
The Art of Powerful Questions (2003) [pdf] - azizsaya
https://umanitoba.ca/admin/human_resources/change/media/the-art-of-powerful-questions.pdf
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ssivark
In context, allow me to share this gem of a comic:
[http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-
park](http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park)

I won't say anything about it, because I don't want to spoil it for you.

~~~
jborichevskiy
That was lovely. Thanks for sharing!

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pattisapu
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I
would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for
once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five
minutes.” -Albert Einstein

Reminds me of:

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four
sharpening the axe." -Abraham Lincoln

~~~
yesenadam
As soon as I saw that Einstein quote, I couldn't help wondering if it was
fake. I'm really unable to say for sure - I can't get beneath the thick layer
of websites with it, or saying it's "attributed to" Einstein or he is "claimed
to have said it", etc. No mention of a source when you search for it. So, I'm
sceptical. I downloaded the PDF.. there's another Einstein story:

 _Many years later,an empirical demonstration showed that light from distant
stars actually curved as it passed through the gravitational force of our sun.
Einstein’s graduate students rushed to him as he was walking through the
Princeton campus and exclaimed, “Dr. Einstein, light really does bend!”
Einstein looked at them quizzically and said, “Of course!”He had come to this
conclusion through exploring the question in his own thought experiment years
before._

I can't find "Dr. Einstein, light really does bend" online except in this
article. I asked the questions Uh, wasn't that 1919? Was he in the US in 1919?
(A: First visited 1922, moved there 1933). But the writing leaves you
uncertain which experiment ("demonstration"?) they mean, or what ...

A lot of it has the same vague, unpindownable nature. There just seems
something peculiarly dead and unreadable about the style of the article. It's
hard to force my eyes to read it. Extremely boringly written, repellent. I
found that the most fascinating thing about it - Q. _How did they manage to
create such an unattractive, uninviting style?_

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tlb
Before the internet, I user to spend a lot of time pondering questions to
which the answer was in a textbook somewhere. Sometimes I figured them out for
myself.

Today, I rarely spend much time pondering questions whose answer is in
Wikipedia. I just look it up.

Pondering any question is good mental exercise for others. I wonder if the
easy availability of answers to most questions makes it harder to tackle the
truly unsolved ones.

~~~
_jal
There's a related thing, too. I notice that easy answers mean it takes me
longer to realize I'm asking a slightly wrong or less useful question than I
should be.

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jph
Summary repo here:
[https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/powerful_questions](https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/powerful_questions)

These questions and practices are very relevant for startup teams and tech
teams, such as for strategic project planning with limited resources, or issue
postmortems using blameless retrospectives, or pitch deck presentations for
choosing the big questions to tackle.

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randcraw
Powerful questions are disruptive. They invite revolution.

Corporations HATE disruptive questions. They destabilize the status quo and
the large scale infrastructure that relies on it. They embarrass executives
who can't answer them with a platitude or deflective business-speak. And they
leave stockholders less confident that the company is on track to predictably
increase share value next quarter.

Universities dislike revolutionary questions because professors are just as
dependent on status quo as corporate executives are. Revolutionary ideas
dispose of all that hard earned expertise you developed in the past decades
and force you to start over, reduced in rank from being a renowned expert to
just another student. Worse still, such questions require rethinking and
replacing too many models and theories, consuming much too much development
time to ship yet another incremental research paper in time for the gauntlet
of conferences, thereby letting your academic life's blood. They also tend to
irritate and/or confuse others who do peer review and/or approve funding.

No. Powerful questions can't be too powerful. Consider Galileo or Darwin or
Einstein. If the three had depended on the support of their peers to sustain
their careers, then after asking their Magnum Opii, all would have perished.

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lowdose
Every entrepreneur and CEO should be able to answer these question without
thinking. Eventually every output is caused by degree of focus and this
document is an example to amplify meaning from effort.

------
mikelabatt
"He explained to me with great insistence that every question possessed a
power that did not lie in the answer." \- Elie Wiesel, Night

