We live in a world that wants answers. Answers provide solutions to our problems, teach us about the world, and help us navigate our lives. But we rush toward answers forgetting that it is questions that set the course.

Questions are a form of power, as well as a vital, everyday tool. After all, if you don’t ask the right questions, you won’t get the right answers. In Q, philosopher Lani Watson examines the history of question-asking, analyzes our answer-oriented present, and offers a path forward toward a question-oriented future. Along the way, she asks us to consider what a question is, why we ask the questions we do, when we first start asking questions, and where we want our questions to take us.

There are real-world benefits to creating a question-oriented future, and it will require a personal, social, political, philosophical and technological transition. In Q, Lani Watson provides us with the knowledge and tools that we need to implement this change in our own lives and communities.

The following excerpt comes from the book's Introduction.

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From an answer-oriented world to a question-oriented future 

We live in a world that wants, needs and values answers with ever-increasing restlessness and urgency. I call this an answer-oriented world. It is a world that places an emphasis on answers as opposed to questions. A world in which the dominant paradigm tells us that knowledge, rather than enquiry, is power, and in which we are psychologically primed to seek out and value familiarity and certainty over uncertainty and doubt. One might also call this an answer-dominated world, but I prefer the notion of an orientation. When you are oriented in one direction, you are necessarily facing away from another. At the same time, you cannot fail to have an orientation; we are all facing something. 

In an answer-oriented world, we are taught and trained to pursue and value answers, and are deemed successful when we get the answers right. For many, this begins in our earliest years of school. I can vividly remember receiving a coveted gold star after successfully spelling out the word MONDAY in class; it was the right answer. There are rarely gold stars for asking the right questions. Most of us are not taught how to ask questions in school, and we are not incentivised to become good at it because our learning is not evaluated in these terms. The rewards transition as we advance through education, from gold stars to lettered grades and framed diplomas, but the premise of our success remains the same: we are rewarded for knowing the answers. 

For many, this answer-oriented reward scheme extends into and throughout our adult lives. We become habituated answerers, continuing to measure our successes in terms of answers rather than questions. This inclination has been exacerbated by the omnipresence of answers in the Information Age. For those with access to a smartphone, answers to seemingly any question are within clicking distance: ‘Where can I buy milk’, ‘What are spark plugs’, ‘What is the meaning of life’. The quality of the answers undoubtedly varies, but their immediate availability does not. The Internet has dramatically reduced the distance between our questions and their answers—it takes Google users on average 14.6 seconds to click on a link in answer to a question.¹ This leaves little time to check that the questions themselves are worth asking. 

At the same time, we are living in a world that is growing increasingly unpredictable and unstable, socially, economically and politically. In such times we are psychologically drawn towards a sense of control arising from the certainty of simplistic answers to complex challenges. This phenomenon, known as the need for cognitive closure, is heightened under stress and can lead to greater ‘in-group’ identification and an increasing sense of threat from unfamiliar ‘others’.^2,3 Consequently, we are more inclined to seek safety and security in people and groups that we already identify with, and view those that fall outside these groups as threatening or dangerous. This induces a state in which ‘any answers’ are preferred to none, and there is no shortage of people willing to take advantage of this by providing the answers that suit their interests. 

In short, we live in an overwhelmingly and indeed dangerously answer-oriented world, and are facing an answer-oriented future. We should be striving, instead, for a question-oriented future. One which allows for uncertainty and doubt and recognises the value of questions—in education, in healthcare, in journalism, politics, law and technology—enabling us all to harness their power for positive change. A question-oriented world will measure human progress not only in terms of what we know and can do, but also in terms of the questions our knowledge and actions have been developed in response to. In turn, we will see that the questions we ask can deliver the future we want. A future in which our unique drive to understand one another and our world outweighs our fear of the unfamiliar and unknown and forms the foundation of our shared humanity.  

That is not to say that the search for answers should be abandoned. There are many good reasons to pursue answers and many good answers to pursue. But a world in which answers are sought without due regard for the questions is flawed in a number of important respects. First and foremost, it is a basic enough maxim that if you don’t ask the right questions, you won’t get the right answers. Most of us know and understand this simple truth, even if we’ve never really given it much thought. Time, energy, money and resources can all be easily wasted in search of the wrong answers, or on finding brilliant solutions to problems that don’t exist. 

In recent years I have seen companies dispensing this common wisdom on billboards and buses and in online marketing. A well-known British supermarket chain, for example, proudly proclaims, ‘We never stop asking questions about the food you eat. Because we believe that when we ask more questions, we get to better answers.’ Similarly, a widely respected global consultancy brand boldly asserts, ‘The better the question. The better the answer. The better the world works.’ Despite their strapline-friendly brevity, there is a natural logic to these claims that even the most contrarian philosopher (and I count myself high on that list) will struggle to deny. Good answers go hand in hand with good questions. 

Such platitudinous wisdom is easy to underestimate or disregard. In this case, however, it is the platitude rather than the wisdom that should be dispensed with. The advertising executives are on to something. If you don’t ask the right questions, you really won’t get the right answers. The philosopher G. E. Moore once summarised this with characteristic clarity: ‘The difficulties and disagreements, of which history is full, are mainly due to a very simple cause: namely to the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire to answer.’⁴ We can deepen our natural appreciation of this idea by examining what it really means, why it matters, and how it manifests in our lives. 

Just as importantly, we can realise the power of questions by learning how to use them. There are a number of practical steps you can take. At the end of the book I have included a toolkit setting out ten Q Tools that will help you develop a habit of questioning and become a more empowered questioner. I hope these are useful to you. But tools and techniques without an overarching purpose can feel disjointed and disconnected, and harder to implement effectively. Like learning to use a drill before you have anything to build. So first we will look (in Chapter 5) at the broader goal that structures this effort to make the most of our questions; the goal of developing a questioning mindset. 

A questioning mindset probes unquestioned answers and delights in unanswered questions. It allows for uncertainty, ambiguity and doubt with an attitude of openness and humility. Those with a questioning mindset approach the world and the people in it with questions in mind, cultivating their own and others’ curiosity, and focusing on asking the right questions, at the right time, in the right way. Perhaps it is this that prompted you to open this book. In its pages you will discover how to develop and refine a questioning mindset, and experience the radical difference it can make in your life. 

This book is the culmination of more than a decade of research on questions. I have been drawn into this research with renewed fascination time and again, never ceasing to be struck by the everyday magic of questions and their extraordinary pervasiveness. As soon as you start to notice questions, you begin to appreciate the astonishing breadth and depth of their power. It is a power available to you every day, residing in a tool you have been using since you were a child.  

This remarkable power is hidden because we live in a world that wants answers, rushing towards them with ever increasing velocity, without considering the questions that set the course. To become empowered questioners and build a more question-oriented world we must reorient ourselves; we must turn our attention back towards questions. 

About the Author

Lani Watson is a philosopher and Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and a world-leading expert in the philosophy of questions. She is fascinated by the art and science of asking questions and understanding how we can harness their power for good. Her research focuses on questioning in everyday life and she is passionate about applying her expertise to help everyone make the most of asking great questions, having worked with businesses and organisations around the world. Follow Lani on social media @thequestionsdr

Endnotes

1. https://backlinko.com/google-user-behavior.
2. 9. Kruglanski, A. W. and Fishman, S., ‘The need for cognitive closure’, in M. R. Leary and R. H. Hoyle (eds), Handbook of Individual Differences in Social Behavior (Guilford Press, 2009), pp. 343–53.
3. 10. Orehek, E., Fishman, S., Dechesne, M., Doosje, B., Kruglanski, A. W., Cole, A. P. and Jackson, T., ‘Need for Closure and the Social Response to Terrorism’, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 32 (4) (2010), pp. 279–90.
4. Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica (Cambridge University Press, 1903), p. vii.