Tweetspeak Poetry

Book Club: A More Beautiful Question

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As an insurance adjuster, I ask questions for a living. There’s some irony in that if you know that I also bypassed a career in journalism in part because the George Costanza model of newswriting—in which I wrote solid stories based on interviews I didn’t actually conduct because I didn’t like asking questions—wasn’t going to work beyond the university classroom.

There might also be a tiny bit of irony in the fact that though I am a professional question-asker, I also believe there is such a thing as a dumb question, though perhaps dumb question is the wrong thing to say when what I mean is bad question. That’s the sort of question that isn’t really a question but is more of a statement, or a directive, or sometimes even an accusation that attempts to masquerade as a question by holding up a curly piece of punctuation around its eyes.

Questions and I have long since forged a level of peace, and sometimes I’m even good at them, even if I don’t prefer the kind that have me inquiring of a 12-year-old why he might have taken a baseball bat to a neighbor’s windshield or just how many hours before driving since a guy had last puffed. The best kind of questions to me, now, are those that create openings rather than close off people and possibilities, and the kind that explore alternatives instead of prove cases.

These are closer to what Warren Berger would call beautiful questions: “A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something—and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.”

We invite you to join us for our next book club discussion where we’ll be exploring Berger’s book, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas,  considering how asking beautiful questions like Why, What If, and How can help us move forward in our businesses and personal lives, our writing, and our creative endeavors.

To join with us, pick up the book at your favorite bookseller or your library. I’ll have a post each Wednesday for four weeks to get the conversation started and invite you to meet us in the comment box beginning Wednesday, March 11.

Planned reading schedule for A More Beautiful Question:

March 11: Chapter 1 • The Power of Inquiry and Chapter 2 • Why We Stop Questioning
March 18: Chapter 3 • The Why, What If, and How of Innovative Questioning
March 25: Chapter 4 • Questioning in Business
April 1: Chapter 5 • Questioning for Life

To get the questions started, try this “inquiry quotient” quiz or watch the book trailer:

Browse our recent book clubs

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Photo by Horia Varlan, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by LW Lindquist.

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About Will Willingham

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.

Comments

  6. Maureen Doallas says

    This selection promises rich conversations, which I’ll look forward to.

    MIT’s Media Lab is one of my go-to places on the Web when I want to be inspired by and think about the influence of inquiry on innovation. Some years ago, I had an opportunity to attend a creativity lecture at which Tod Machover and others from the Lab offered demos of their projects, particularly in music and various expressive technologies. Machover’s work with persons with dementias or catastrophic brain injuries has led to creations known as hyperinstruments, which are phenomenal. The list of research interests and groups at the Lab is remarkable. The “Lifelong Kindergarten” is especially appealing. The Lab describes itself as “anti-disciplinary” and stresses its commitment to “looking beyond the obvious to ask the questions not yet asked”. What goes on there affirms the value of refusing to be hemmed in in silos.

    Reply

    • L. L. Barkat says

      Fascinating, Maureen. I’m particularly interested in your note about hyperinstruments. Say more? Is this some technology or approach that has made actual strides working with those with catastrophic brain injuries?

      Reply

      • Maureen Doallas says

        Here’s a page on Music, Mind, and Health that includes an Alzheimer’s-related project under Machover’s direction:
        http://opera.media.mit.edu/projects/music_mind_health.html

        There’s a TEDTalk with Machover that you might want to watch. (It’s in my Wednesday Wonder 10-13-10 blog post). As I recall, it demonstrates Machover’s Opera for the Future group, which seeks to evolve the hyperinstrument concepts, which essentially involve using technology (e.g., computers, video, live apps) in combination with traditional musical instruments to create expanded interactive environments comprising elements of the sonic, reactive robotic, visual, and more. Machover works with professional musicians, students, amateur musicians, the public. The research covers instrument design, interactive touring, new kinds of performance spaces, some entirely virtual, and what are referred to as “music toys”. His application Hyperscore uses a mouse-based interface and allows musical composition from graphical representations (freehand drawings).

        My blog post also has a video about Machover’s “Death and the Powers”, an amazing opera for which Machover composed music; it features robots, scenery that “expresses” itself, hyperinstruments. It has its own Web pages (http://opera.media.mit.edu/projects/deathandthepowers/).

        Individual current and past projects are here: http://opera.media.mit.edu/projects/#

        One example at the 2009 lecture I attended was a demo of the headpiece that Machover and his team created to allow composer Dan Ellsey, whose cerebral palsy has robbed him of his ability to walk or speak, to still write, play, and conduct music because of Machover’s Hyperscore software and the hyperinstrument. It was/is phenomenal!

        One of the really interesting things Machover pointed out is that music is the one of the last things people lose from memory; the group’s research shows that people can remember lyrics to a song they heard 50 or more years ago, even if they have lost memories of all else due to dementia, for example. The findings led to fascinating projects called brain instrument interfaces.

        Take a look at the project called Music, Mind, and Mouth: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~janiwang/MediaLabSite/thesis.html

        Or the Vocal Vibrations: Expressive Performance for Body-Mind Wellbeing:
        http://web.media.mit.edu/~ejessop/vocalVibrations.html

        Can you tell how jazzed I can become just rethinking about the Media Lab and Machover in particular?

        Reply

  7. Maureen Doallas says

    I have been thinking lot about Berger’s statement that the question “How does one define ‘good’?”, while a “grand question” is outside the purview of his book. I just want to capture my thought before I lose it, which is this:

    How does one’s definition of ‘good’ affect charitable giving via crowdsourcing? In light of that definition (which probably is also tied to some sense of what it means to be generous), how do we capitalize on what we know about giving patterns to ensure that our donations go to the truly needy?

    What sparks this is the recent public outpouring of money via social media for the man in Detroit who had no car and walked some 20 miles a day to get to his job. He not only received a new free car from a dealer, he was given $350k. In contrast, during Hurricane Katrina, Nadia Bolz-Weber, a priest, tells a story of how she and her parish were utterly scammed by a woman who wasn’t from New Orleans.

    With crowd funding, it’s become ok to ask for handouts. But we have no guidance, really, on what’s worthy of being supported and what’s not. I don’t think it’s an inconsequential issue but the question remains: How do we ensure our hard-earned dollars produce a social good that is greater than the need of any one individual?

    Reply

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