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Warren Berger

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87
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2017-12-14
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2017-12-14
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  1. “Environment for you because we want it, we want to do that. If it's a real estate decision and you can't afford to have individual offices, okay, be honest about that. But what I like is what I want to see companies do is try to balance it with some type of a hybrid architecture and structure that has both open spaces and closed spaces. I think you're seeing a number of companies do that now. I think I'm starting to see that sort of mix. And I think that's a really good way to proceed”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Yeah, I think I've seen it. I've seen it happen. I've seen it. I've seen companies go to an open model and it's been a disaster. And I think what happens is that it's not respecting the individual. It's saying when we're here at this company, everyone just has to be part of this blob. And it's like, yes, there are times when you want that sense of communal behavior and interaction, but you don't necessarily want it all day long, every day. And I think it's, you know, a lot to be, to be frank, a lot of times when companies are doing this, it's a real estate decision too. I mean, it's a lot easier to put an office together that is an open office because you need a lot less space. And so, okay, if they have to do that, well, all right, maybe that's a reality, but don't try to sell it to people as, you know, we're creating this utopian.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “I think it's definitely not a great idea. One other thing that I'm not totally sold on is, and I think we're starting to see a backlash against it, is the whole open office culture, which I think makes sense up to a point, but I think it's been oversold. And I think the idea that nobody needs any private space or their own space. I've always felt that's kind of a mistake. And I feel like it's a real struggle with office cultures to get the balance right. But I think there's some kind of a balance you have to achieve that somehow has a lot of interaction and openness, but also gives people the space they need to think and to work and to create.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Yeah, it's a big mistake. And yet I see people do it all the time. And I saw it in the advertising industry, of course, where you were either in the creative department or you weren't. Everybody else was just something else. But the people in the creative department were the creatives. It just always struck me as an odd division. And I understand people have different skills and I understand some people are going to be more involved maybe in the copywriting than other people. But I just thought that broad division of creative versus non-creative never made sense to me. And I see it now playing out in lots of other organizations where they will basically say this is our innovation group. Well, what does that say to the rest of the company? The rest of the company is the non-innovation group. So I think this is an idea that is.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “A common piece of advice about business or creativity that I'm not buying. Well, I think I just named one right there about the idea that failure is a wonderful thing. I don't think it necessarily is. So that would be one thing. I think the idea, there's an idea that is out of there.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Yeah, exactly right, right, and that's that takes time. I mean, it takes some perspective. You know, you need the perspective of maybe a little bit of distance from the actual event or the actual realization that things were not going to work as well as they did. You know, you tend to be in a negative mindset when that first happens. And, you know, it may just take a little bit of time before you can then look at it with not such a negative mindset.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Myself from it. I don't want to be associated with it because I want to get away from it because it's a negative, it's totally a negative, you know, negative thing. So I think that's part of the time, the process that has to happen before, at least for me, I could go back and think about, okay, what is here that I can use? What can I learn? What is possibly some good stuff within this failure that didn't get used as well as it should have, but still has potential. You know, I think if you can look at your failure and almost you're almost trying to pull the gems out, you know, the things that got buried in the mess, but that were good. They were good things, you know. So if you can pull those good things out and figure. Out okay, you know, how do I take what's good there and come at it in a fresh way?”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “I think it was some time had passed. I think that it was at the time I was failing, I was just desperately trying to save that project or do whatever I could to salvage that project. And gradually it became apparent that if a book doesn't get on the radar at a certain point, it's just really hard. And you're not suddenly going to put it on the radar. So it took a while before I even acknowledged or admitted to myself that this was not going to be a successful book. You know, I was fighting against it for a long time. And I think it takes a while and then again, as I said, there was a period after that where once you do accept that it's not successful project, then there's a period where you say, I want a disk.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Thing out there now around failure that we should be happy about failure and we should just embrace it like it's the greatest thing that ever happened to us. I'm sorry that that does not strike me as realistic. Failure is always going to hurt a little bit. Whenever you don't do what you set out to do and you don't achieve exactly what you set out to do, you're going to feel disappointment. And I don't think we can just like mask that or hide that. I think that's a human, that's human nature. You're going to feel that way. So I think what we have to, the more realistic way to talk about failure is, you know, yes, embrace the suck, as they say in the military, you know, feel the pain at the time, but be willing to, you know, lick your wounds and examine the failure and see what you can.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Oh, I've been definitely low when it was happening, when I was first realizing that the book was not going to succeed. I was like, you know, very low and I was feeling like, again, like I should just drop this, get as far away from it as I can and go on to something totally new and totally different. got myself, you know, again, mostly by reacting to what audiences were telling me. You know, I was able to gradually get myself to become interested in this new idea that was pulled out of the old idea. And I think it was definitely a process. It definitely took time. And you are going to have to lick your wounds when you have a failure. There's going to be a period where you're just not going to feel great about it. I mean, I think there's a little bit of a fall.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “As I was going around talking about Glimmer and giving little speeches here and there, I noticed that everyone was interested in one chapter of the book about questioning. And that was that interest among people just sort of put the idea in my head, well, you know what? What if I still love some of the things I was talking about in Glimmer? But maybe I was like talking about too much, you know, I was talking about all the way designers think and I was just exploring a lot of different directions. And maybe if I just zero in on questioning.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “But it just didn't connect. And so, you know, from a commercial standpoint, the people who read it really liked it, but it just wasn't connecting in the marketplace. It just wasn't getting any traction. And so that was really hard. I mean, that was really hard for me because I felt number one, I'd had really high expectations, and so did the publisher, and they were just dashed. And the book was just not selling at all. And so, you know, I kind of didn't know how to react to that at first. And I thought, yeah, I'm probably not going to do another book because number one, who's going to publish me? You know, this book just tanked. And so I'm probably going to have trouble getting another contract and all. And it's somewhere along the line.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Yeah, well, I mean, I've had a bunch of failures, but one that really shook me was when I did that book Glimmer, which was back in 2009. And it was an interesting case where I'd written this really great proposal for the book. And then the book ended up getting a bidding war between all these publishers, top publishers, and then it got bought by one of the top publishers, Penguin. And it was just great. I was just like really riding high. And then the book came out. And for all kinds of reasons, I'm sure it was partly my fault. It was partly the publisher's fault. It was partly everyone's fault.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “On me. As I've gotten older, what has influenced me? I think a lot of the people I meet and interview end up having a big influence on me. When I wrote that book Glimmer, I spent a lot of time with several designers. One was Bruce Mao, but there were several others too. And they all ended up really changing the way I think. I could see something in the way they saw the world that then changed the way that I saw the world. I just almost embraced a little bit of their philosophy or their way of looking at things. So I think I hesitate to point to one person because I think it's always changing and it's always someone. New will come into my orbit that is a fascinating person, and I will come under the influence of that person for a while, and they will begin to change me in some way.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Let me think. I would say the most impact on me intellectually when I was young probably I would say probably I had an older sister who went into journalism and I was still in high school and I was trying to figure out what what I could do with my life and had no idea. And she became sort of a model for me of this way of life of being a journalist. And it kind of inspired me. I thought, well, that's something I could aim for. I could do that. And it became this sort of this tremendous influence on me as a young person. So I would say that was probably a big influence.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “I think the employees would love it. By the way, every company I've spoken at when I talk about mission questions, the employees absolutely love it, right? The senior management is like, well, maybe, I don't know, maybe, but the employees always think, yeah, that's great. I would love it. The employees generally say, I hate the mission statement. I don't pay any attention to it. It's boring. I don't even know what half of them don't even know what the mission statement is. But they say a mission question. I would love that. I would love to be able to have this question that represents what we're trying to do.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Yeah, I think that's what they're worried about. I don't see it that way. You know, I see it as very courageous and confident. I think a company that is able to ask a mission question would signal to the world that they are extremely confident and they don't need to brag about what they've already done or make some statement about something they haven't done, which sounds like an advertising slogan. They don't need to do that. They can be honest and they can be humble and they can say, well, here's what we really want to do. I mean, we really want to change the world. And by doing X, Y, or Z, and how might we do that? And that's what we're aiming toward. I think it would be a very positive thing. But I do understand that companies are very worried about how shareholders are going to.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Since I came out with the book, there have been several companies that have said they are thinking about shifting there. There was one small company that actually did it, and it was interesting. They had interesting.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “You start to get into that thing, oh, this is your job, okay? We are working on this big question, but your job is to take care of this little function here. And if you do that, then we'll be able to hopefully answer the big question. And what I think that companies should be doing is making sure everybody feels they're part of answering the big question. Because if you do that, they will be so much more engaged. You know, one of the things I said in the book is a more beautiful question is I said that companies should forget about mission statements. They should have a mission question. And the mission question should begin with, how might we? And whatever it is they're trying to do in their field that they haven't gotten to yet, the really big thing, the really big accomplishment, that should be phrased as a how might we question. And it should be shared with the entire.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Yeah, it is. It is, but it never gets really, it rarely gets explained that way or articulated that way. It's usually like, oh, we're all together and we're going to change the world or we're all together and we're going to make a lot of money. But really, yes, that's what a startup often is. It's about a group of people trying to answer the same question together. I don't know that, you know, I don't know that startups always put that idea out there to everybody working within the startup. They should, but I don't know if they do. I think maybe the partners know they're working together on a question. You know, the top four or five people know that. But when you go down the line to some of the people further down the food chain,”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Yeah, I refer to that as collaborative inquiry. And I don't know if I'm the first one to use that term or not, but I just started using it when I was working on the book. And I think collaborative inquiry is really, really important. It's the idea that we're going to work on questions together and we're going to share big questions and we'll pursue them. And obviously, you know, scientists are doing this all the time. Lots of people are doing this. Isn't that a start?”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “And my habit is to always just answer the question, right? But what I've realized is it's really interesting if you invite the group to help you answer the question. You know, there's an interesting dynamic that happens there where you say, you might say, well, I think I tend to think this or that, but what do other people feel about that? What have other people found about this question? And you get some really interesting group thinking happening then. So that to me is something that I'm going to try to get myself to not so reflectively answer questions, but to sort of turn it into more of a conversation where I'm getting input from other people in the room and it's not just me trying to answer the question.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “I think one of the things I struggle with is, and I'm just learning about this now, it's going to be in my next book, but the idea that I think when I'm asked questions, sometimes I try to give too much of a definitive answer just because I feel that I'm supposed to do that. And what I've learned is that what's really interesting to do with questioning is when you're asked a question is to explore the question with the person who asked it of you and sort of turn the question back around to like, you know, well, you know, basically what do you think about that? And then in groups, a lot of times I get asked questions in groups when I'm giving a talk or something.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “So that's all part of the innovation process is just taking ownership of a question and staying with it until you work your way gradually, hopefully, to an answer. And if you don't get to an answer, you've had fun. You've probably had a fun journey anyway exploring.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Exactly. Ownership of a question is what every innovator does. Every innovator starts out with a question like, why hasn't someone come up with a better way to do X? And most of us, when we ask that question, we're using our snow shovel and it doesn't work well enough or whatever, we ask that question almost reflexively, why hasn't someone come up with a better snow shovel? And then we don't do anything about it. We just let it go. We let that question just float away into the ether. And what the innovator does is they ask that question and then they take ownership of it. They say, okay, I'm going to find out why someone hasn't come up with a better shovel. And then I'm going to work on what if you made a shovel that did this and that and how would you do that?”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “I think what you want to do is encourage the questions, possibly give focus to them if they need more focus and direction. I think you don't have to answer them. I think sometimes you may want to answer questions from kids, but sometimes you don't. Sometimes you want to encourage them to take ownership of the question. figure out how they would answer it if it were up to them what what steps would they take and i think that can be you know i hear all the time parents say and teachers by the way worried that they're not going to have the answers for all these questions that kids come up with and they don't”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “10 years, what are you doing asking a question like that? If you've developed this understanding with your peers or your group, they will say, oh, I see what you're doing there. You're asking us to step back and look at this from a fresh perspective or an outside perspective. And it will generate a worthwhile discussion, right? So I think the culture, you have to create a culture where people understand what's going on when these questions are being asked instead of having a knee-jerk reaction and saying, oh, gee, that question, that's a waste of time or that's a naive, stupid question. You know, there needs to be a better understanding of the value of questions and what questions do. And then I think people will be less likely to have that kind of gut reaction to it.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Yeah, I think the only way you can do this stuff is through conversation and trying to create a culture. By culture, I could be talking about a group of four people that are part of a team working together, or it could be talking about a household, or we could be talking about an entire company. But I think there has to be an understanding that questioning has value and that all types of questions that are rooted in curiosity have some value. So if we can get that idea out there, then all of a sudden when someone who is an expert asks a novice question, instead of people, you know, taking the person's head off and saying, you know, you should know better than that. You've been in this field.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Inside the accounting field never ask it. They are way too steeped in what they're doing. They're way too close to it. So when they ask questions, they're asking really technical questions. But the outsider can come in and ask the totally naive why question the way a four-year-old child would ask it. And it's amazing how often that leads to something dramatic. That can lead to that can just cause people to step back and say, whoa, wait a minute. We really do need to rethink what we're doing here because we haven't thought about it for the last 10 years. So I think there's a real value to both kinds of questions, both the informed question and the uninformed outsider question.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Be said for the outsider question because a lot of times as you start to do research on something, you immediately start to gather assumptions together. You're gathering together the assumptions that are out there, kind of the conventional wisdom, right? That's out there by people who've already studied this thing. And so you start to get steeped in their expertise and their conventional wisdom. And that starts to inform your own thinking about it, right? Whereas the outsider, the total novice can come in and ask, you know, why are we doing it that way? I'm not part of the accounting field, but why do accountants always do this system that they do? And there's a huge benefit to that type of question.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Know the answer, they just want you to continue. Which is okay in certain instances for a clarification and it's okay for if you're doing sort of Socratic teaching, then that kind of questioning is fine. But generally, I believe a good question should be rooted in curiosity. And if it is, if there is authentic curiosity behind it, then I sort of welcome all questions. Now, of course, the question will get better if you have the more informed you are, the more informed your question will be. So if you have curiosity about something and you've started to do a little bit of learning on your own, a little bit of research on it, then you're probably going to be able to ask a better question about that particular subject than someone who is a complete outsider. On the other hand, there's something to...”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Think okay, for starters, a good question is a question that's rooted in curiosity. That's the only thing that standard that I put on something being a good question. It has to be stem from authentic curiosity. A lot of times people ask questions that are not how are you or what were you thinking when you did that? And they're not really based in questioning. They're more like criticism and disguise or...”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “You know, I don't really think there is a right or wrong way to be asking questions. I think that, interestingly, questioning, you know, I've studied taxonomies of questions and I've seen a lot of people categorize questions by type and higher order questions versus lower order questions. I mean, I understand why that's done. That's done a lot in the academic world. And I think there's a reason for doing it, I guess. There's a purpose to it. But I come at questioning very differently. I mean, I think of, I don't try to categorize questions that much. And I don't try to say this is a lower order question and this is a higher level of question.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “That innovators move forward. They use questions to move forward into the darkness. And what's interesting about that is a lot of people think exactly the opposite about questions. They think questions keep you from moving forward. Think questions paralyze you. If you ask too many questions, you're not going to know what to do and you're going to be paralyzed. And exactly the opposite is true, at least from my experience.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “And what if you took this little bit of information we have on it and combined it with this other bit of information that maybe is from another field or another area, what if we put those two things together? So I think what the innovator is doing is just using questions to attack what is unknown. And then through questioning, you begin to shape things. You begin to frame the problem you want to work on. You frame the challenge maybe that you want to take on. And then the question keeps changing as you're working on it. Maybe you realize I framed it, but I didn't quite frame it right. My question wasn't big enough or it wasn't small enough. Maybe I need a more specific question. I just think that that ends up being the way.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “That we all have that allows us to proceed when we don't really know what the heck we're dealing with or what we're doing. And this is why innovators, it's such a key tool for innovators of any kind in any area, whether it's the arts or business or whatever, because what they can do is look at an area that is unknown. Nobody has ever done this kind of thing before. How do I dive into that? And the way they dive in is through questioning. They dive in by saying, well, you know, why am I interested in this vast unknown area? And what do we know about it already? And why hasn't someone figured out this particular take on it that I'm interested in?”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “Yeah, well, that's it. I mean, and even being aware that you don't know. I mean, you know, you could say that awareness of what you don't know is one of the real measures of intelligence, right? Because people that are less intelligent are completely unaware of what they don't know. They kind of feel like they know it. They know all they need to know and they don't care about what they don't know. So I think first of all, having the awareness that there's a lot of stuff out there that you don't know and caring about it, caring about the fact that there's a lot of lot out there that you don't know, that's almost a starting point for questioning. And then what the questioning will do is enable you to move forward in the face of the unknown. It's almost, I think of it almost like an app, you know, it's like an app.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Yeah, well, I think the question enables us to tackle the unknown. There's a great definition that I came across from this group called the Right Question Institute. They're a nonprofit group that studies questioning. And they describe questioning as a tool that enables us to organize our thinking around what we don't know. So there's a lot of stuff out there we don't know. And through questioning, we can attack it. And the different form of question you use will allow you to come at this unknown thing from a different angle.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Figured out. We've been doing it long enough. We've got it figured out. And what I discovered is innovation is about being the person who asks those questions instead of going through the routine. But, you know, it's difficult for a lot of people.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “Seen as the thing that you're going to get anything out of it. It's going to make you look bad. And what's the big reward? What's the payoff for doing it? So I think all of this conspires against questioning. And then lastly, of course, what conspires against questioning is knowledge. Knowledge, if we feel we know something, then we don't have to ask. And so, you know, as you get older, you start to feel like I know what this is all about. I get it. I get what the game is here. And so you don't feel that you have to ask. And then that continues again straight into the business world where we all become experts within our own domain, in our job, and we don't feel we necessarily have to ask questions about it because we've got to fix.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “As something that's inefficient or that the teacher may not want, or the other students may not want, it gets seen as really uncool. And I've talked to a lot of high school kids about this. And, you know, if you ask questions, you are A, either you're revealing weakness, right? You're revealing you don't know something. B, you're showing that you care and you're not supposed to care that much when you're in high school. You're supposed to be like If I care about then I already know it. And if I don't know it, then I don't really care. And so that attitude tends to make questioning uncool. It's like something that nerds do or people who are just out of step. So anyway, you've got all these factors coming into play against curiosity and questioning. It just isn't.”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Absolutely. I mean, it is definitely seen as inefficient. That's the word that Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School used when he was, I talked to him about questioning and he said the attitude among business leaders is that questioning is inefficient, that we would be much better off using our mental resources to answer things instead of asking questions. And of course, that's crazy because you can't answer something until you have a question. But that's just the way that they perceive it. They perceive that the answers are going to fall from the sky. And you don't really have to bother asking questions. So I think this message gets ingrained into young people. And then as they get older, not only is it seen as”

    2017-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Taking care of business, whatever the business is covering the material we have to cover in class, answering the teacher's question, whatever. The question is a distraction. If someone asks a question at the end of the lesson, it extends the lesson and it keeps you from moving on to the next thing. So it's, again, it's seen as this negative thing. And that continues right into adulthood in the business world where people who ask questions in a meeting are often seen as they're slowing down the meeting. They're slowing us down. We should be moving on to the next item.”

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  44. “Than I could, but there are things going on in our brains that probably affect how curious and how questioning we are at certain ages and why it might seem to decline a little bit. But I think there's also several other things. I mean, I think that we will do whatever we are rewarded for doing. And we do not get rewarded for questioning. You know, we basically, the message we send to children at a very early age is that the reward goes to the person who has the answer, not to the person who asks the question. So I think kids internalize that pretty early. And it's like the question gets eventually gets seen as a distraction. It is a distraction from, you know,”

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  45. “Well, I don't know that anyone has the full complete answer to that. I think it's about five or six factors that are all coming into play with each other. Part of it is probably biological. There are interesting things going on in our brains at a young age that have to do with a mode when we are in total absorption and expansion. And then we kind of go through this synaptic pruning stage where our brain is trying to consolidate all this amazing amount of stuff we've been learning and maybe trim some of the things that seem unnecessary. So I think, you know, there are definitely a neuroscientist could probably explain this a lot better.”

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  46. “As I learned that and started to look into that, that was a big surprise for me. I don't think I realized quite what was going on in our education system or in our culture or both where we're not doing a good job of fanning the flames of creativity and curiosity that we seem to be born with. I mean, we seem to have this from age three or four. And, you know, it's just there. Nobody had to train us to be curious and creative. But it seems to decline, and that suggests to me that we're not doing a good enough job of nurturing that and allowing that to be expressed. And then gradually it just gets kind of suppressed.”

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  47. “Well, you know, I don't know if it's counterintuitive, but I find it interesting the research showing that creativity seems to decline as we, like we're incredibly creative as children. And then it seems to be on the decline after that, which is also true of questioning. And they probably go hand in hand, curiosity, creativity, questioning. What was surprising to me was to learn that these things start to drop off fairly quickly, at least some of the research indicates that. And we move away from that kind of thinking into much more predictable patterns of thinking. And we start to do it very early. You know, we start to do it in grade school and that to me was.”

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  48. “At the same time, you have epiphanies in a museum because you're exposed to these great influences and ideas, but it's not so overwhelming like a play or a movie that you can't do your own thinking. So for me, you know, if you can find that kind of an environment, that can really help with your creativity.”

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  49. “No distractions, and maybe even seeing something stimulating, but not so stimulating that it takes over. So walking out in nature, the trees are stimulating, but they're not so stimulating that it's like you're in an action movie or something. You know, they're not going to take over your full brain. So same with going to a museum, going to a museum, there's a great quote from George Lois advertising guy who I got to know pretty well, but he said museums are the custodians of Epiphanies. And so what he was saying is that, well, he meant that on two ways. Number one, museums are full of things that were epiphanies for the people who created them.”

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  50. “No room for your own thinking. So you need to find those activities where you're a little bit immersed, but you can still have your own thoughts.”

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