Ask More: The Power of Questions to Open Doors, Uncover Solutions, and Spark Change pdfdrive com

CHAPTER 13
I’M GLAD I ASKED
I
EMBARKED ON THIS
project to discover a better and more disciplined way to ask
questions. I wanted to find out if questioning could be organized around specific
objectives and how the types of questions we ask affect how we listen. Though I had
asked questions all my life as a journalist and interviewer, I never thought of them as
“strategic” or “creative” or “empathetic.” I didn’t build inquiry around outcomes. But
as I talked to close to 100 people for this book, curious souls skilled at turning
questions into discovery and results, I became convinced that a “taxonomy” of
questions, each with its own approach and compelling benefits, could serve as a
useful way to think about what and how we ask. I don’t pretend that my way of
approaching questions is definitive; some of the best inquiry is generated by random
curiosity. But by understanding what we’re asking, how we listen, and when we
should ask more, we can become better questioners with tangible results to show for
it.
?
Still, we must appreciate that questions are not a blank check. There is such a
thing as a stupid question. I’ve heard plenty of them over the years. Stupid
questions reveal willful ignorance, laziness, or a painful lack of preparation.
There are also hurtful questions that humiliate or open old wounds. Gratuitously
hostile questions—meant to embarrass or pick a fight—can poison a
conversation. Inappropriately personal queries can get you in trouble. Self-
serving questions, where someone asks a question just to show off how much he
or she really knows, turn off everyone else.
Cultural sensitivities vary widely; one person’s question may be another’s
insult. Some cultures defer to age and authority or view public questioning as
inappropriate or disrespectful.
A few years ago, while teaching a university class in China, I employed what
I thought was some good, provocative Socratic questioning about what the
United States and China were up to in the world and how the students perceived

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the competition. I challenged the students to share their opinions, define their
terms, and support their views. A Chinese student leaned over to one of the
Americans in the room and asked, “What is he doing, trying to get us to fight?”
This was unfamiliar, uncomfortable territory for these students and my questions
landed with a thud.
In some societies, questions are viewed as an outright threat. Repressive
regimes know they cannot stand up to scrutiny or challenge. Thought
dictatorships reject accountability and suppress curiosity.
A “Letter from Pyongyang” in the Washington Post caught my eye. Entitled
“Virtual Reality Inside North Korea,” the article by Anna Fifield told the story of
her tour of a North Korean hospital with a group of reporters. A secretive,
brutally repressive state, North Korea wanted to show off healthcare in the
communist paradise. The tour was surreal. Fifield saw “decades-old” incubators
in the maternity ward and a lab stocked with “a museum exhibit of scientific
instruments.” She asked one of the doctors who was assigned to the group
whether international sanctions “limited your ability to get the technology you
need to do your work.”
Sanctions had caused suffering, came the answer, but “Great Leader Marshal
Kim Jong-un taught us to learn about technology and science so we have the
ability to develop by ourselves.”
Later in the tour, Fifield asked if the doctor had access to the internet. He
went to a nearby building to go online three or four times a week, he replied.
Had he been online this past week? “No, no times this week.”
As they passed a CT scanner, Fifield asked if they could turn it on so she
could see it work. The response: “Why? Do you have a serious health problem?”
she was asked.
“You ask too many questions,” Fifield’s government minder told her. “It’s a
little hard to work with you.”
In North Korea, there’s no point and little future in asking.
In vibrant societies, however, we want our next generation of questioners to
be better than the last. Indeed, the people I spoke with for this book know that
the ability to ask is directly connected to our ability to invent and innovate, to
push boundaries and pose the big questions that confront us as a society. Some
have dedicated themselves to teaching young people and helping future
generations understand the power and poetry of questions. Three such
individuals stood out for their commitment to the future.

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The Justice of Citizenship
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor asked some of the biggest questions confronting
America during her twenty-five years on the United States Supreme Court.
Though she had been retired for several years, she still kept an office deep inside
the massive neoclassical building. Justice O’Connor was in her eighties. A cane
leaned against her desk. But her voice was strong and clear as she rose without
effort to greet me.
We weren’t there to discuss her opinions in some of the most significant
cases in American history—not Bush v. Gore, when the Court (with her crucial
vote) picked a president; nor Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when she sided with
the liberal justices upholding Roe v. Wade. “I don’t look back,” she told me
definitively. “That’s for a historian or a book writer. I did the best I could and
that’s that.”
We were there to talk instead about her initiative to teach young people
about the important questions of government and citizenship. Sitting in her
cavernous office, wrapped with shelves heavy with books on law and
government, it was impossible not to feel the weight of history and the great
debates that had defined America. The American experience, Justice O’Connor
explained, was built on defining questions.