To ? is human
Why do we question things and how do we form questions that will help shape the world we live in? Learning notes on Warren Berger’s book, titled “A More Beautiful Question”, and a dive into the empathy and humility needed to be better questioners.
For those of you not already familiar with the highly-acclaimed title, A More Beautiful Question talks about how deep, imaginative questioning can help us identify and solve problems. It’s a thought-provoking read, with stories and case studies delivered in a highly inquisitive manner that invites us to start questioning things on our own. Rather than reviewing the book, in this article I’d like to discuss more about the act of questioning itself, and how I’ve come to acknowledge the two things that play a big role in helping us ask better questions.
When do we start questioning things?
Most of us are inherently curious creatures. Research shows that a child asks about forty thousand questions between the ages of two and five. As toddlers, we would start by asking simple factual questions (“What is that?”, “Who is that?”) but then shift to making requests for more complex explanations (“Why is the sky blue?”, “Why is it raining?”, “Where do ghosts come from?”) as we reach the age of four. Unfortunately, this doesn’t last long.
Funnily enough, as we enter stimulation-rich environment (usually by the time we enter preschool), with ready access to an adult question-answerer, we begin to ask less questions. By the time we begin elementary school, our own act of questioning starts to disappear altogether. Now this may just mean that once we learn how to read and write and therefore are exposed to more resources to quench our thirst for knowledge, we simply stop verbalising our questions, which doesn’t really say much about our level of curiosity or our impulse to question things. But is this the only reason?
Why do we stop questioning things?
Dennie Palmer Wolf, a professor of education at Brown University who studied the role of questioning in US schools found that not only teachers tended “to monopolise the right to question” in classrooms, they also used questions mainly to check up on students rather than to try to spark interest; oftentimes leaving students feeling “exposed” rather than inspired.
Moreover, John Seely Brown, a researcher who specialises in organisational studies, points out that questioning by students can easily come to be seen as a threat by some teachers. “If you come from the belief that teachers are meant to be authoritative, then teachers are going to tend to want to cut off questioning that might reveal what they don’t know.”
This sounds awfully familiar to me as a person who grew up in Indonesia. The nature of our culture forces the younger members of society to be respectful of the elders to the point of submission. While there is nothing wrong to be respectful of anyone who deserves it, there remains a question of who exactly is the “elders” and to what extent this “respect” must stretch.
In Javanese culture, the definition of “elders” can range from biological parents and grandparents, to authoritative figures including, but not limited to, teachers. This translates into the way we conduct ourselves in the classroom. Teachers are often seen as the authoritative figure who possess absolute knowledge and wisdom, both of which are rarely subjects to challenge from the students. We are trained only to memorise facts delivered by the teachers and it’s the teacher’s job to ask us questions, to make sure we have these “facts” imprinted in our brains. Even our success in school is measured by how many of these facts we are able to recount during tests. The more the better.
For the luckier members of society who get to attend more progressive schools (most of which are privately managed), things are changing for the better. But for the rest, this perfunctory mindset becomes the basis of their adult life.
Our lack of training as questioners has rendered our questioning muscles that were once beautifully toned, atrophied. We end up losing sense of why and how we ask questions that as we grow up and start solving problems on our own, we just don’t know where to start.
What do we need to be better questioners?
If we go back and look at why and how children ask questions, there a few things we can learn from them. One of these things (and this is despite the fact that they often quite rigorously, though unknowingly, follow the Socratic method of questioning) is that they don’t do it to annoy the parents; they simply want to get to the bottom of things. They don’t ask questions for the sake of asking questions; there is a sincere desire to understand something, and being children as they are, this desire comes without prejudice. The asking of a question also indicates that the child understands there are various possible answers. When a little girl asks her older sister, “Why are you sad?” she might be imagining the answers could be either, “Because I lost my toys,” or “Because I miss my mommy.” Her hypotheses may be a result of her own previous learnings, but by asking the question, she is trying to understand what her older sister is going through. She is trying to build empathy so she knows how to respond and try to make her sister feel better.
I find this ability—and willingness—to empathise very important for me as a designer. The sincere desire to understand the humans I am designing for helps me shape the questions I need to ask in order to get the right information that can be used as a base to devise an impactful solution.
Another thing to point out about children is how by asking questions, they are openly acknowledging that there are, in fact, gaps in their knowledge they need to fill. One of the primary drivers of questioning is an awareness of what we don’t know. Acknowledging these gaps can help us form more and better questions so we can better understand the problems at hand.
This degree of humility is harder to achieve as we get older and we grow more self-conscious, because our society is trained to value us by how much we know. It’s been deeply rooted in the way we are raised and educated that we start to believe it, too. We feel that when we know something, our value as an employee, a colleague, a human, is instantly higher than those who may not know about that particular thing. We happily strut around the office and say, “I know this,” while at the same time neglect to see that for every single thing we know, there may be a hundred new things we would still need to learn. Consciously or not, we are humouring the fear of admitting our lack of knowledge; which is a shame because, as Joshua Aronson from NYU had said, “Fear is the enemy of curiosity.”
Upon reading the first few chapters of Berger’s book, I’ve come to realise that our humility and our ability to empathise play a big role in how we shape our questions, which, in turn, will impact the way we build our understanding around the problems we are trying to solve and experiment on solutions as a member of society, an employee, a friend, or as a designer. Instead of settling on being the “comfortable expert”, it might be worth going back to this version of us that is the wide-eyed, restless learner.
