Warren Berger > Quotes

“You don’t learn unless you question.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air, and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Don’t just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.” After”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it . . . if you think of, detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream even if the end is a long way off, for there are about five thousand steps to be taken before we realize it; and start making the first ten, and stay making twenty after, it is amazing how quickly you get through those five thousand steps.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“The main premise of appreciative inquiry is that positive questions, focusing on strengths and assets, tend to yield more effective results than negative questions focusing on problems or deficits.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“What if our schools could train students to be better lifelong learners and better adapters to change, by enabling them to be better questioners?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“questions challenge authority and disrupt established structures, processes, and systems, forcing people to have to at least think about doing something differently.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“most creative, successful business leaders have tended to be expert questioners. They’re known to question the conventional wisdom of their industry, the fundamental practices of their company, even the validity of their own assumptions.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“What’s required is a willingness to go out into the world with a curious and open mind, to observe closely, and—perhaps most important, according to a number of the questioners I’ve interviewed—to listen.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“... schools in many industrialized nations were not, for the most part, designed to produce innovative thinkers or questioners -- their primary purpose was to produce workers. The author Seth Godin writes, "Our grandfathers and great grandfathers built schools to train people to have a lifetime of productive labor as part of the industrialized economy. And it worked."
To create good workers, educations systems put a premium on compliancy and rote memorization of basic knowledge -- excellent qualities in an industrial worker. (Or, as the cartoonist and Simpsons creator Matt Groening puts it, "it seems the main rule that traditional schools teach is how to sit in rows quietly, which is perfect training for grown-up work in a dull office or factory, but not so good for education.")
And not so good for questioning: To the extent a school is like a factory, students who inquire about "the way things are" could be seen as insubordinate. It raises, at least in my mind, a question that may seem extreme: If schools were build on a factory model, were they actually designed to squelch questions?”
― Warren Berger

“when he came home from school, “while other mothers asked their kids ‘Did you learn anything today?’ [my mother ] would say, ‘Izzy, did you ask a good question today?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Beginner’s”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Picasso was onto this truth fifty years ago when he commented, “Computers are useless—they only give31 you answers.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“One of the many interesting and appealing things about questioning is that it often has an inverse relationship to expertise—such that, within their own subject areas, experts are apt to be poor questioners. Frank Lloyd Wright put it well when he remarked that an expert is someone who has “stopped thinking because he ‘knows.’”2 If you “know,” there’s no reason to ask; yet if you don’t ask, then you are relying on “expert” knowledge that is certainly limited, may be outdated, and could be altogether wrong.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“I’ve always been very concerned with democracy. If you can’t imagine you could be wrong, what’s the point of democracy? And if you can’t imagine how or why others think differently, then how could you tolerate democracy?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“It’s easier to act your way33 into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“you can’t help but feel uncomfortable,” because it becomes clear that fear of failure “keeps us from attempting great things . . . and life gets dull. Amazing things stop happening.” But if you can get past that fear, Dugan said, “Impossible things suddenly become possible.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“As you make those daily choices about what to spend your time on and which possibilities to pursue, the author and consultant John Hagel suggests you ask yourself13 this question: When I look back in five years, which of these options will make the better story? As Hagel points out, “No one ever regrets taking the path that leads to a better story.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something—and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“with others.” Bennett culls all of these bits59 and shares the best of them with the people at IDEO, or with a larger audience on his blog, The Curiosity Chronicles. For many of us, the beautiful question that calls to us is some variation of what Bennett is talking about: How do we continually find inspiration so that we can inspire others? That question must be asked and answered fresh, over and over. There is no definitive answer, at least not for the creative individual who wants to keep growing, improving, innovating. To say, I’ve figured it out—this is”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“This works well under most circumstances, but when we wish to move beyond that default setting—to consider new ideas and possibilities, to break from habitual thinking and expand upon our existing knowledge—it helps if we can let go of what we know, just temporarily.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Death to Core Competency,” suggests that whatever a company’s specialty product or service might be—whatever got you to where you are today—might not be the thing that gets you to the next level.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“The mind, if preoccupied with a problem or question long enough, will tend to come up with possibilities that might eventually lead to answers, but at this stage are still speculations, untested hypotheses, and early epiphanies. (Epiphanies often are characterized as “Aha! moments,” but that suggests the problem has been solved in a flash. More often, insights arrive as What if moments—bright possibilities that are untested and open to question.)”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Carlin died in 2008, but his daughter, the comedian and radio host Kelly Carlin,16 feels the vuja de way of looking at the world—of observing mundane, everyday things as if one were witnessing something strange and fascinating—is exactly the way Carlin went through his life and got his material. “When the familiar becomes this sort of alien world and you can see it fresh, then it’s like you’ve gone into a whole other section of the file folder in your brain,” she said. “And now you have access to this other perspective that most people don’t have.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“one of the most important things a leader can do is project a clear and distinctive point of view that others can follow. But that clear vision is arrived at, and constantly modified and sharpened, through deep reflection and questioning.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something—and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“if you never actually do anything about a problem yourself, then you’re not really questioning—you’re complaining.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“What matters now is your ability to triangulate, to look at something from multiple sources, and construct your own warrants for what you choose to believe.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“What if we start with what we already have? When innovators look at the world around them, they’re often looking for what’s missing. But while questioning your own life, it’s also important to look, via “appreciative inquiry,” not just for what’s missing, but also for what’s there. The main premise of appreciative inquiry is that positive questions, focusing on strengths and assets, tend to yield more effective results than negative questions focusing on problems or deficits. Strength-based questioning focuses on what is working in our lives—so that we can build upon that and get more out of it.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“A learning company might also think of itself as an ongoing “idea conference,” as in What if we could create the experience of a TED conference, every day, within the company”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas