would be liable in the event of an accident? So far, consumers had accepted that liability as 100 percent theirs—would SawStop shift that balance? Toolmakers didn’t want to find out. No thanks, they told Gass. Not only that, they seemed determined to undermine SawStop, criticizing its technology.

And so it was that Gass and the two other patent lawyers who’d become his business partners asked themselves a crucial question: Should they try to get their old jobs back, or learn how to manufacture SawStops? They’d never run a business or manufactured a thing in their lives, and they’d need to raise capital. The only certainty was that there would be some very lean years. But the prospect of a steep learning curve was energizing; all three liked figuring out how to do new things, and by 2004, they had.

“We started selling saws in November, and then in March 2005 I got a call from a customer,” Gass remembers. “He said, ‘Steve, we had a guy run his hand into his saw today.’ I’m just waiting, my stomach dropped, and then he said, ‘Worked just like you said! He’s got a little nick.’ It was a huge relief. Two weeks later we got the next call. Now I think we probably get a finger-save a day.”

Today, the SawStop isn’t just safer than standard saws. “How can we make this better?” is the constant refrain that has driven incremental improvements and the development of new features, such as a better fence to hold back wood chips and particles. Indeed, the entire spirit of the company revolves around challenging the status quo—and each other. “How do you know?” is another constant refrain. Gass says, “We had a guy come out to visit, a former client looking to invest in the company, and as he was leaving he said, ‘Gosh, is everything okay here? You guys seem to be going at each other.’ I was flabbergasted. From our perspective, questioning and challenging is just normal, there’s nothing heated about it.”

Meanwhile, SawStop has asked the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to rule on whether injury mitigation systems should be mandatory for table saws—a gamble, as realistically the major manufacturers may just wind up ripping off SawStop’s technology and launching an endless patent fight. But, despite the ongoing uncertainty—and the fact that his bank balance is much lower than it would be had he remained in law—Steve Gass has no regrets. “This is my dream job,” he says, “because I get to work on interesting technology and it’s challenging, and I’m proud that we prevent mutilations and injuries.”

He didn’t find his dream job because he was an expert. He got where he is because he’s naturally curious, and that makes learning new things and taking on new challenges both enjoyable and fulfilling. He takes his measure not through the size of his paycheque (though a large one, he agrees, is pretty nice) but through the volume of what he’s learned, and how he’s been able to apply it in practical ways to make the world a little better.

The knowledge economy needs people like Steve Gass, people for whom the same old same old isn’t good enough, people who like to tinker with things in the hope of coming up with something even better.

CURIOSITY IN THE CLASSROOM

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over the past forty years about the need for schools to promote creativity and original thinking, but there hasn’t been widespread recognition that creativity is an outcome. It’s triggered by curiosity, and in my view, that’s what schools should be promoting first and foremost. Let’s face it: passive, incurious kids are not creative. They’re not churning out imaginative stories or figuring out new stuff in the chemistry lab or fooling around with a computer program to try to make it do something different. Kids who aren’t very curious are couch potatoes, intellectually speaking. The reality is that before anyone can do anything innovative or original, there’s got to be a sense of wonder or at least a spark of interest, and a whole bunch of questions.

But while schools are terrific at disseminating information, most of them are quite a bit less terrific at promoting curiosity. In many schools, there is, as one researcher aptly put it, “a pedagogy of ‘intellectual hide-and-seek’ in which teachers hold all the correct answers and students aim to seek out, memorize, and parrot back those answers.” Students learn to suppress their own insights and ideas and, instead, try to figure out what the teacher wants to hear. The system is set up so that kids will converge on the one right answer, rather than thinking divergently—coming up with several novel and unexpected possibilities—and asking questions of their own. According to the researcher, “Such practices not only underestimate the importance of imaginative thinking, but deaden the personal value of the information being taught to students.”

In an educational system in which productivity is measured by hours logged per task, number of worksheets completed and scores on standardized tests, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to prompt kids to ask more questions unless the questions are about what’s going to be on the test. In many classrooms, stopping to encourage and mull over questions that aren’t procedural or directly related to the material at hand is viewed as wasting time. It’s no big surprise then that most kids come to school bursting with questions, but exit, a dozen or so years later, asking very few. Curiosity declines from one grade to the next, and the reason isn’t that kids’ thirst for knowledge has been satiated and they now know everything they want or need to know.

The reason is that, by and large, the education system (aided and abetted by many parents and governments) doesn’t celebrate, much less tap into, children’s hunger to explore, inquire and discover. The system simply isn’t set up to do that. Schools were designed at the turn of the nineteenth century to meet the needs of a completely different economy, which required workers who’d been equipped with a reliable, standardized package of knowledge.

Today, we need workers who are excited about learning and know how to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances—just think of all the changes the Internet has wrought in so many different industries over the past five years—and come up with new ways to do things. We need workers who question rules of thumb and conventional wisdom, and ask, as they do at SawStop, “How do you know?”

Currently, however, most schools don’t reinforce or reward divergent thinking. How can they, given their mandate? So instead of learning how to learn, many kids are learning how to be good at going to school. The straight-A student is, in virtually every educational setting, the one who has figured out what the teacher wants and how to deliver it.

My point is not that kids shouldn’t be learning facts and shouldn’t be memorizing, say, the letters of the alphabet or doing addition and subtraction drills. My point is that, for many kids, this is the only kind of learning that’s going on at school. Their natural curiosity—the kind that keeps them excited about finding out more—gets damped down. The kids at the back of the class, the ones who challenge authority or check out altogether, may wind up scrounging for change on the street corner. But they may also be the ones who go on to start a software company or come up with a new way to treat diabetes. Whether or not schools reward “Why?” the world certainly does.

QUESTION THE UNQUESTIONABLE

Highly innovative people share five distinct “discovery skills,” according to a six-year research project involving more than 500 individuals who started innovative companies—the likes of Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com and Niklas Zennström, the guy who came up with Skype—as well as 3,000 highly creative executives. The most important discovery skill, the one that can “turbocharge the others”? Asking questions. And of all the questions innovators asked, one was rated as being the most important: Why? Study participant Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata summed up the innovative mindset this way: “Question the unquestionable.”

The results of the study were published in The Innovator’s DNA, co-authored by legendary innovation guru Clayton Christensen, Jeffrey Dyer and Hal Gregersen, who point out that managers tend to ask how questions, like, How are we going to speed up production? Innovative entrepreneurs, on the other hand, ask Why? and Why not? They are the kids at the back of the class, all grown up: skeptical, unimpressed with conventional wisdom and pretty sure there’s a better way. Michael Dell, for example, told the authors that “his idea for founding Dell Computer sprang from his asking why a computer cost five times as much as the sum of its parts. ‘I would take computers apart … and would observe that $600 worth of parts were sold for $3,000.’ In chewing over the question, he hit on his revolutionary business model.”

This wasn’t a particularly brilliant question. It was actually pretty basic. But asking basic questions forces people back to the heart of the matter, to re-examine and justify practices and beliefs that have become so ingrained they’re almost invisible. And the payoff that comes from questioning assumptions and rules of thumb can be huge. “In business, the big prizes are found when you can ask a question that challenges the corporate orthodoxy,” Andrew Cosslett, the CEO of the InterContinental Hotels Group, told the New York Times. “In every business I’ve worked in, there’s been a lot of cost and value locked up in things that are deemed to be ‘the way we do things around here.’ So you have to talk to people and ask them, ‘Why do you do that?’”

In other words, you have to ask the kinds of questions a three-year-old would ask, the kinds of questions that schools should be encouraging kids of all ages to ask. But as the educational system is currently constructed, the right answer, not the cheeky question, gets the gold star—and the faster you get t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE: What Happens to Curiosity?
• CHAPTER TWO: Forget What You Think You Know
• CHAPTER THREE: Question Yourself
• CHAPTER FOUR: Figure Out What No One Else Is Doing
• CHAPTER FIVE: Dream Big
• CHAPTER SIX: Borrow, Don’t Just Follow
• CHAPTER SEVEN: Be Prepared to Change Course—Frequently
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Get Engaged
• CHAPTER NINE: Play Well (A Little More Roughly, That Is) with Others
• CHAPTER TEN: Talk to Strangers
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• INDEX
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• About the Author
• ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE POWER OF WHY
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher