 In this episode, you're going to learn how you can bring more and better questions into your work and how to convince others to do so as well. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Warren and this is the service design show episode 131. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome back to the service design show. On this show we explore what's beneath the surface of service what are the hidden and invisible things that make a difference between success and failure all to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people and business. The guest in this episode is Warren Burger. He's the author of my favorite book of 2021 so far, which is called the book of beautiful questions. It's no secret that every great solution starts with a great question. As a service designer, you're already naturally curious and probably asking a lot of questions, but the reality is that most likely you're in an environment where answers are more valued than questions. And when people do ask questions, they are mostly not the ones that we're hoping for. So in this episode, you're going to learn what happens when we don't start asking more and better questions, preferably the beautiful ones and what you can do to get the people who are right now focused very much on the how questions to be more open for the why questions. I think the answers will surprise you. And during this episode, we're also going to announce a contest where you can win a signed copy of Warren's book. So make sure to stick around if you're interested in participating. It's actually really easy and will send a copy to you anywhere in the world. If you didn't know already, we publish a new video here on this channel every week or so. So if you want to keep growing as a service design professional, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any of the future videos. I guess that's all for the introduction. And now let's jump into the awesome conversation with Warren Burger. Welcome to the show, Warren. Hi, it's great to be here, Mark. Really excited to have you on this episode. I am usually not a bit starstruck. But in this case, I am because I must say the book is my is the most inspiring book I've read this year. And I'm not just saying that because you're here on the show, I actually invited you to because of the book and really happy to get the opportunity to dive into these questions. That's great. Before we do that, for the people who have no clue who you are, haven't read any books, haven't Google you yet, could you give a brief intro? Yeah, sure. Well, I call myself a questionologist, and which is a made up term. But it's also something I'm very serious about, because I really believe, you know, that there is there should be a serious study and practice of the art and science of asking questions. I mean, I think it's hugely important. And yet it is not really studied as that like as a separate discipline. And so there is no such thing as, you know, while there are so many allergies out there for almost everything you can think of, there is no allergy, there is no field of study that I know of that pertains directly to asking questions. So I've decided to make this kind of my own mission. And I got into it. You know, I came up as a journalist, worked for newspapers, magazines for many years. That kind of got me initially into questioning because, you know, as a journalist, it's sort of what you do in trade, you know, you're asking questions all the time. And you have to kind of work on your questions to try to make them better. So so I was already in a way into this field and this study, but then something really changed about seven or eight years ago, I was doing a lot of writing about designers about innovators, about business leaders. And I started to realize that they were all really great questioners. And so that changed my perspective on questioning a little bit. I had thought of it as something journalists do, and maybe lawyers do, interview, you know, people are doing surveys, you know, that kind of thing. But when I started to think about it in terms of being such a powerful tool for creative people and innovators, when I started to think about it that way, I had a whole new angle on it. And that's kind of the way I talk about it now, not just as a communication tool where you ask questions of somebody sitting across the table from you, but as a much bigger tool where you're using questioning to reimagine things or to solve problems, or to design, or to create. So that's kind of where I am now. I look at it everything from a business tool to a leadership tool to a relationship tool. And I just look at all the ways you can use questioning to, you know, to improve things. And we'll get into that because what the book shown has shown for me is that we often take a very narrow perspective on questioning. And we can broaden that much more in there, like a lot of new opportunities open. But again, we'll get into that in a second. What we always do on the service design show is a rapid fire question round five questions. And the goal for you is to answer them as quickly as possible. Here we go questioning, just to get to know you a little bit better, you haven't prepared these questions. So that's the whole point. Okay, ready? Yeah, sure. Go. All right. What's always in your fridge? What's always in my fridge? Milk. Got milk. Got milk. Now, this one is interesting. Which book or books are you reading at this moment? Oh, I am reading. I just finished a book called the splendid and the vile about Winston Churchill during the early start of World War Two. I'm also I'm usually I'm reading several books at the same time. I'm reading the original Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Don't know why but I got into that. And then I'm reading a book about critical thinking that's called good good thinking is the name of the book. Because I'm very interested right now in critical thinking, and which is an offshoot of questioning, you know, and so I they're related and I'm very interested in that. Interesting. We'll add to the link to that in the showdowns for sure. Next question would be, what superpower would you like to have? Oh, what's superpower? I mean, I think flying, you know, it's predictable. But you know, I love the idea of being able to fly. I think it's an amazing, you know, to just sort of sort through the air. On a more sort of realistic level. I think I this superpower I would like to have would be better vision, being able to see things more clearly, being able to notice details more than I do. I'm a little bit. I'm not as strong in that area as I wish I was. All right. Okay, maybe someday, augmented reality, artificial intelligence will help us in that area. Now, the final question is related to service design. I know you're not a service designer, but you have had a lot of experience with design. I'm curious if you recall when you heard about the term service design, when did it come up in your field? You know, not much. I mean, and I write I've written a lot about design. But I do remember hearing it occasionally mentioned by companies in the service industry, like hotel companies, people like that. But in the wider sense, no, I don't really, I have not heard it that much. So this is kind of a new area for me. And it's great because I like to have people on the show who are on the fringes of our field, because that's where we learn the most. And I think there are strikingly a lot of overlaps between what people call design thinking and service design. So I think you have more experience with service design than you might actually probably do. Yeah, recall. One of the questions that I'd like to start with is you've written a few other books. And one of your first books, if not the first one, was on applying design in a business environment, right? Could you take us back to that moment? How did that book came to be? Yeah, that's it. Well, you know, my career has followed interesting sort of progressions where for there was a period of time where I wrote a lot about advertising. And I was very interested in advertising and marketing. And then I noticed that within the advertising industry, design was taking a greater and greater role. So I started to get interested in design firms and how they work and in-house designers who would be working at either at ad agencies or at the client companies. And so I got very interested in design. And then as I started to talk to designers, this term design thinking started to come up. And I was never really that happy with the definitions of it. I thought it was a little bit jargony. And so my thought was, what if I could take this concept of design thinking and try to break it down into the most simple terms? And to me, the most simple definition of design thinking is three words. How designers think, right? That's design thinking. If you break it down to the most basic level. So then I said, well, could I write a book that would attempt to describe some of the ways designers think? And obviously, all designers think differently. And it's going to differ depending on what category they're in or whatever. But are there some common approaches they take? Are there some common principles? Are there some ways they tackle problems? So I talked to lots and lots of designers in different disciplines. And I was breaking down some of the basic things they do. And interestingly, that led to question. Because one of the things that designers, I was noticing all these designers were doing, they were asking really big questions and they would often start their project by attempting to answer a challenging question. Yeah, the design challenge, the design brief. And I think curiosity is a sort of natural skill characteristic threat of designers. After that book, according to your publication list, it went silent for a few years. And then you came out with a book on questioning. How did that transition go? Well, it was great. I mean, what happened was actually my design thinking book didn't do as well as I hope. It was, it did okay, but it kind of went out there. And I think maybe I didn't have enough of a hold in the design world. Because at the same time, I came out with my book, IDEO, the firm IDEO, and it's chief Tim Brown, they came out with a book that was fairly similar. That was called Change by Design. And so my book, which was called Glimmer, and Change by Design came out and Change by Design like did a little better than my book, because I think IDEO had a little more of a, you know, a strength and a presence in the design world. But besides that, I was really hoping that Glimmer was not really just for designers. I mean, I was hoping Glimmer, and my publisher was hoping that it was going to mainstream, it was going to be a mainstreaming of design of thinking it like a designer. And it was going to go to the average Joe and say, would you be interested in learning something about how designers think? And do you think you could apply that to your own life or your own business? So, you know, we had great hopes that this would become a, almost like that book Freakonomics or something, you know, one of those really big phenomenon books. And it just didn't happen, you know, which is the way it is in book publishing. Sometimes things hit, sometimes they don't. And so I was a little bit, it was a little bit of a disappointment for me, you know, but the interesting thing, the lesson I learned from that, and I've shared this with other people, is that sometimes within a failure, if you want to call it that, or a thing that doesn't work out as well as you'd like, is this seed, within that is the seed of something that could be successful. And the key there is you have to almost do a post-mortem on the project that didn't work. And in other words, a lot of times we just want to put those things aside because they didn't work. And we never want to look at them again. We never want to think about them again. But luckily what I did was I went back to it. I looked at what seemed to be working, what people were responding to in it. And I found one of the things they responded to was there was a chapter within that book, Glimmer, that was all about asking questions, asking beautiful questions. And so I said, hmm, you know, this is interesting. Whenever I do a talk about Glimmer, the one thing people always seem to seize on is the chapter on question. So I decided, maybe that should be its own book. And then that booked it very well. So it's, you know, it's an interesting lesson there, I think. And this is the way it goes. Like, it's hard to predict. And just the only thing you can do is keep pushing, keep kicking the cat forward. That's the thing I was looking for. And I think of it as iterating, right? Because, you know, it was like, in a way, I could think of Glimmer as the first iteration on my questioning thing. I was, I hadn't quite gotten it focused yet. I hadn't gotten it narrowed down. So I was talking about four or five things. But then when I got rid of the other three or four things, and I just focused on questioning, then I had something really tight and focused. Now, let's transition into the questioning topic. You, I don't know if you coined it, but at least you sort of took the beautiful question phrase and linked it to your name. I'm curious, how would you describe a beautiful question? What makes a question beautiful? Well, it's a totally subjective term. So your idea of a beautiful question is probably going to be different from mine. I decided that I wanted to use, I wanted to create a term that would make people think more highly of questioning. And originally, what I had, what I was working with the original language I was using around this was, believe it or not, stupid questions. I was originally talking about stupid questions, because one of the people I had been dealing with a lot was a designer named Bruce Mao. And Bruce Mao talked to me a lot about stupid questions. He was a big believer that as a designer, you have to be willing to ask the questions that no one else is asking. Yeah, like fundamental, sometimes very basic fundamental questions, which other people will consider to be naive or stupid. So he was a big believer in stupid questions. But but I was, I decided that that was not a good term to use for my book, because I wanted the book to be a celebration of questioning in general. And I wanted it to be very upbeat and optimistic. And that word stupid just brings too much negativity into it. So I decided to move transition to something else. And then I came across this term, beautiful question in a, it's from a poem by the poet E E Cummings, who who wrote Always the Beautiful Answer, who asks a more beautiful question. And that pretty much summed up what I wanted to say in my book, which is that if you're asking really great questions, you're going to get better answers, you're going to get better results. And so that's, I said, I'm going to take that beautiful question, not only beautiful question, but I liked the whole phrase a more beautiful question. So, so that became my, my thing that I went with. And then I had to define what is what do I mean by a beautiful question. And so I cobbled together my own definition. And basically, I was looking for how do you distinguish the kind of special question from the run of the mill every day question. And so the definition I came up with was that a beautiful question is, is a question that is very ambitious. Yet at the same time, it's actionable. So it's, it's big and ambitious, but you can actually act on it. You can do something. And it has the potential to bring about change. So any question that fits those three, it's like three things, right? Ambitious, actionable, and potentially game changer. That's a beautiful question. And do you have any classic examples of those kind of questions just to get online over? Yeah. Yeah. So what are your favorites? Like, which one's my favorite is, is that I tell a lot is the, the question that led to the Polaroid instant camera, you know, 60, 70 years ago. And it was actually asked by the founder, the daughter, the four year old daughter of the founder of the company. And the founder of the company was named Edwin Land. And, and so he was before he'd even really gotten deeply into the camera business, he was in, he was doing optics and headlights on cars and all kinds of stuff like that. But he wasn't deep into cameras. He was on vacation one time with his family. He's using a camera, not his camera, just a, you know, a camera from another company to take a picture of his family. He takes a picture with this camera. And then he puts the camera aside and his daughter, his four year old daughter wants to see the results. She wants to see the picture. And he tries to explain to her, no, it doesn't work that way. We have to send it, take the film, and we have to send it to the, and then we have to wait in it. So it's going to be about a week or whatever before we're going to see anything. And then his daughter asked him, why do we have to wait for the picture? So this was a beautiful question because what it did was it was, it, it sort of created this game changing moment when she asked him that question. He had this realization like, yeah, why do we have to wait for the picture? You know, and what if we didn't, what if we didn't have to wait? And so that led to the beginnings of the Polaroid incident camera. I guess you find so many, you so find so many questions like that at the start of companies or innovations. Somebody is looking at something that's not quite right. And they're saying they're asking some version of a question like why does it have to be this way? Or why hasn't someone come up with a way to do this or that? And those to me are the beautiful questions. They're the questions that are really thinking about changing, changing the game. And it also, as I'm hearing you say, has to do with the right moment and who is actually getting that question. Because maybe a question, which is plain, simple and normal, becomes a beautiful question in the eyes of the, in the ears of the person who's listening to it. Because it has to resonate with them. At that moment, like that question a year earlier or with a different person, maybe you wouldn't, wouldn't have had the same effect. If there's definitely two parts to it, there are, there's the people on the other end. Although, I mean, sometimes there are beautiful questions. If you're talking about a solo inventor, sometimes they ask the question and then they answer it. But oftentimes, you know, it has to be the question has to not only energize the person asking it, but it has to energize the people that hear it. And they have to, that's part of what makes it beautiful is that other people hear it and they go, and instead of going, oh yeah, whatever, they go, wow, I hadn't really thought of it that way. You know, that's an interesting way of looking at it. And when that happens, that's part of how you know you've got a beautiful question is the reaction. And Mark, people ask me this all the time, like, how do you know if something is a great question? And that's one of the things I said, you know, by the reaction, you know, by the reaction it gets with people around you, because if it's a really great question, they will, they will be moved by it. And you will see that. And I literally had that question on my paper here, like, how do you know you're making progress, you know, you're making progress by the response that your questions are getting, right? Now, so I'm also interested in your arguing for the art and science of questioning that we should get better at it, spend more time, do it more deliberately. What would you say is at stake? Like, to put it bluntly, why should we care? Well, we should care because if we're not asking questions, everything is going to hell. If we're not asking questions, we are resting on our existing knowledge. And if we're doing that, we're not keeping up. We're not growing as people. Our businesses are going to fall apart because they will not keep up with innovation. Our political systems will break down because if people are not asking questions, then you get a situation where people are simply spouting their own positions and, you know, going up against each other with solid ingrained positions that they're not movable on. So it even this even crosses over into the political space where you really need both sides to be questioning each other and questioning themselves, questioning their own beliefs and their own dogma. Otherwise, you get locked into this, you know, battle. And so I think it's basically the key to almost everything, you know, and being a questionologist, of course, I'm biased, I understand that. But I think it relates to almost every aspect of our lives. And if we are not pushing ourselves to ask questions more, we can easily fall into the trap of assuming, resting on our existing knowledge, being comfortable, not challenging ourselves, not wondering about things. So we really have to avoid that trap. And the way we avoid that trap is by exercising this questioning muscle that we had when we were kids, you know, I mean, we were born with this. And unfortunately, we don't use it as we grow older, we probably don't use it as much as we should. So the argument for asking more questions, for being more critical, for being more aware, I get that. But I'm also curious, in the questions we ask, do you feel that there's also something missing? So are the current, like we're generalizing, and I get that, but are the current questions we're asking good enough? Or is there in general, something missing? Often, there's something missing. And the thing that's missing can be summed up in one word. The thing that's missing is often thought. So a good question is a thoughtful question. In other words, you don't ask it reflexively. You don't ask it automatically. You don't ask it out of pure anger or emotion. You ask it out of thought and curiosity. And if that is an ingredient in your questions, they will automatically become better questions. But if you ask questions out of habit, I often talk about wrote questions, R-O-T-E wrote. How are you? What's up? What's going on? Those are wrote questions. They don't mean anything. We ask them out of habit, and what do they get back? You get back wrote answers. So a wrote answer would be fine. Yeah, whatever. I'm doing great. And so a lot of our questioning is there's not much thought behind it. And then there's all kinds of other weird stuff that comes into questioning. Sometimes we use it to criticize people. What were you thinking? What's wrong with you? So I think if you can put more actual wonder into your questions and say, if your question can be based on, hey, I really want to know something, I'm really wondering about this, then it starts to become a better question. So the superficial questions, the habitual, the superficial, which just the only thing they do is fill up the air, right? Fill up the space rather than helping you progress forward in whatever way that might be in your relationship and finding new ideas and solving a problem. Absolutely. And the other thing to watch out for is questions with an agenda, you know, where you youth, the question is based on an answer that you already think you know, or an answer that you want to get. There are times when I understand people using those in a courtroom, a lawyer may be asking those kinds of questions. If you are a teacher, and you're using the Socratic method, you may be asking questions where you already know the answer and you're trying to. But in general, I have a problem with questions that are simply, you know, where a person is asking a question, and they think they know the answer already. And they say, isn't it true that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or haven't you realized, haven't you thought about the fact that this, so in other words, they're coming from this position of I know already, I'm asking you something, but I already know. And I think people do that a lot. And it causes them to use questioning, not in the best way. And it causes that so if you bring any kind of an agenda, like for instance, now, you know, there's a there's a lot of questioning going on, that I feel has a political agenda behind it, where people are saying, Oh, I'm going to, I'm going to question the vaccine, why should I believe in it? You know, and so that's fine. I'm okay with questioning almost anything, including vaccines. But if you are coming into it with already having a position, like, I'm anti, whatever, I'm anti government or whatever. And that's why I'm questioning the vaccine. So in other words, your agenda is driving the question. Can we can we ask questions without an agenda? I think I know the answer, but we can. Or the agenda can be a very, a very positive one. The agenda can be I if the agenda is, you know, I want to learn. That's fine. That's a good agenda. You know, so so maybe I should modify to it to positive agendas agendas that are going to lead to something good or agendas that are that have that are basically good in nature agendas that are also remaining. There's an agenda, but it's open. It's an open minded agenda. So it's not an agenda where you're coming in. And, you know, you feel, you know, already, and you, you know, you have an agenda, maybe you want to create something or you want to learn something, but you're very open. You're not coming in feeling like I already know how to create this. I already know all the truth about it. I know my agenda is only to learn. And I'm going to be very open as I ask questions because I don't know. I made learn new stuff that I don't know. So I that's the kind of mindset that I would like to see people using as their question. Yeah, a certain humble attitude towards humble inquiry. Yeah, humble inquiry. It's a wonderful book called Humble Inquiry by Edward Shine. And I recommend it to people. But you know, that's part of part of being a questioner is that you have to be humble. It's part of being a good critical thinker. You have to be humble. You cannot assume that you know. I want to transition a little bit into the design space. I'm curious if you have seen examples and I'm sure you have of ways we can embed better questioning within the design space. Like you said at the start, designers are probably already quite good at it, quite aware of questioning or maybe they're doing just based on habits. But we can get we can probably do better. And what would be some ways to embed better questioning within the design field? I think, okay, there's a couple of levels to this. I'll talk about what I think the levels are. And then I'll give maybe a couple of examples of people. So I think with questioning, it starts with yourself. And it starts with developing the habit in yourself or celebrating or strengthening the habit in yourself. Then it extends out to others around you. So you are trying to ask more questions yourself. You're trying to do that both privately and in front of other people. And you are modeling the behavior of a questioner in front of others. Then you are, if you are leading an organization or a team of people, you are trying to spread that out. And you're trying to sort of suggest to other people around you, hey, you know, let's ask more questions, let's question some of these assumptions. Let's have meetings where we share questions. What are the things we've been thinking about this week? So you kind of promote the idea of question asking to the people around you. If you're dealing with clients or customers, you do the same thing. You have to champion questioning in front of them. And I always start with, by the way, when I champion questioning, I start by trying to show results. And I start by saying, I will show innovations that have come out of questioning. So, you know, I'll go through Airbnb or Netflix or all of these stories where the ideas began with questioning. And not only did the original idea come out of a question, but then oftentimes the development and growth of the company came out of continual questioning and refining of the questions. So I will show that initially, just to tell people, this stuff is real, you know, this is not like philosophy or sitting around, you know, asking questions just because you think it's fun. This stuff leads to things. If you're doing it well, it leads to results. And so I think you always want to start with that saying, this is powerful. This is a tool that gets results. And then you want to encourage doing it more and try to figure out ways you can do it more. And that's for all of us to design or figure out because every organization is different. I'm totally in your corner and I'm a deep believer in the power of questioning and that every great solution starts with a very good question. The challenge I see, and I'm curious if you've seen the same, is that it's often people who are driven by short term results or like, okay, let me rephrase this question. What is the reason that businesses seem to have little appetite to ask good questions? I do think it's because they oftentimes are driven by short term results. And they're driven by the actions of the sort of middle management of the company that is kind of getting things done on a daily basis. Now, in defense of middle managers, what I will say is they're the people that oftentimes are on tough deadlines. And they really do have to, they really do have to get things done. And they have to, they have to produce. So I do understand that and sympathize with that. That's my son walking into the episode for the people listening to the podcast. But yeah, I think in general, what is going on is that companies are focused on results and they're focused on getting things done. And they see a conflict between questioning and getting stuff done. Like they don't exactly the two things are not related. In fact, they think that questioning can actually slow down exactly the process of getting things done. So this is why I feel it's very important for organizations questioning almost has to come from the top. Sad to say, but it's true. If the top people in the company think of themselves as questioners or begin to think of themselves that way. And by the way, I'm seeing a lot of top executives taking this attitude and this mindset, it's happening. But it has to come from them because they will then give permission to the middle managers and the other people. And once they do that, then things start to change a little bit. So they need to get that message to the company. Hey, yeah, we are about deadlines. We do have to produce, but we also have to have a vision. And we also have to innovate. So what I'm asking you to do is both I'm asking you to hit the deadlines and be a producer. But I'm also asking you to be a questioner and an innovator. And I'll give you some space to do that. I'll give you some if you need a little time or something. I'll give you that. So when you start to ask questions in a business environment, it often goes against the grain of what they want to do. And the thing they want to do is standardized. They want to have predictability. They want less uncertainty. And what you do with questioning is you open up new opportunities. But at the same time, like you disrupt the process that's going on. And I've seen that a lot. And that's very limiting and can be disheartening for somebody who wants to create change, because that's what happens when you ask good questions. And your message that it has to come from the top, I totally get that. But is there like there are intermediate steps that you've seen? Like sometimes we don't have a seat at the boardroom table yet. So we need to work our way up or make progress happen anyway. And next to sort of giving, showing, questioning yourself, are there any other things we could do to still thrive in that environment? I think just showing if you can show that, okay, so started, let's say we started the bottom. And we started the people that are producing things, creating things, having direct interactions with customers or clients. We started at the field level, right? And if those people are bringing in more questioning style into their work, and then if they see some positive results from that, and then they can take that talk about that positive result to the next person up the chain. And then that person hopefully talks about it to the next person up the chain. And meanwhile, I think what's going on is you may not realize it, but these people at the top, you know, they do know what's going on in the world. You know, they do the good ones anyway, the decent ones. I mean, there are some out there, I have run across some CEOs that have no interest in this subject at all. They've said to me, I don't care. I don't want to know. Um, but in fact, I had one CEO say, I don't want my people asking questions. I want them producing. I want them working. He's honest. Okay, that's the way he feels. Great. I think he's going to lose out in the long run. I think he's going to lose to his competitors. And I think his employees are going to leave him for better companies. But that's his choice. He can make that choice. However, what I will say is most CEOs are aware of this. They're aware of what I'm talking about. They may not have implemented it yet, but they know about it. They understand it. They see the value in it. They may not yet have figured out how to make it part of the culture, but they see the value. So in other words, what I'm saying is they are receptive to this message. If it's coming from outside, or if it's coming from below, bubbling up through the company, they're going to be receptive to it. A lot of them, and they're going to say, you know, I understand why this is important because I've been hearing about it and I know it's important in my gut. And so I'm really interested in what you're saying about how questioning produced a positive result. And what do you think we can do to get this to be more a part of the company? I think you're going to see that attitude in many, many leaders. Not all, you know, you won't, but you will see it in many. So have you found a pattern in the people who do get this? Like is there, what is the argument or the narrative that they buy into the people who do sort of want to run with it? They are simply progressive about how they run their company. They are not locked in. They're not locked into a, oftentimes it's founders. Founders are very good at this because they came up as innovators. They started as innovators, but it doesn't have to be founders. It can be, I've seen people who are second generation leaders or third generation leaders. And they can be very innovative, especially sometimes they have come from a company that was an innovative company and they were brought in because they were innovative. And that's why they're in this position as the leader. So I think as long as the leader has some type of an attitude of believing in innovation, believing in the potential of their people, believing those kinds of things, as long as they have that, then they're going to be open to this mindset. If they're kind of an old school, you know, I think of leaders as being new school or old school. The old school leaders, you know, they act like generals in the army, you know, and they're like, you follow my orders. I know what I'm doing. I know everything. Those are old school leaders. We still have some of those. I think they're dying. I think they're dying breed. I think the new breed, which is going to be much more prevalent, is a leader who is more open minded, more curious, more questioning, more appreciative of the people working for them. That's the new model for leadership. And it's going to be those the only people who are going to do well, in my opinion, in the new world are the people who embrace that model of leadership. Those old authoritarian leaders, they're going to have big problems. But one thing, people are not going to work for them. You know, people have changed. They don't want some old guy who thinks he knows everything yelling at them all day and telling them what to do. They won't stand for it. Totally agree. And we are luckily seeing they're not the typical service design client anyway. In the service business, you have to learn to listen and adapt. You can't be this kind of a know it all dictator. It just doesn't work in the service business. It works in very few businesses, but there are some old fashioned businesses where someone produces a widget, you know, or some little, little thing, right. And their family has been producing it for 100 years, and they've made a lot of money. And a lot of times those people are not too open to change, because they feel like, Hey, we know how to make this widget, we're just going to keep doing it. But you know what, their time is going to run out eventually. You mentioned something about showing results. And this is also one of the things I'm curious about. If you have some tips, tricks, tools, what are some good questions to start with that help you to show results and results like I know that they can be, they are super context dependent, it depends on your audience. But have you seen certain types of questions that really quickly lead to tangible results? Because the Airbnb example, like somebody could say that takes years to get there. And yeah, we don't have years, we need, we need something to show next week. So are there any easy ways in? I don't know that there's any easy answers to that. I think that questions can produce all kinds of results. They can produce short term quick results as well as long term. For instance, if you are asking questions about a, a, let's say a gap in the market right now, you know, I've been, I've done some work with Starbucks, right? So if Starbucks is asking good questions, which they often are, they're very much a question in culture now. And, and so they are constantly asking about what is going on in people's tastes, and in their habits. And then they are trying to quickly respond to that. You know, so, so we have a new product that can hit this emerging trend that can immediately bump up there. They can see immediate results on that because they're hitting with something that just works at this moment in time. And it might not have worked yesterday, might not work tomorrow, but it works right now. And the way they got to that product was by asking a lot of questions they had. And it's not just the people at the top, it has to be, you know, with Starbucks, they are trying to get this out there so that the people at the, at the, at the ground level, the baristas, the people in the coffee shops, they are the ones who should be asking a lot of questions too, because they're going to figure out, you know, this is, I'm asking my customers what they, how they feel about this or that. And they're saying, you know, this is what we like. This is what we're interested right now. And then they are able to take that input and bring it back to their home office. The home office is very receptive. They want to hear this, you know. So what I would say to people is, you know, you want to be asking questions at all levels of the company. You want your people at all levels to be trained to ask questions of customers. Then you want them to feel comfortable bringing that back to their, their managers, their superiors and being able to share it. The managers have to be open to it. The managers have to be asking for it. The managers have to be asking, what have you learned? What are you hearing? What are you, what are you finding out? And then they, the whole, the questions have to be flowing in all directions, all the way up to the top. And the top person has to be asking, okay, what's going on out there? I want to hear from everybody, what's happening? What is going on? What are we doing in this area? What are we looking at here? What do we, you know, it has to be all the questions are flowing in every, every which way. Now that's a lot harder than it, than it sounds because you have to develop systems that allow that to happen. And I think this ties into what you mentioned at the start is that it has to, it has to be an art and science and you have to develop it. You have to see another guest on the show mentioned question literacy. You have to sort of show that you can actually get better at it and that there are more questions that yield more valuable answers than other questions. I think the problem is one of the challenges is that people have been disappointed by questions and sort of questions that just filled up the air rather than helping them to progress towards the thing that they want to. And so that's, you know, you can actually, you can actually train people because like one of the things you can, yeah, you can do and actually Starbucks was, when I was working with them, they started using a exercise that I had been, that I shared with them, which is just very simple and it's about question formulation. So you get people in a room, you give them a challenge and you have them attack the challenge through constant questioning. So they may try to come up with 50 questions around this problem. We're having a problem with customer retention on this issue here. How do we, let's come up with 50 questions about that. So Starbucks started using that model and you know, what they are, what you're doing there is you're just strengthening the habit. You're, you're getting people to think, if you think of questioning as a way of thinking, you want to get people to use that way of thinking almost habitually and then they will be more comfortable with it and they'll, they'll know how to do it better. They will get better at it. A part of this exercise involves not only coming up with lots of questions, but then you work on your questions. Can we make this question more specific? What if we combine this question with that question? We put them together. So there are things, what if we open up the question or what if we close it? There are things you can do and you teach people, you get people in the habit of doing this and then they'll start to do it automatically. When they're at work, when they're coming, when they're dealing with customers, they'll start to use this as a more natural skill. Is this maybe one of the things that we take for granted and the thing that makes practicing questioning so hard that people think like, like anyone can ask a question. Right. It seems so easy. I think it's true. And the, and the thing you articulate the thoughtfulness and that there are different angles and there are better and worse, worse questions. Is that a big misconception? Yeah. I mean, I think people think it's like breathing. Everyone can do it. And part of the reason they think that is because we all know that young children ask a lot of questions. So that makes you think, oh, it's just, it's a childish behavior. So if a child can do it, that means it doesn't, it's no big deal because if a five year old can do it, so what, then anyone can do it. But that's not true because the truth is, this is one of those areas where a five year old is better than we are. They're stronger than we are when it comes to asking questions. They have less filters. They have more humility. They have more open wonder. They have their eyes are more wide open. So in other words, a child is actually a better questioner than we are. So it's wrong for us to think, oh, if a child can do it, anyone can do it. What the way I put it to people is we almost have to go back to that five year old state of being in order to be better questioners. And we have to imitate the five year old. We have to be more open minded. We have to be more bold, not be such, you know, scared of asking questions if a five year old isn't scared. They'll ask anything. So we need to in some ways mimic that behavior and then bring our own strength to it. Our own strength is that we know, we know more than the five year old. We know a lot of stuff. And as long as we're humble about that, about our knowledge and say, well, our knowledge could be really useful. It could also be wrong. There may be some things we're wrong about, but we can bring that knowledge into the questioning process. And now our questions will be stronger for it. They'll be better. But we need some of those behaviors of the five year old, the open mindedness and the willingness to ask. And I like what you're saying here is that a first step could very well be just showing the gap and the things that we are currently missing in our questioning, like the boldness and the curiosity and the thoughtfulness. The thoughtfulness, yes. So the deliberateness, the idea that you're going to spend time on your question, you know, and this is something I think I developed to have it as a journalist because I would go into an interview and I would know I'm only going to have a few questions with this person. And if I don't ask the best questions, the interview might not go very well. So I would sit down and think about the questions I was going to ask. Now, how many people do that? Not many. How many people sit down? And yeah, you probably do because you're doing a podcast. But every day people, how many of them sit down and really work on their questions and scratch them out and rewrite them and reword them. Most people don't do that. So that kind of thoughtfulness is very important. And on the one hand, I get that. It feels, and you mentioned it, it feels like slowing down. It feels like taking a step back and you sort of have to get over that. Maybe it's fair that you're going to invest time up front. Like this is the classic Einstein quote where he's going to spend 55 minutes figuring out what the question is and then five minutes for the solution. But I think you have to go through that process a few times to build the confidence that it's okay. And it's actually beneficial to be thoughtful about your questions because the answers and the solutions will be so much easier. But if you're just constantly under pressure to move forward and come up with answers, you have to pull the brakes somewhere and break that habit. It's not easy to do. But the one thing people have to realize, and managers have to realize this, and leaders have to realize that, is when your total focus is on producing and getting things done, you will get things done. There's no doubt about it. You will get things done. But the question is, will you be doing the right things? Something's going to get done, but it may not be the right thing. So I tend to think of questions. It's interesting. You can think of questioning as categories. You can think of why questions. You can think of what if questions. And you can think of how questions. Now, people who are very results oriented, they're how people. So the only question they're asking is, how are we going to get it done? How much is it going to cost? How can we do it faster? How, how, how? And you need that. You definitely need that. Those people are really important. But what I say is that sometimes they're missing the why and the what if. They're missing the questions that direct you to the how. So they're missing the front end. They're missing the front end of the process. And they're on the back end. And so I think this is a big adjustment for businesses to realize it's a full cycle. And you got to get to get it right. You have to be asking the right why questions. Why are we doing this in the first place? Does it still make sense? It might have made sense two years ago, but does it still make sense now? You have to think about those questions before you get to the how, how, how, how, how, how are we going to do it? I think a lot of big adjustment. Yeah, I think a lot of designers are right now cheering while listening to this episode, because this is I think what a lot of our designers are arguing for. Let's figure out what the right thing is to do and then figure out how to do it the right way. And listen, Mark, this is the designer's role in this process. I mean, it's their responsibility if they're not if they're not being the voice of reflection, thoughtfulness, asking why if they're not doing that, then it might not happen. It might not get done. So it's so critical for the designer to be whether whether it's a person within the company who's playing that role or whether it's an outside designer. It's so important for them to be the people who are asking the questions that nobody else is willing to ask or that nobody else has time for. Everyone else doesn't have time. And I think that one of the frustrations of many designers is that they they are asking these questions, but they are not being appreciated for it in a world where everything evolves around the how like the why questions aren't being appreciated to the extent they should be. Yeah, the only thing I'll say to that is that questioners often have had this resistance through the years. And it's part of the it seems to be part of the territory. It comes with the territory. You are you are going to encounter resistance. And you are going to have people that that doubt the value of what you are doing and who think you are, you know, just slowing things down or upsetting the process or whatever. And so I feel like there's almost no getting away from that. That is a responsibility that when you're in that role, you have to sort of take on. And and this is true for all kinds of people who are in advisory roles. I mean, it's true of coaches. It's true of consultants. It's true of designers. If you are going to be the person that comes in and helps people rethink or think better, you have to be willing to take the heat that comes with that because they're going they're not going to like it that you're you are changing things, you're disrupting a little bit. And they're not necessarily going to like that. And thank you for mentioning this because this is very comforting. It's it's part of the game. It's part of change. It's part of disruption. And you'll always encounter resistance. There's always going to be resistance. You'll always be a minority. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's just it's part of the game. And don't let that discourage you. And I think, right, with and I was thinking like, what are some tools that designers can use to get the rest of the people, how people more into the white people. And I really think your book is like a Trojan horse, because it's not packaged as design, right? It's it's it's packaged as a New York Times bestseller. Put it on the shelf of a few people. And that will marinate them. Yeah, you know what I say to people, Marcus is make questioning part of your own brand as a person, whatever level you are within a company or within an organization or whatever, make yourself the questioning guy or woman, right? And make it part of who you are, because then you can be you will be seen that way in the company. And as long as you don't do it in an annoying way, you know, I have seen people do this in an annoying way. So I will say as a caveat, be careful about being the sort of gadfly in the company, the person who asks like what would you call devil's advocate questions all the time and just is doing it as I said, you know, be careful of having an agenda behind your questions where I want to make myself look good, or I want to make myself seem smart, I want everyone to see how smart I am. If you've got that kind of an agenda, be careful, because that's going to make your questioning annoying people. But if you can bring positivity only about growth, only about learning, only about getting better, if you can have that be the the genesis or the basis of your questions, then I think people will love it. And you can be you will be valued by, I mean, clients may say, you know, they may laugh about it, they may say, Oh, there he goes with another one of those questions, they'll laugh about it. But at the same time, they will appreciate it, they'll understand that you're bringing something to the party here, that's really important. And it's great that we can use this as part of our brand and be more explicit about it, that this is actually a skill and a quality that we bring to the table, rather than just just doing it intuitively, like use it to your advantage, be be very transparent and also point out to people that they can use it to their advantage to, you know, even better anything. You don't have to have a master's degree in this, it's really a habit. And if they are willing to try to pick up the habit to they can have some of these, they can get some benefits out of it also. I've got two more questions left. And then we are sort of wrapping up this episode. If people remember one thing from this conversation, what do you hope it is? I hope they remember that questions are valuable and questions can help organizations and people in all kinds of ways. So give them their respect that they do. Pay attention to questions, spend time questioning and talk about the value of questioning with people around you. That's what I would, that's the most important thing. Can I share one other thought? Go ahead. One other thing, one other thought I'll give you is find your own question. I love to tell people, find your own beautiful question. It may be about your work, it may be about something you're trying to improve in your work or it may be about your life. But find some big ambitious question that you'd like to pursue and just make that a question you're going to work on for a while. I think that that's great. My beautiful question is how can I spread the word about questioning? So that's something, I mean, I can work on that forever. There's no, there's no end to that question, but it's a thing I can follow and a thing I can pursue. Awesome. Like that advice. And if people want to comment on this episode with their beautiful question, I'd love to know. It will be great. There's one more thing left to do and we're going to do a small contest one. And we're going to do, we're going to give away a signed copy of the book. Right? Now you had a question in mind and it's a simple question, but that's the whole purpose. What do people need to answer in order to make a chance to win a signed copy of the book? Okay. So the book we're giving away is called The Book of Beautiful Questions. However, it is based on a previous book that had a similar but different title. So I would like the first person to answer what was the name of the book that led to the book of beautiful questions. Awesome. Leave a comment down below this episode. We'll do a raffle. So all the good answers will go into Big Hat and then some how we'll randomly pick a winner and we'll ship the book to anywhere in the world. Warren, it was awesome having you on the show. Like I was reading this book every single morning during my breakfast and I loved it. I'm recommending it to everybody. So it was a great honor to have a face-to-face virtual conversation with you. Thank you for coming on. Sure. I really enjoyed it and I hope we get to talk again sometime soon. And by the way, those are great questions you asked. Thank you. If you've made it all the way here, I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Now don't forget to participate in the book giveaway contest. The only thing you have to do is to post a comment down below answering the question to which book is the book of beautiful questions a follow-up to. All the details of the contest are also in the video description. So check that out. Thanks a lot for watching to the Serbs Design Show. If you want more, check out the next video that I've got lined up for you. See you there.