There’s a lot of talk about innovation going on in brains, blogs, and boardrooms. Education, technology, corporate policy… people in all kinds of fields are constantly trying to see around the corner, create a new reality, and get in position to rise with the next wave (rather than simply catch its crest).
Innovation requires having more than the right answers, though.
It requires asking the right questions.
Questions open doors to unexplored territories. They demonstrate AND inspire creativity. They are how you discover new places & ideas, and come up with the solutions & tools necessary for realizing them.
Here are 15 quotes about the importance of asking the right question:
- “It’s not that they can’t see the solution. They can’t see the problem.” – G.K. Chesterton
- “There are no right answers to wrong questions.” – Ursula K. Le Guin
- “We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.” – Bono
- “Ask the right questions if you’re going to find the right answers.” – Vanessa Redgrave
- “Asking the right questions takes as much skill as giving the right answers.” – Robert Half
- “What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.” – Jonas Salk
- “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” – Werner Heisenberg
- “The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a creative mind to spot wrong questions.” – Antony Jay
- “In school, we’re rewarded for having the answer, not for asking a good question.” – Richard Saul Wurman
- “In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” – Bertrand Russell
- “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.” – Voltaire
- “We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.” – Friedrich Nietszche
- “My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.” – Peter Drucker
- “He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes. He who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.” – Chinese proverb