#26 Warren Berger: Improving The Questions You Ask

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish

Farnam Street

Business, Investing, Entrepreneurship

4.7 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2017

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The quality of your outcome depends on the quality of your questions.

Through asking the right questions we can spark innovation and creativity, gain deeper knowledge in the topics that are most important to us, and propel us forward in our personal and professional pursuits.

Yet very few of us do it well — if we do it at all.

My guest on the podcast today is Warren Berger — journalist, speaker, best selling author, and self-proclaimed questionologist.

His insightful book A More Beautiful Question shows how the world’s leading innovators, education leaders, creative thinkers, and red-hot start-ups ask game-changing questions to nurture creativity, solve problems, and create new possibilities.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of asking the right questions, why they’re critical to your success, and how you may be one great question away from a major breakthrough.

You’ll also learn:

How Warren manages the constant input and stimulation from online consumption when it’s time to create.
The small habits that pack the biggest punch and make the most difference in Warren’s life
What makes a question more or less effective
How to create a culture where questions are welcome and encouraged
Why answering all your kids’ questions may be doing them a disservice — and what to do instead
What “collaborative inquiry” is and how to use it to get the most out of your teams in the workplace
How Warren transformed one of his most painful failures into one of his most proud achievements
Why Warren insists that everyone is creative, and what we can do to fan the flames of our own creativity

If you think you could improve the quality (and frequency) of your questions to enhance key areas of your life, this is not a conversation you’ll want to miss.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello listeners, welcome to the Fernum Street podcast called The Knowledge Project.
0:12.8	I'm your host Shane Parish, the curator behind the Fernum Street blog, which is an online
0:18.0	community focused on mastering the best of what other people have already figured out.
0:23.0	The Knowledge Project is where we talk with interesting people to uncover frameworks you
0:26.8	can use to learn more and less time, make better decisions, and live a happier, more meaningful
0:32.4	life.
0:33.4	On this episode, I have Warren Burger, author of the book, A Beautiful Question.
0:38.2	I was so curious to talk to Warren because I wanted to learn how we can ask better
0:42.0	questions.
0:43.0	After all, questions enable us to innovate, solve problems, and progress.
0:47.0	They allow us to gain perspective, comment things from a different angle, and hone in on
0:52.1	the variables that really matter.
0:54.0	To get the best outcomes you need to start with the best possible questions, and yet in
0:58.5	reality, questions can be dangerous.
1:01.2	A lot of leaders see questions as inefficient.
1:04.5	These leaders think that questions slow them down, and in some organizations asking a
1:09.4	question can even come with a career risk.
1:12.3	And yet, improving outcomes is so often tied to asking the right questions, the questions
1:17.4	that challenge the conventional wisdom, the questions that challenge our assumptions,
1:22.5	the questions that allow you to see something in a new life.
1:26.0	Far from slowing you down, these questions propel you forward.
1:30.4	Questioning isn't really taught, it's not something we learn how to do, we just do it.
	...

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