Simon Brown (00:09.233)
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Curious Advantage podcast. My name is Simon Brown. I'm Global Learning and Development Leader at EY and one of the co -authors of the book, The Curious Advantage. And today I'm here with my co -author, Garrick Jones.

Garrick (00:22.99)
Hi there!

Simon Brown (00:24.977)
Unfortunately, Paul can't be with us today, but we are delighted to be joined by Warren Berger. Welcome, Warren.

warren (00:32.952)
Hi, it's great to be here.

Simon Brown (00:34.961)
That's great to have you. Welcome to the Curious Advantage podcast. So Warren, you are a questionologist who works with the world's leading innovators, entrepreneurs and creative thinkers. You're also an author of 12 innovation focused books, as well as a keynote speaker. So let's kick off with if you could tell us a little bit about your journey and how you ended up where you are and what is a questionologist.

warren (01:00.664)
Yeah, well, if you haven't heard the term before, it's probably because I made it up. I was specializing in questioning for quite a while. What this came out of was being a journalist, and I kind of realized that in the world of journalism, there isn't enough attention paid to questions. In fact, you know, when I went to journalism school, there were no courses on formulating questions or...

Simon Brown (01:05.393)
Aha!

warren (01:30.84)
types of questions, really wasn't much attention paid to it. And then as I was a journalist, I noticed a lot of times, I would work really hard on my questions, but a lot of other journalists, it seemed like they were going through kind of rote questioning when they were doing interviews. So I got interested in questioning as a technique to help me as a journalist. But then,

while I was writing articles, I started to write more and more about innovators and business leaders and really creative people, a lot of Silicon Valley people, that kind of thing. And one of the things I noticed was that a lot of these people were really good at questioning. They were really good at formulating big, ambitious questions and then going to work on those questions.

And eventually, you know, that seemed to be the thing that would guide them as they were developing innovations and new ideas. So that was a big kind of breakthrough for me, you know, because I'd always thought, oh, questioning is this tool that helps you get information out of other people. But then I started to think about it this other way that it's also a tool that, you know, when you're asking yourself questions.

or you're in a group and together you're asking questions as a group, it can be this really powerful tool for shifting the way you think. And that became the basis of my book, A More Beautiful Question. I just kind of really focused in on what's the connection between questioning and innovation and questioning and any kind of change, bringing about any kind of change. And that's where I am now. It's become a huge thing I've done.

three books on it and it just keeps expanding and growing.

Garrick (03:30.862)
Such a beautiful topic. I mean, in the book, full title, a more beautiful question, the power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. And there you see, there are five enemies of good questions, which I was fascinated by. Can you tell us all about those? I think it was a fear, knowledge, bias, hubris, and time. It's amazing.

warren (03:53.112)
Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, well, I would say fear may be the biggest one and it's because questioning is associated with the unknown and when you ask questions, you're kind of in a way you're venturing into the unknown and you're admitting that you don't know already and so for a lot of people this creates discomfort in many ways. It starts with kids. Kids...

Garrick (03:58.99)
Hmm.

warren (04:22.328)
start out amazing questions, but then as they go through school and they're surrounded by peers and there's peer pressure and all of a sudden fear starts to be associated with questioning because, oh, what if I ask a stupid question or what if, what if I, you know, my question reveals to people that I don't know something that I'm supposed to know? And that continues into adulthood and the workplace. It's the same thing. I mean,

people are afraid of asking questions in the workplace because again, they might reveal weakness or not knowing. But then there's another issue in the workplace which is they're afraid that questioning could be seen as confrontational or that it could be seen as challenging the people who are above you. And so that's a whole other layer of fear on top of that. So fear I'd say is the number one thing.

When I talk about hubris, it's kind of like, it's just really like you have to be humble to ask questions because you have to admit you don't know. And then knowledge is an interesting one. Knowledge in some ways is the enemy of questioning because the more we know, oftentimes the less we ask. And that's why kids start out asking a lot of questions. Then they start to feel like they know more. They have kind of a mental model of how the world works.

and they begin to question less and less. And then the other one that's big is time. Time is just, you know, questioning is a form of slow thinking. It's reflective. It oftentimes doesn't seem like it's moving things forward. It can seem as if it's going backwards, you know, because sometimes when you ask questions, you're saying, hey, let's go back to what we talked about earlier. I have a question about it.

Garrick (06:17.39)
Mmm.

warren (06:17.944)
And so for a lot of people, they feel that, especially in the workplace in situations where time is so important and efficiency is so important, people can have this idea that questions will slow us down. And so that's, and by the way, that also starts in school. That starts with teachers having to cover so much material that what gets squeezed out of the classroom oftentimes is questioning.

So those are kind of the enemies that work against questioning that we should be aware of.

Simon Brown (06:55.185)
And bias one, so the bias is our own personal bias or?

warren (07:01.56)
Yeah, bias is what happens is it kind of, it's tied to knowledge a little bit where you think you know and when in fact you don't. So our biases will cause us to make a lot of assumptions. And so we really have to question our own biases as much as possible. That's where critical thinking comes in and critical thinking is all about questioning.

So yeah, that's a big issue today, I think. I actually added a new chapter onto the book, a new edition of the book. I added a couple of new chapters, newest edition that just came out. And one of them was critical thinking, because I look at what's going on in the US, certainly, and I think it's happening in other countries too, where we're seeing people having trouble distinguishing reality from...

lack of reality or factual information from they're getting they're basically purely getting swamped by information. And so it becomes more important than ever that they have critical thinking tools and critical thinking just is entirely about questions. It's like knowing which questions do I have to ask in what situation? And and how do I ask the question? I have to have the right attitude and the right mindset. So so yeah, that's that's where bias comes in.

Garrick (08:22.894)
I love these.

Yeah, fear, knowledge, bias, hubris, time. We could do a podcast with you about each one of those. And then critical thinking or criticality. It really rings a bell with Simon and myself and Paul because we were asking the question, what do we teach the kids in the next generation down the line dealing with the kind of digital realm and this kind of post truth if you accept that world that we kind of live in.

and critical thinking was where we landed too. I think it's absolutely vital, powerful set of skills to help us distinguish between, as you say, what's real and what's not real. And if we can get the kids understanding that and using that as a filter, I think we have achieved something. I'm fascinated by how...

warren (09:11.512)
Yeah, it's going to become, it's just going to become more important than ever, you know, because it's the more information that's coming at people, the more it's almost like there used to be filters in place, you know, back in the old days when there were, you know, three networks and the news anchor that we all trusted, you know, and those filters are gone, you know, and so now basically everybody has to have their own filter.

Garrick (09:25.614)
Yes.

curators, editors, and...

That's right.

warren (09:41.112)
and for sorting through things and figuring out what makes sense, what doesn't make sense. And yeah, and that's where critical thinking and critical thinking questions, knowing the kinds of questions you should be asking is really important.

Garrick (09:55.214)
How does, do you have a, give us a sense of some of the questions we can ask when we're doing critical thinking.

Simon Brown (09:56.369)
That's it. Yeah.

warren (10:04.6)
Yeah, well, the sort of the starting point, which I refer to in the book as the jugular question, is why do I believe what I believe? And it's a question that we need to ask ourselves regularly. And you can break that question down in a number of ways. You can ask, first of all, you ask, what is it that I seem to believe? What are my tendencies?

Garrick (10:11.118)
Mm.

Hmm.

warren (10:32.856)
What are my possible biases? And that kind of self analysis is really important. And then you're asking why, why do I tend to think that way? And it might lead you to all kinds of things like, well, it has to do with the way I was raised, has to do with the circles that I travel in, the media bubble that I'm in, all kinds of things like that. And then we can also ask ourselves, well, what can I do about it? What if I...

What if I want to, you know, sort of shift myself a little bit out of, if I'm leaning a certain way all the time, how can I get myself to sort of straighten up in my thinking? And I actually found talking to experts on this, on de -biasing, they say that one of the things you can do is actually embrace the opposite point of view. And you kind of force yourself to always consider the opposite. So you're kind of leaning.

Garrick (11:18.158)
Hmm. Cool, that's -

warren (11:28.664)
entirely in the other direction. And hopefully, it's not that you necessarily want to accept or embrace the opposite point of view, because that's not necessarily right. But what you want to do is get yourself to a balanced point. And by embracing an opposite point of view, it pushes you one way. And then maybe eventually you come back to a more centered and balanced way of looking at things.

Garrick (11:31.022)
Mm.

Garrick (11:55.726)
I love that because that's the kind of debiasing is a is a you're giving us a tool for how we can do it. Sorry, Simon.

Simon Brown (11:56.752)
So is that an?

warren (12:04.568)
Yeah, what would the opposite version of me think? There's a famous episode of the American sitcom, Seinfeld, where the character George goes through this and he realizes that he's always wrong, his decisions are always wrong. So he decides that from this point forward, he's going to ask himself, what would be the opposite thing? What would opposite George do? Of course, it doesn't work out really for him.

Garrick (12:14.03)
Mm.

Simon Brown (12:29.073)
Hehehehe

warren (12:34.232)
But that's an interesting exercise that we can use to get ourselves to shift our thinking a little bit.

Simon Brown (12:41.745)
So, I mean, there's a few things that come to mind, but one, as you were describing, they're sort of going into that jugular question, as you talked about it. So what, you know, why do I believe what I believe? You know, what are my tendencies? Why do I think that? It feels like there's a lot of self -awareness there that sort of then drives that, that actually trying to get underneath why, yeah, why you hold the views and beliefs that you have. And I guess in a world that is changing as quickly as the world is today, presumably,

asking that question regularly and coming up with that self -awareness of why you are thinking the way you are is incredibly powerful.

warren (13:20.504)
Yeah, what I see in the US now is there are a lot of people who think they're doing critical thinking, but they're doing it all in one direction. So they're doing it with an agenda or with a very solid, rigid point of view. But yet they think they're doing critical thinking because they're asking a lot of skeptical questions and they're sort of challenging authority. But they don't realize they're only doing it in one direction. They're only doing it one way.

And so that's one of the things I'm trying to get across is if you're doing that, you're not a critical thinker. No matter how much, no matter how many skeptical questions you're asking, it's about the attitude you have as you're asking those questions.

Simon Brown (14:02.833)
So is there whether it's another question or whether there's something that can break one out of that, I guess, perception and awareness that I think I'm being broad and thinking of all the considerations, but actually I'm in my own little bubble that's being reinforced by listening to only a certain set of views or whatever. Is there a way to break out of that where we may not even realize sometimes we're in that?

warren (14:30.264)
Yeah, I think just by challenging yourself to look at things in a different way. And that's where we can all do that if we're willing to take the effort, take the time and make the effort. Most of us, there's a slight discomfort associated with that too, because a lot of us get very invested in our viewpoints.

And we get invested in thinking that what we think is right and we've figured out the right way to look at this issue or this particular matter. So one of the things you have to do is question whether you're willing to let go of being right and whether that's really the most important thing, you know, is, is being right. Really the most important thing, or is it really more important that you're learning and adjusting and adapting and, uh, you know, and that's, that's kind of a big shift for people.

It involves ego and letting go of that ego feeling of being right.

Garrick (15:32.174)
reminds me of the neuroscientific piece about how when we learn, you know, we secrete pheromones and hormones and neurochemicals and so on. But when we're learning those particular things, because they're related to fight or flight, they tend to make us feel uncomfortable. And so we can sometimes mistake being uncomfortable for being learning. It's one of the problems I've got with feedback systems where people...

warren (15:50.232)
Yeah, absolutely.

Garrick (15:59.31)
get to say, oh, I didn't like this. I felt very uncomfortable in a learning situation. Well, yeah, maybe. Learning is supposed to be uncomfortable. It's supposed to take us to the edge and for us to inquire. And then when we know that it's safe or we learn or we figured it out and we know what our opinion is, then we can settle down and it can be laid down as a memory and so on. So that's another whole discussion, the question of learning and being uncomfortable.

warren (16:08.44)
Yeah, it is.

warren (16:22.808)
Yeah, well, someone that I had interviewed, someone I interviewed had said, one of the questions maybe we should be asking ourselves is, how can I get to the point where when I learn I'm wrong about something or that there's a different way of looking at it, it actually feels good? Can I get myself to feel good about that? And I think that's kind of the challenge. If we could get to the point where we feel great pleasure,

Garrick (16:39.246)
So...

Garrick (16:49.102)
Hmm.

warren (16:49.336)
when we encounter a view that causes us to change our view, instead of feeling defensive about it or scared, that is gonna be really important to making us better critical thinkers.

Garrick (17:01.998)
I love it. How does it, sorry. How can we apply this to the workplace? I mean, you talk about creating a culture of inquiry. How do you create that cultural, how do you encourage a culture of inquiry?

warren (17:18.52)
Yeah, I think the culture of inquiry basically starts from the top because you have to signal to people very strongly that you are interested in questioning and that it's something that our culture values. And don't forget, you're trying to overcome years of programming that people have had that say it's all about the answers.

Garrick (17:43.022)
Yeah.

warren (17:46.904)
questions slow things down, that kind of thing. And people have been absorbing this kind of information ever since they were in school. Don't forget when they're in school, they only get rewarded for the answers. They don't get rewarded for asking a good question. So there is a sense that questions are not valued. So the biggest thing that I think has to be done to establish a culture of inquiry is leaders have to find ways to show,

Garrick (18:02.094)
Mm.

warren (18:16.088)
that questions are valued. There's a million ways of possibly doing that. You know, it could be we choose the question of the week and that person, you know, is celebrated for coming up with the best question or, you know, you just have to find ways to reward and encourage questioning and put it out there as part of the belief system of the organization to say, we are a questioning culture.

I've often said to companies and leaders, if you want to do that, you know, one place you might start is with your mission statement. Because if you phrase your mission statement or your value statement as a question, that signals something to your people. That tells them, we're not about saying we have all the answers. And oftentimes a mission statement is...

is phrased as if it's an answer, as if it's something we've already figured out. You know, we make the world a better place through robotics or something. So it's saying, we figured this out. Now the problem is it's probably not true. You really probably haven't figured it out. You're on your way to figuring it out all the time. It's a journey. So that's where mission statements come across as kind of static and they feel as if the mission's already been accomplished.

Whereas if you're phrasing your mission questions as like, how might we, you know, how might we make the world a better place through robotics? Well, it's sending a whole different signal to your organization. First of all, it's saying we're on a journey. We haven't figured it out. And it's also an invitation to them. Questions are always invitations. You know, they're invitations to think about something, to be part of something. So, and that's what you want. That's what you want your mission to be. You know, you want it to be a collaborative journey.

that you're all taking together. So anyway, that's, it's a small thing, but I talked to companies about it a lot. They're a little nervous about doing it because they, I think they feel that the, if you do your mission question or value question as a statement, I mean, as a question rather than a statement, it might suggest you're not confident about it or, you know, some doubt about it or something. So I think that's where I run into resistance.

warren (20:37.496)
to that idea on mission question. But that's just one thing. I mean, there's a lot of policies you can do. It could be the way you structure questions into your meetings, instead of leaving them for the very end. Maybe you have them in the middle of the meeting or at the beginning of the meeting. There's a lot you can do to signal to people that questions are valued here.

Simon Brown (21:01.361)
So interesting, now I'm at EY, we have better questions, better answers, better working world. So it's tied in very much to actually, if we can ask those better questions, then everything that follows is going to be better for it. So yeah, creating that environment to better question. What's your take, Warren, on, I guess, the applicability of questions today versus in the past? Because my gut instinct is because...

warren (21:13.304)
Absolutely. Yep.

Simon Brown (21:28.433)
we're going into a lot more uncharted territory with the likes of Gen .ai and other things that actually the ability for a leader to know the answer now is to have certainty over an answer is very, very difficult. So actually, almost the best way of navigating through is to be able to ask those questions. Is that style of working going to be more suitable or more valuable in the future than you think it has been in the past?

warren (21:56.568)
Yeah, I think so. I think it's going to be eventually the only kind of leadership that works. You know, and it's a transition right now. It's, it's leaders were have to make this big transition from being the answer people, you know, the people that you would go to with all the expertise and the answers who tell you what to do and say what this is exactly what the company's going to do. So they, they were in that position. They were trained in that position.

in that kind of thinking. And it's very closely tied to authority, the idea that the leader has to exercise really strong authority, that the leader has to be extremely, extremely confident. And so to shift to this other model of questioning leader, which is what I call it in the book, I say, this is the new type of leader, the questioning leader.

And to shift to that is a big, big change. It requires different ways of operating, different ways of interacting with your people, where you are asking them more questions and you're allowing them to ask questions. You're saying basically, I want to hear your questions. This is a shift. I mean, it's a little bit of giving up some control.

And so that could be an issue for some leaders. What if I get, this is the same problem teachers have, by the way, when teachers start allowing students to ask more questions, the first thing that teachers will wonder is, well, what if I can't answer it? What if they ask questions and I don't know the answers? How am I gonna deal with that? Well, the same is true for leaders as well. They may find themselves in situations where they have to say, I don't know. And a lot of leaders are not.

entirely comfortable with that, but they should be because really no one expects anyone today to have all the answers. It would be ridiculous. And, and if, and in fact, if someone does present themselves as having the answers, I think it's a, it's a huge warning sign. It's a red flag because it tells you that they, uh, you know, they think they know way more than they do and they're probably going to lead you down a, down a bad path. So,

warren (24:19.8)
So I think it's a big adjustment that's going on now and leaders are gonna have to figure out how to get comfortable with it. How does it change my behavior? How does it change my everyday interactions with people? How can I balance the humility and confidence? Because to be a questioning leader, I think you have to be.

humble and confident at the same time. You have to be humble enough to be willing to admit you don't have all the answers, but then you have to be confident enough to believe that even when you do that, people will still follow you. And so that's the big challenge for leaders today.

Simon Brown (25:05.553)
So we're talking with Warren Berger. Warren is an innovation expert and questionologist who explores the minds of the world's leading innovators, entrepreneurs, and creative thinkers. Warren's techniques help to unravel organization strategies in asking questions, generating ideas, and solving problems. With over 12 innovation -focused books as his name, his book Glimmer was recognized among Business Week's Best Innovation and Design Books of the Year. And his insightful writing extends to publications such as Fast Company, Harvard Business Review,

Psychology Today and the New York Times. Hearing you talk there, Warren, one question that comes to mind is can you overplay that questioning? So if a questioning leader is where maybe many of us end up, can you ask too many questions, maybe in today's world, to the point where it becomes an issue versus a positive trait?

warren (26:02.456)
Yeah, I think that's where the balance with critical thinking comes into play. Because when you're asking a lot of questions, you can get to the point where you're questioning almost everything. And that's where you have to exercise some thinking to say, okay, there are some things we actually know. There is this actual thing called evidence. And how do we know when to trust?

Simon Brown (26:22.353)
Yes.

Garrick (26:26.542)
Mm.

warren (26:31.96)
the evidence or when to trust the sense that yes, this is the right way to go. You know, and, and so I think, you know, you don't want to get trapped by questioning to the point where you're not moving forward. And that is probably one of the, one of the big dangers, you know, I always think of, uh, when I was in college and, you know, um, a group of us would get together late at night and have these.

philosophical arguments or whatever that never went anywhere. They just kind of spun around and around. And that's kind of questioning can do that, you know, where you're sort of asking endless whys and why, why, why, but you're not really, you know, moving forward on anything. So, so I think what you have to do is figure out your own kind of system and methods for using questioning productively.

Garrick (27:26.126)
Hmm.

warren (27:26.616)
And in my book, I had a suggested model for one way to do that. There's a lot of ways you can do it. There's no formula for questioning. But one of the things I tried to say in the book is different questions do different things at different stages of the innovation process. So when you're asking why in the early stages, you're trying to understand something. You're trying to understand.

a problem, an issue, an opportunity, you know, why does this opportunity exist? Why hasn't someone solved this already? Um, but you have to move forward with your questioning. So when you're asking why you're not really doing anything other than trying to understand, and you have to sort of move from those kinds of thinking questions to more action oriented questions. And that's where I say, well, you know, you can, you can start to ask what if, you know, and what if questions are going to.

challenge you to come up with ideas or possibilities. What if we tried this? What if we tried that? And then eventually you're gonna try to get to more practical how questions, how would we actually do it? How would we take the first steps? How would we, how much is it gonna cost us? All those practical issues, right? So you can look at questions in that way as different types of questions will help you move forward. They'll help you move through different stages.

of developing ideas or innovating or bringing about changes in policy in your organization. You can't get trapped in those sort of philosophical questions.

Garrick (29:03.566)
I really like the way that you've brought it back to innovation because it then starts to come alive for me so much. I always think about, you know, the famous von Klauswitz quote that no plan survives its first encounter with the enemy or no plan survives its first encounter with reality. And the thing I love about innovation and you talk about these phases or modalities, then what I really respond to about that is.

warren (29:18.904)
Right.

warren (29:22.744)
Yeah.

Garrick (29:31.342)
that there are different sets of questions, as you say, for each of those modes. And with the bias for moving us forward, if you want to know something, go and test it. Go and find out whether it works in reality. Do lots of high -volume, low -impact failure, lots of little things that allow you to get real feedback from the real world. And then, of course, those prompt new questions.

Simon Brown (29:48.689)
you

warren (29:53.784)
Yeah, yeah, that's why I think. Yeah, I think of the like, for instance, the how questions, you know, when you're asking how that's when you're, you might be doing testing and prototyping and things like that. And you're saying, how does this, how does this work? How will it be received by people? How does it work in the real world? And so, yeah, so, so I think of, you know, there's someone from the company IDEO who, who once said a prototype.

is a question embodied. And really it's just taking, it's just creating something that you can put out into the world and say, okay, how does this work? Right? And how are people gonna receive this? And how do we need to improve it? And so I think, you know, there's a whole stage of those kinds of questions, very practical. But I do think that if, I would say if organizations have a bias,

toward one type of question over another. They're very biased towards how and action oriented. They're very biased toward practical questions. So immediately organizations will start asking, how is it gonna work? How can we test it? How much is it gonna cost? So they immediately go into very practical questions. When I think that it's really important to go...

back to those earlier stages of questioning too and say, you know, why are we even doing this in the first place? And, and I think a lot of times that gets lost. That type of questioning gets bypassed because we're so eager to get to doing things and making things and getting results.

Simon Brown (31:40.689)
I'd like to come back to the fear bit from earlier because I think the notion that questions can invoke so much fear in people I think is a really powerful one that if they can bring all of this good stuff that you've shared since and yet many of us may be afraid of actually asking questions because of the fear barrier. How...

How best can we overcome that fear? So are there any techniques or any ways you've encouraged people to move beyond that fear, whether it's a fear of looking stupid because it's not perceived as a good question or whether it shares that maybe you don't understand things as well as people think we should know things. How?

Is there a reframe or is there a technique that we can use to overcome that fear as that main barrier that you described?

warren (32:37.656)
I think one of the things you can do with fear and questioning is you can use questioning to analyze the fear. And so that what you're asking is, what am I really afraid of here? And you're asking that question that people's mothers used to ask them forever and ever, which is, what's the worst that could happen? Right?

And that's a great question to ask when you're thinking about challenges and risks. You want to articulate or clarify what are the actual risks? Because a lot of times in our head, we exaggerate them. Or we never even get a clear thought of what they are. We just know we're scared of something, but we don't know really what are we scared of. And so a lot of times with...

with that kind of fear, questioning the fear to force yourself to articulate what is it, what's real about that fear and what's exaggerated. And another question someone shared with me, which I love is, let's say you ask what's the worst that could happen and then you say, well, we could have this kind of a failure or something like that. Then you follow that up with the question, how would we recover from that? What would we have to do?

if that worst case scenario happened, is it fatal or is it something that we could come back from? And that's really, again, it's really important for taking these exaggerated fears in our head and making us realize, you know, no, they're not, they're probably not as extreme as we tend to think in our imagination.

Garrick (34:29.294)
Curiosity is such a powerful motivator for questions and is kind of bound up in why we ask the questions that we do and why we choose to follow the paths that we want to follow and learn and take things forward. I have to ask, what are you personally most curious about right now, Warren? I guess professionally. So let me ask that, sorry, Warren, sorry, let me ask that again.

warren (34:52.184)
I'm curious about, yeah, there's something that I'm curious about. Yeah.

Garrick (35:00.11)
What are you personally most curious about right now?

warren (35:00.312)
Uh -huh.

warren (35:07.48)
You know, I'm working on something now, which I don't know if it's going to end up being my next book or not, but I saw some research on how nature can have a very powerful chemical effect on your creative mind, on your creative thinking. And I find that fascinating. So I plan to delve deeper into that subject and the science of it, as well as

firsthand experiencing it myself. And so there's an area that I really like in Ireland called the Byrne. And so one of the things I plan to do is I'm gonna be traveling there pretty soon, next week actually. And I will be talking to artists there and people who find it to be a source of inspiration. And so it's part of this larger question of what is the connection between nature,

and creativity and I'm just fascinated by that. Very, very curious about it.

Simon Brown (36:11.057)
There's an article I passed this morning which I think was around showing nature in VR having, it was claimed, wellbeing effects on, I think it was people with cancer or something. I sort of passed by it but it seemed to be a similar thing of actually maybe we underestimate some of the power of nature in various pieces. I'd love to see where your curiosity goes around the link between nature and creativity.

warren (36:37.72)
Yeah, I think it's a powerful idea. And I think it, again, it's something that people probably have felt something like that for a long time, but there was never any research behind it. And now people are starting to research and say, yeah, no, it really does have these interesting effects on your brain and the way you think. And so it's fascinating.

Garrick (37:02.798)
I saw something in Japan recently about...

Simon Brown (37:04.049)
So as the master of questionology, do you have any questions for us, Warren?

Garrick (37:10.158)
Sorry, sorry, Simon.

warren (37:11.256)
Yeah, I'd be sure to.

Simon Brown (37:13.585)
Oh, sorry. Yeah, of course I can. Yep, yep. So, Warren, as the master of questionology, do you have any questions for us?

Garrick (37:14.19)
Can you ask that again? Sorry.

warren (37:26.36)
Yeah, well, you guys have been really focused in on curiosity. And I'm wondering, what do you feel organizations are thinking about curiosity? Do they value it? Do they try to actually encourage it? And have they figured out ways to do that? Because I find that fascinating.

Simon Brown (37:52.049)
So I can start. So certainly through the conversations that I've had, there's been, and maybe this is self -fulfilling, having written a book on curiosity, but we've certainly heard a lot more over recent years of organizations being interested in the notion of curiosity, and I guess behind that questioning. My assumption on that is because it is...

this changing world around us that there is no longer a clear answer and therefore many organizations coming to the conclusion that actually what are the traits that you need to be able to navigate through ambiguity and through the unknown? Well, actually it's the ability to be curious, the ability to adapt quickly, to experiment, to try things, to test and to today's discussion to really question things and not hold too strongly onto what we believe to be true because...

It may well have changed without us knowing and we need to constantly question to get to the right answer. So yeah, it's definitely the last couple of years seems to be raising in its prominence would be my take. Garret.

warren (39:01.304)
Do you feel like they're developing practices and systems to encourage creativity? Are you seeing organizations actually do this in a kind of a systematic way?

Simon Brown (39:15.153)
I think I see it more in things like leadership development. So encouraging leaders to be comfortable with not always knowing the answer. And I think still there's a lot of organizations wrestling with this sort of, if I don't know, is that a sign of weakness? So trying to sort of shift to actually.

Garrick (39:19.374)
Exactly.

Simon Brown (39:40.593)
It's not possible to know the answer in many situations. So actually the sign of a good leader is someone who can ask the right questions, but also do what you said earlier, I think as well, which is not question everything. It's actually, what do we know? Let's put the stick in the sand that allows us to move forward. And then what's the next question? So I think that leadership traits around that, I think are key. And then...

looking at how other processes can reinforce that, recognising the sort of system nature of an organisation, you know, how does performance management and other things maybe, or values and culture within the organisation also reflect that curiosity element.

Garrick (40:22.894)
I was also thinking about leadership specifically around why this is all happening. Because the digital realm and this hyper connectivity has really changed the world that we live in. And we're only now it's time to more and more discover what those impacts are. For one thing, anybody who's connected to the internet has more solutions and answers and questions than anyone leader can.

can possibly deal with. So it changes not only what it means to be a leader, but it also changes who you turn to for answers and how you do that. So I completely agree that it's at the heart of the kind of digital transformation that's going on around the world at the moment, which is throwing everybody into crisis. What's my role? Who am I? And how do I cope going forward? All of which are great questions.

warren (41:15.288)
Yeah. Yep.

warren (41:22.552)
By the way, one of the ways I define a good question and an authentic question is basically, does it have a curiosity at the center of it, the central ingredient? Because there is a lot of questioning that does not have a curiosity and it ends up being almost what I would call counterfeit questioning. You know, when you ask someone something, but it's really a statement or a criticism disguised as a question, you say to them, what were you thinking when you did that?

And so I think there's a whole way of questioning that is not curious, and it's much less effective to me than questioning that is rooted in curiosity.

Simon Brown (41:59.025)
you

Simon Brown (42:04.593)
I love that. Yeah. And in fact, at the end of our book, The Curious Advantage, the conclusion we come to is to question is the answer. So it ties in very well. There's really, as you say, the heart of curiosity. So we're coming close to time. We've covered a lot. If I try my best to sort of summarise some of the things we've covered. So we heard all about a questionologist and I thought I was missing something, but I'm glad to hear that you made it up.

warren (42:12.44)
Hmm. Yeah.

warren (42:17.272)
Yeah, absolutely.

Garrick (42:18.222)
It's so much.

Simon Brown (42:32.593)
that it wasn't a term I wasn't familiar with. The barriers to us asking questions around fear, around hubris, around knowledge, around time and around bias and how that fear element is one of the biggest ones and how then questions are becoming more important maybe than ever before. We heard about the jugular question. So...

Garrick (42:34.094)
Love it.

Simon Brown (42:56.977)
Why do I believe what I believe? And the discussion then around sort of self -awareness and the importance of critical thinking and how we can embrace the opposite point of view to help us sort of to navigate through that. The challenge of how we're often invested in our own points of view and how we get caught up sometimes by our egos and are we willing to actually let it go and or let go of being right?

that we need to learn, we need to adjust, we need to adapt. We had about how we can create a culture of inquiry, the importance of signalling from the top, the possibility of having mission statements as a question, of really setting the tone for an organisation that's leading with that mission statement, and how leaders go from answering people to actually questioning people. So actually the role of a leader in the future may be...

far more asking questions, but not overplaying that either. We then heard about questioning too much and actually we need to take certain things as read so we can move forward, but actually still use questions productively. We'd heard about different types of questions. So moving from sort of why that gives us the broad sort of thinking through to the what if, generating ideas and then the how, the practicalities of the cost and how would we actually do this.

and the organisational bias to move to that how maybe a little bit too quickly. And then, yeah, asking ourselves as a maybe a tactic for managing that fear of asking questions of, you know, what's the worst that could happen? You know, what really are the risks here? And if they do manifest, you know, how can we recover from those? So pretty rich conversation. If there's one thing from all of that, Warren, to leave our listeners with as a takeaway, what would that be?

warren (44:50.424)
Just one of the ways you get better at asking questions is to just ask more of them. And so take your questions out there into the world, share them with people. Don't be afraid of asking them. Try to get better if you're in a group. You can use exercises, question formulation exercises to try to get better at formulating exercises quickly, formulating questions quickly. And so, you know,

Basically, that would be my final thought is just ask more and then you will get to better questions.

Simon Brown (45:25.233)
I love it. So ask more questions, or as we said in the book, to question is the answer. So thank you, Warren. It's been a fantastic conversation, and thanks so much for joining us.

Garrick (45:26.158)
Great.

warren (45:35.704)
Thank you, I really enjoyed it. And by the way, you asked great questions.

Garrick (45:38.67)
Question leader.

Simon Brown (45:39.089)
Oh, thank you. We shouldn't have asked you that, so rate our questions. Yeah, no, thank you. So you've been listening to a Curious Advantage podcast. We're curious to hear from you. If you think there was something useful or valuable from this conversation, we encourage you to write a review for the podcast on your preferred channel, saying why this was so and what have you learned from it. We always appreciate hearing from our listeners and share your thoughts and have a curious conversation with us today using the hashtag curious advantage.

warren (45:43.864)
Right. Yeah.

Garrick (45:44.43)
Thank you, Owen.

Simon Brown (46:07.089)
Curious Vantage Book is available on Amazon worldwide. Order your physical, digital or audiobook copy now to further explore our 7C's model for being more curious. Subscribe today and keep exploring curiously. See you next time.

Simon Brown (46:24.177)
Thank you, Warren.

warren (46:25.976)
Great, thank you guys.