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

How do we stop the mutation and replication?
Researchers tested more drugs and found that a cocktail of medications, if
taken together, could backstop one another and prevent the virus from mutating.
The new regime, approved in 1996, increased a patient’s expected remaining life
from eight months to as much as fifty years. HIV/AIDS still kills, especially in
poorer parts of the world. But decades of methodical research—slow questions
—paid off. The disease is no longer an automatic death sentence.
Science bases itself on the measurable world. But we can incorporate its
method into the way we ask and answer other types of questions to become more
precise, more focused, and more accurate. We can slow down, pose our

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questions more deliberately, and bring more data and facts to the discussion. We
can challenge our hypothesis and invite others to do the same in a conscious
search for problems with our findings and assumptions.
Scientific questioning can be applied in business, in daily life, and in our
communities. Imagine how much more interesting a staff meeting, corporate
board retreat, or a policy debate might be if people brought up an idea they had
tried to prove wrong before they concluded it was right.
You’re thinking about putting money into your company because the
competition is out-hustling you. What do your customers want? Where is the
demand? What are they buying? As you answer these questions you develop a
strategy—a hypothesis—that you can test.
You’re not sleeping well. You wake up at two in the morning or can’t get to
sleep at all. Is it the caffeine, the food, or stress? Before you go to the doctor to
do one of those involved sleep studies, what can you figure out on your own?
How can you experiment to narrow down the cause of your own insomnia?
Perhaps creating a spreadsheet or gathering your data on your own digital fitness
tracker, which will tell you when you sleep and how you sleep, will help. Chart
your caffeine and exercise, your diet, and your stress level to look for patterns.
Come up with a hypothesis and test it.
From outer space to the subatomic particle, scientific questioning probes the
real world, trying to figure out real mysteries. It relies on observation and
measurement, and it demands patience. It is a humbling form of questioning
because it is endless, dwarfed by the universe it seeks to decode.
After studying this line of inquiry, I find myself questioning differently. I
think more deeply about what I can see for myself—the observable. I ask more
about data, separating what I know from what I think I know. I want to hear
more about uncertainty and how we explain and accommodate it. I ask:
What do we see and what do we actually know?
How do we know what we know and how might we explain it?
Could we be wrong, and what’s the next question to ask?

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