BETTER QUESTIONS?
EPISODE 020: BETTER QUESTIONS?
Much as we look for answers to questions in the creative life, it’s the quality of the questions that determines how fruitful the pursuit of those answers might be. Better questions are much more valuable than good answers. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
There’s a chair in my office in which I do all my writing, an old beat-up Eames lounger. Beside that chair, just within reach of my left hand, there’s a stack of 40 little black notebooks, battered and dog-eared, that hold the collective thoughts and scribbles of the last 20 years. And as much as I love these books, I’m hoping very much that whoever survives me has the good sense to burn them when I’m gone. They’re not exactly the stuff of legacies, or evidence of genius. If anything they’re evidence of someone with more questions than answers, and a lot of really half-baked, even bad ideas, half-formed, scribbled out, some mostly illegible having written them while only half-awake or half-sober. Most of these ideas are written in the form of questions. But these are the most powerful tools I have in my creative life, tools without which I could do no interesting or productive work. They are the tools that pull me forward and as my willingness to collect them grows so to does the depth of my work. I don’t mean the notebooks, really; it’s the questions contained in them that have such value.
I’m David duChemin and this is episode 20 of A Beautiful Anarchy: Better Questions. Let’s talk about it.
Music / Intro
In my final year of college, studying theology on the cold Canadian prairies, I took a course in Rabbinic Thought, which seemed so unusual a course offering in my particular college that I probably took it based on curiosity alone. A bunch of Christian kids learning how Rabbis think? Oh, hell yes! What I remember from that course wasn’t so much the content but a way of thinking. The theological circles in which I chose to place myself at the time had a way not so much of asking questions but of defending very particular answers. Sometimes it felt like they were answers to questions we had lost sight of long ago. But in this class we were encouraged not to look for answers but to learn to ask better questions, and to explore and debate the many different sides of any issue. We were told to respond to questions, but never definitively answer them. “An answer,” we were told, “is lazy thinking, and shuts down conversation. A response is simply one of many possible replies.” In this class there was no such thing as a final answer. Looking back it was really a course in creative thinking.
This might not be mind-blowing stuff to you, but to a kid about to emerge from a very non-creative and dogmatic way of thinking, a way of thinking more concerned with having the right answers than it was about possibilities, it was life-changing stuff. We were taught to ask better questions, and if I emerged with anything valuable and abiding from those years of cramming a four-year degree into five, it was from that one class and a growing willingness to ask more questions, and not only more of them, but better, stronger questions. I learned that the questions are the more valuable thing, they endure, they incite, and they draw us into the unknown. With time, our final answers have a way of becoming irrelevant. But good questions will serve us for much longer.
Questions are at the very heart of any creative effort. What happens if I change this? How can I express that? How can I combine this idea or technique with others? What if my assumptions are all wrong? This curiosity is sacred to the truly creative.
But not all questions are as powerful as others. It is not merely that we ask questions but what kind of questions we ask.
Questions that are satisfied by a binary answer, a simple yes or no, for example, are usually lousy questions. So are questions that force a decision between only two options, like when someone asks if you want to do this or that, which implies there are only 2 options, which almost always makes me instinctively want to choose neither or both just to cause trouble. Because the binary choice is usually the least imaginative and when faced with a choice of only two directions, the better questions are probably, “Why are there only two choices? Have we looked at all the options? Have we looked at various combinations of the two?” The "This or That" scenario is rarely so cut and dried, it’s usually just a choice between the two most obvious answers, the low-hanging fruit that doesn’t recognize nuance or further possibility, really just the result of parking our thinking at the first convenient spot, and camping out without further exploration.
I suspect this tendency to ask questions with fast and easy answers comes from a desire to do things “the right way". The implication is that one of these is right, and one of them is wrong. The problem is that true creative thinking doesn’t sit comfortably on untested assumptions, it doesn’t lean toward the tried-and-true because most of us are trying to do something new, to create something in the space beyond the known and the done-before. If the creative life is nothing more than a constant effort to make the “right" choice between two uninteresting alternatives, I’m out.
The very reason I love the whole idea of creative thinking is that it frees us from the obvious and the pre-determined. It allows us to chase our curiosity and experiment and look behind forbidden curtains, to replace “Should I do this?” with the much more interesting “What happens if I do this in this way, and are there other possibilities?” which is a two-part question that contains a multitude of interesting possible responses and subsequent directions. When we ask these questions in search of the first answer that fits we miss out on the iterations, and the combinations, we miss the chance to allow our brains to incubate the ideas for a while and run off on a needed tangent.
As I get older and more committed to my work as a calling, more sure that what I do matters, at least to me, and that my productivity matters, my ideas increasingly express themselves as questions, not statements or answers. My most productive times are becoming those times in which I’m asking more questions, chasing them down, filling notebook pages with questions and their many possible responses. The questions are the starting place for my work as a photographer, a writer, a teacher, and an entrepreneur.
Try this when you’re next looking for an idea or bashing through one. Write a good question down, one that’s open-ended and can’t be answered with a yes or no. Then don’t stop until you’ve written down 10 possible answers, 10 replies. They can be really rough, and as unrealistic as you want. It’s not the answer that matters, it’s the exercise of not just being open to other possibilities but chasing them down. Pushing your thinking past the obvious.
Here’s an example. As a photographer I like to work in bodies of work, a series of images rather than just one photograph to explore an idea. If I’m at the beginning of a project, I ask myself, “What might this look like?" A couple years ago I was in India starting an ongoing project about the auto-rickshaws there. I wrote at the top of a page, Rickshaws. Then, below it, “What might this look like?" And I made a long list of all the possible visuals I could imagine. Rickshaws at different times of day, being repaired, being used for different things, the life of the rickshaw drivers, blurry images of rickshaws in motion, images from the inside looking out, from the top looking down, and so on. That exercise opened my eyes to new possibilities and directions, in the same way the same exercise has worked for coming up with ideas for books, articles, and blog posts to write, projects to pursue, and a thousand mundane daily things. They become the responses to the questions I’m asking.
The value in list-making and question-chasing is in mining the possibilities. Even if you don’t make actual lists, it’s human nature to settle too quickly on a first answer or idea, and not consider the less obvious possibilities. The solution is not better answers but better questions. If you focus on better answers you tend to stop too soon, and censor yourself, just the same way we tend to disregard ideas we label as bad and never give ourselves a chance to explore them before writing them off.
In my work with Corwin, my business manager for years, we have turned the asking of dumb questions and the stating of bad ideas into an honoured part of what we do. We call it out, usually prefacing it by saying, “Ok, this is a stupid question, but I’m going to ask anyways.” or “This is a really bad idea, but hear me out.” And we throw it out there and bash it around. And most of the time it gets a response like, “that’s interesting, what if we…?” and we find ourselves coming up for air an hour later with something really viable, a new direction or something we get super excited about. Something that wouldn’t have happened if we had just said, “you’re right that’s a dumb idea, let’s move on”.
The idea for this podcast came out of a dumb question, one I thought I knew the answer to, but by the time I had found 10 possible answers to the question: “what would a podcast look like if I did it my way?” I knew I had something. My original question was weak and unhelpful. I had asked “Do I want to do a podcast?” and the immediate answer was “Nope.” But that answer came from a very specific idea about what a podcast should and should not be like, how long it had to be, how much work I assumed it would take. I knew I wanted to do something, there was an urge that felt right. But if I’d stopped at the obvious, I would have bailed on it, and I haven’t been this excited about a creative project in years. It’s the result of asking a better question and exploring the responses for possibilities that felt right to me.
One of the principles I hold most sacred is that so-called “bad ideas” lead to better ideas, or they can if you let them. But you’ve got to let them out and you’ve got to have a place to put them. That’s what my notebooks are for. I also use Evernote to sort those ideas later on, to keep track of them and keep them searchable and findable. Creativity is all about how we think, and what we do with the little pieces of ideas that spark in our brains. Ultimately it’s all about what we do to put those ideas into the world, but first they have to be given room to grow and change. And all those ideas that are so good you’ll never forget them? They’ll be gone before you finish your coffee if you don’t write them down.
Often the idea goes nowhere but remember too that creativity is about connecting the dots and you just can’t keep all these dots in play for very long. Sometimes the idea comes at the wrong time, a time before the other dots that are needed to one day complete the idea haven’t yet arrived. Sometimes it’s only in hindsight that an idea makes sense. Often a question I asked a year ago only now has a response that leads somewhere, or I go back and the possible answers I had at the time only now lead to a new idea and suddenly the bad idea is pure gold. After 20 years I’ve got a massive resource of ideas sitting in these notebooks beside me.
The other value in asking questions and not settling on one answer but listing out many possible responses is that it pulls us out of our scarcity mentality about ideas. Our culture has this notion that great ideas are a rare thing, found only by the lucky or the talented. But ideas are everywhere. Ideas are a dime a dozen and when you begin to embrace the reality that ideas are abundant and ready for harvesting anytime you sit down with a notebook and a cup of coffee, you stop being so precious about them, you stop trusting the first one that comes to mind, and you realize that the gold–the real gold–is in the execution.
The obvious next step is another question: what now? The moment I find an idea that excites me, one that has a “hell-yes” factor to it, I ask “what next possible steps can I take now to explore this idea?” And I start making a list of possibilities, eyeing the first ones that come to mind with a little suspicion and forcing myself to dig a little deeper. Often it’s registering a domain name. I think I’ve got close to 100 domain names registered, most them just waiting for the right time. Sometimes it’s talking to someone specific.
Often it’s writing a page or two of further questions, half-baked ideas and what-ifs. Many times I design a logo for it because if I can see it visually it becomes more real to me.
And often the idea dies on the vine, or it becomes something else, something unexpected that I’d never have discovered if I hadn’t asked the better questions, entertained the worst of the ideas that came as replies, and took some first step toward it, if for no other reason than to see what might happen.
Years ago I asked myself what it might look like to make an ebook for photographers, so to find out I sat down, learned Adobe InDesign and made a book. I made a logo, sold the book, and years later found I’d accidentally created a publishing house. When I had asked myself if I wanted to make an eBook the answer was no because I thought I knew what an eBook looked like and I didn’t care for them and was pretty sure nobody would buy them. But what would it look like if I made one my way? Now that was a question worth exploring.
Ideas are valuable, but most of them don’t fall from trees. They come by asking a lot of questions, even the dumb ones, and being more fascinated by the possibilities than finding one right answer. Do what you have to to chase better questions, be suspicious of easy answers, and remember that ideas aren’t where the magic is. The magic is in what you do with them. So grab the paintbrush, the pen, the camera, and go make something beautiful. And if you can’t make something beautiful, make something ugly, because that’s almost always where it begins.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0