Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life

2018 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner

What if you could unlock a better answer to your most vexing problem—in your workplace, community, or home life—just by changing the question?

Talk to creative problem-solvers and they will often tell you, the key to their success in business and leadership is asking a different question.

Take Debbie Sterling, the social entrepreneur who created GoldieBlox. The idea came when a friend complained about too few women in engineering and Sterling wondered aloud: "why are all the great building toys made for boys?" Or consider Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, who asked: "would it change economic theory if we stopped pretending people were rational?" Or listen to Jeff Bezos whose relentless approach to problem solving has fueled Amazon’s exponential growth: “Getting the right question is key to getting the right answer.”  

Great questions like these have a catalytic quality—that is, they dissolve barriers to strategic thinking and channel the pursuit of solutions into new, accelerated pathways. Often, the moment they are voiced, they have the paradoxical effect of being utterly surprising yet instantly obvious.

For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions has always been clear—but it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn’t we know more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest ultimately including over two hundred interviews with creative thinkers. Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions—and breakthrough insights—and how anyone can create them.

This book delivers the insights Gregersen gained in his research, offering a powerful framework for developing your own creative thinking.

• A Proven Method: Learn the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions, based on insights from over 200 interviews with creative thinkers.
• Better Questions, Better Answers: Discover why the most vexing problems at work and home can be unlocked simply by reframing the inquiry.
• Overcome Creative Blocks: Identify and dissolve the hidden barriers in your own thinking that prevent you from seeing new and accelerated pathways to a solution.
• Lessons from Innovators: See how leaders from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to GoldieBlox founder Debbie Sterling used catalytic questions to fuel their exponential growth.

HAL GREGERSEN is the Executive Director of the Leadership Center as MIT, a prolific author and motivational speaker, recognized by Thinkers50 as one of the world’s fifty most innovative minds. He has authored or coauthored ten books, and his most recent bestselling book is The Innovator’s DNA, coauthored with Jeff Dyer and Clayton Christensen.