Ep. 32: Questionologist, Author, and Speaker Warren Berger on Why Leaders Need to Ask More Questions
In this episode, Darren Reinke chats with author and speaker Warren Berger. Warren discusses the power of questioning, how curiosity and questioning are linked, why you and your leadership team need to slow your pace to ask more questions, and so much more.
Warren is a speaker and author specializing in questioning, innovation, creativity, design, the media, advertising, and general business. Some of his books include The Book Of Beautiful Questions: The Powerful Questions That Will Help You Decide, Create, Connect, and Lead and the bestselling A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas. He is also a co-author of other books and writer of articles for consumer magazines and newspapers including Wired, Fast Company, and The New York Times.
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SHOW NOTES
What Warren was Interested in As a Kid [1:05]
Why Warren Considers Himself a Questionologist [2:00]
Why The Value of Answers Has Been Devalued [4:10]
The Relationship Between Questions and Curiosity [5:42]
Why You Have to Question With a Sense of Purpose [7:00]
How Companies Are Using Questions To Drive Business Results [9:36]
Why Companies Should Adopt a Mission Question Instead of a Mission Statement [12:51]
How You Can Ask Questions to Be a Better Leader [17:26]
The Key Mindset Shift You Need to Adopt to Become a Questioning Leader [21:13]
A Case Study on Questioning in the Workplace [24:58]
How You Can Balance Asking Questions With Taking Action [27:55]
Warren’s Advice to Leaders Who Recognize the Value of Becoming a Questioning Leader [30:20]
How Starbucks and Google are Committed to Creating a Questioning Culture [32:20]
SHOW LINKS
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Questionologist, Author, and Speaker Warren Berger on Why Leaders Need to Ask More Questions
[00:00:00] Darren Reinke: Welcome to The Savage Leader Podcast, where I interview leaders from all walks of life so that you can walk away with tips to apply to your life and your career. But this isn't your traditional leadership podcast because I believe that leadership tips come from successful entrepreneurs in business executives of.
[00:00:21] Darren Reinke: But they also come from unexpected places like from Navy SEALs, successful professional athletes, sports coaches, musicians, entertainers, and more. So let's dive right in to today's episode. My hope is: You walk away with something tangible that you can apply immediately to your life and your career.
[00:00:42] Darren Reinke: Today's guest on The Savage Leader Podcast is Warren Berger. Warren is a speaker and author of five books, including a more beautiful. The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. He's, also, co-authored many other books and currently writes for Harvard Business Review and fast company. Or thanks for being here today.
[00:01:00] Darren Reinke: Thank you, Dan. It's great to be here. So, take me back in time to act, ask this question a little to Warren, what was Warren interested in growing up as a kid?
[00:01:09] Warren Berger: I was a pretty creative kid, so I always had a very active imagination. So, you know, I like a lot of kids, I was going out with friends and playing and doing stuff, but I also would spend time.
[00:01:22] Warren Berger: I was comfortable spending time in my own world, doing my own thing, thinking about my own stuff and sort of creating games and creating stories and that kind of thing. So, I always was you know, using my imagination as. And so that kind of fed into, I think, naturally fed into becoming a writer and a, which I've done in one form or another, my whole career I've written in almost every form you could think of from newspapers to magazines, to books, to blogs, to whatever, but I've always, you know, that's always been my thing.
[00:01:55] Darren Reinke: So they have really stood out. When I learn more about you is you call yourself a question, ologist, what is.
[00:02:03] Warren Berger: It really started a few years ago, you know, I've, I've been riding a long time, and I've been a journalist a long time. And for what, what, when I was a journalist, you know, the main thing I did or one of the main things I had to do well was ask questions, you know?
[00:02:17] Warren Berger: Cause that's just it's tools of the trade for, for a reporter. So, I, I really used to work on my questions, but I didn't think about it that much as a, as a specialty or an area. Study, and no one else really did either. I found because like I went to journalism school, and they taught you a lot of stuff in journalism school, but there was never a course or anything that was about, you know, the art and science of asking questions.
[00:02:45] Warren Berger: So I always felt like it was a neglected area. Then, I guess about six or seven years ago, I was writing about innovation. I was writing about leadership and creativity. And I started to see that questioning was central to all of that. You know, every story I researched and wrote about some innovator or leader, the person was always asking great questions.
[00:03:08] Warren Berger: They were always pursuing some big question that nobody else was going after. So, I had this kind of epiphany that questioning is really important, not only for a journalist. Let's say or a lawyer or someone who uses it in a professional capacity, but it's really important for anyone who is trying to create innovate or bring about change in some way or lead people.
[00:03:37] Warren Berger: So it's really important in all those areas. And that's when I decided, okay, I'm going to really zero in on questioning. I'm going to study it. I'm going to treat it as if it's a, a specialized knowledge area. And that's when I started calling myself a questionologist because that's what an ologist does.
[00:03:56] Warren Berger: If you're an ologist in a field, you study every aspect of it, and you try to understand every, every. Yeah.
[00:04:03] Darren Reinke: So I think just to rewind the tape of my own life, remember in about 2001, I was in business school at Berkeley, and one of our professors was a pretty provocative statement at the time. He said the cost of phone calls is going to go to zero, and we're just all scratching our head, going no way.
[00:04:17] Darren Reinke: This is, you know, a broad proclamation. I believe he said something similar about the value of answers goes into zero and then how that really highlights the need for, and the power of questions.
[00:04:28] Warren Berger: You know, as I was doing my research in this area, You know, I started to realize, Hey, this is not only is this like relevant to lots of different areas, but it's probably more relevant now than it was in the past because questions are actually more important as you start to get overloaded with information, which is where we are now.
[00:04:50] Warren Berger: Right? It's like, there's so much information out there. And that's why the answers, if you think of the information at your fingertips, if you think of that as an answer. Well, the answers have been devalued in a way because they're everywhere, and we don't even know sometimes which ones are good and which ones are, are false.
[00:05:09] Warren Berger: So the answers are: A little bit devalued and questions. Meanwhile, have, have grown in value because the question is the thing that's going to help us sort through those answers. It's going to help us. Get the best answers. If we're asking the right questions, we're going to get better answers. So, you know, the question becomes almost the thing that helps us filter it helps us distill it helps us make sense of the chaos.
[00:05:38] Darren Reinke: Yeah. Another thing that you talk about a lot is curiosity. And what's the relationship in your mind between questions and curiosity.
[00:05:45] Warren Berger: Yeah, I think about that a lot. And so, there's actually an analogy I use that I, I borrowed from someone a long time ago, and I've kind of made it my own. I like to think of it as curiosity is like an itch, right.
[00:05:58] Warren Berger: It's like a state that we're in, where we kind of want to know something. So, curiosity it is. And questioning is the action you take. So questioning is how you scratch that itch. And so, that's the natural relationship between questioning and curiosity, you know, curiosity kind of leads to questioning because that's asking questions is how we try to satisfy our curiosity or how we scratch the itch.
[00:06:28] Warren Berger: But they're, you know, they're equally important. If you, if you don't have curiosity, you're not going to be asking as many questions. You're just not going to be inspired. Ask questions on the other hand, if you're curious, but you aren't going to ask questions, then you will just remain curious, but not learn, you know?
[00:06:44] Warren Berger: So, so I think they need, they depend on.
[00:06:48] Darren Reinke: Yeah, interesting analogy. It makes me think of just that further because my sister's a dermatologist and my mom's a veterinary dermatologist. Pretty interesting fun fact about my family, but is there a limit I think about scratching and how scratching can become obvious you can cause damage to your skin?
[00:07:02] Darren Reinke: Is there a limit to questions?
[00:07:05] Warren Berger: I, I don't think it's so much a problem with asking too many questions. It's it? It could be more a problem of asking questions without kind of thoughtlessly or pointlessly. So if you were to. Continue to ask questions without really having a purpose, then I think it can become a problem.
[00:07:23] Warren Berger: It can be for one thing, it can annoy people. You know, if you're just endlessly badgering people with questions and there doesn't seem to be a real point to it. You know, people are not going to tolerate that very long. So, I think of questioning is you have to do it with a sense of purpose.
[00:07:42] Warren Berger: One of the things I feel is really important is to. Almost use your questions in a way that moves forward, like propulsive questioning. Like one of the things I talked about in my book was the idea that if you look at the three of the biggest types of questions we ask as human beings, we ask why a lot, we ask what if, and we ask how, right?
[00:08:07] Warren Berger: Those are three big types of question. But they all do very different things. And if you want to be a really productive question or what you might do, for example, as you would start with why questions, which tend to be very open-ended, and we're just trying to understand something, but then you would move towards more productive questioning.
[00:08:28] Warren Berger: Like when you start to ask, what if now you're starting to hypothesize, right? You're saying, okay, what if we tried this? What if we tried this. And ultimately, when you're asking how questions, then you're really practical, right? When, how questions, are trying to figure out how do we do this? Or how much is it going to cost or so I think ideally you want to be moving from this sort of philosophical, why questions to more practical, how questions and that way you're moving towards solving problems and taking action.
[00:09:03] Warren Berger: If you just ask why all the time, as I like to say, you know, you're more of a philosopher, right? You're just kind of, you're just kind of wondering why about the world, but you're not really taking action, and you're not really getting anywhere. So, I think it's really important to use questions in a way that is productive and has.
[00:09:25] Darren Reinke: I know in your book, you talk a lot about that framework. The why, the what if, and the how, and just switching gears on that note in terms of how our company is using that framework on a, you mentioned innovation previously in terms of using questioning, but what are some other ways that companies are using questions these days to drive results for the firms?
[00:09:41] Warren Berger: Well, I think they're using it in, in terms of sort of. Tackling problems, and they're using it in ways that are a little different because the idea of asking why about problems has been around for a while. And I think that, you know, you can go back to the five whys, which was introduced in the automotive industry by Toyota decades ago.
[00:10:04] Warren Berger: And so this idea that we need to be analyzing our problems and our processes by asking why has been there for a while, but I think. I have been trying to do. And some companies have been picking up on this is saying, Hey, you can use questioning not only in that first step of why, where you're trying to diagnose a problem or understand it, but you can also use it for the next steps where you're trying to now let's say brainstorm, and you're ultimately trying to figure out, you know, how might we solve this problem?
[00:10:41] Warren Berger: How might we actually take action? So, what I'm seeing a lot of companies do now, a lot of companies are trying to get to, they're not just trying to do why they're trying to get to what you might call how might we stay there now they've now framed a problem as a big, how might we question? You know, how might we bring in new customers in this area without?
[00:11:07] Warren Berger: Cannibalizing this other part of our business, how might we do that? And so, when they frame this, it's almost like a big mission question that they can then work on. And I'm seeing, you know, a number of companies start to use that kind of language and that kind of structure I'm even seeing companies think about.
[00:11:26] Warren Berger: And in a couple of cases, Start to use questioning almost as the mission statement for the company, which is a pretty radical idea, you know, to take the company mission statement and flip it and turn it into a question like a, how might we question? So, in other words, it may, you know, maybe the company's mission statement was something along the lines of, you know, we changed the world through robot.
[00:11:55] Warren Berger: And you would flip that and turn it into a question that might be like, how might we change the world through robotics? So, it's a, it's a different framing of your mission. And putting it in the form of a question is I think a lot more powerful and a lot more inviting to people than a class. But that's a fairly radical idea.
[00:12:19] Warren Berger: Now, not everyone has, has gone for that. I've talked about it with a lot of companies, and there's been a lot of back and forth about it. And some companies have moved in that direction, but it's still a big shift for a company to say, we're going to turn our mission statement into a question because they feel like gee, maybe that doesn't sound as confident as an answer.
[00:12:40] Darren Reinke: Yeah, I can imagine there'd be some pushback there, but tell me a little bit more about that. It's really interested in terms of shifting from a mission statement to a mission question, like, what are the implications of that? How does that impact a company directly?
[00:12:52] Warren Berger: Yeah, the reason it's so important is because questions are much more shareable and inviting and statements in general.
[00:12:59] Warren Berger: So if you make a statement, and you declare something, people. Either they accept it or they don't, but there's not much they can do with it. It's your statement. And you've kind of laid it on them. On the other hand, if you put a question in front of people, it is almost an invitation for them to help answer it.
[00:13:22] Warren Berger: So if your mission statement is in the form of a question, you're inviting people in the company. First of all, it's more humble, right? It's a little more humble because you're saying we haven't figured out. The whole thing yet we're pursuing this mission. This is a mission we're on to, you know, change the way people do this, or to make the world a better place through that.
[00:13:44] Warren Berger: It's a mission. It's a, it's a, it's a journey we're on. We want you to join us on that journey and help us answer this big question. And so, it's very inviting to people, and it's very open-ended, and it's a little more as I say, humble, a mission statement to me often sounds like. Like a brag or, or it could sound like an advertising slogan, you know?
[00:14:08] Warren Berger: So it sounds like you're just sort of declaring this great thing about your company. Whereas when you put it in the form of a question, you're admitting, Hey, this is our journey. This is our goal. This is the thing we're trying to do. And you know, it's very inspiring to employees to say, Hey, I could be part of helping us get to that mission or get to that.
[00:14:29] Darren Reinke: That's really interesting because I think a lot about purpose and the company's purpose in providing some latitude for people to, to live out that purpose in their different roles and based on their different interests and personalities. But I think that's also interesting about a mission question is it provides, as you say, a different way, a more engaging way for people to connect back to us, so they can actually contribute in more meaningful ways based on what their role is based on what their styles are.
[00:14:53] Warren Berger: Yeah. The other thing questions do is questions also. They have this funny thing that they provoke us questions, provoke us to think. And you can think of a question almost like a puzzle that our minds go to work on. And they, we almost can't help trying to answer a question. So if you put your mission statement in front of people in the form of a question, it's a way to.
[00:15:19] Warren Berger: Provoke them to think about how to make that real, how to make that big, hairy objective into something that could be real or people could actually have a part in. So, I love that questions do that. They, in fact, I, one of the things I say to people, bringing it back to an individual level is I'm like, don't do new year's resolutions, do your new year's resolution in the form of a question.
[00:15:45] Warren Berger: Like, how might I, you know, you, if you want to drink more water next year, how might I find ways to drink more water when you do that, you almost invite your own brain to think about ways to do it. And it's just more engaging. They have actually been, there's been research that shows that you're more likely to do something.
[00:16:06] Warren Berger: If you put it to yourself as a question rather than as a, a resolution or a right.
[00:16:14] Darren Reinke: Yeah. I think also back to the mission question, it almost implies there's no end state, it's just constant journey and evolution, but also I think about just how companies more and more are engaging their customers, whether it's in marketing campaigns or even product development, is it's like having a question versus a statement is so much more inviting in a way to connect with customers and external stakeholders.
[00:16:34] Warren Berger: Yeah. And, and if you think about the idea of a mission, you're supposed to be on a mission, it's supposed to be ongoing and. Your mission statement has the danger there is that you sound like you're already there, right? You can, you can phrase it in such a way, like we've already done it. We've already achieved our mission, but you don't want to say that because if you say that, then there is no mission, right.
[00:17:00] Warren Berger: Then you, then there's no really, really path forward. So, I think it's really important to keep the mission in the form of a mission. And one of the ways you do that is, is through a question which has opened up. And not answered yet.
[00:17:15] Darren Reinke: What about from an individual level? We talked about companies, and how can they adopt a greater questioning mindset, but what about from like the questioning leader and that being a role of new competency of, of leaders?
[00:17:26] Darren Reinke: Like, talk to me a bit about that.
[00:17:28] Warren Berger: Yeah. I think it's one of the biggest changes that's going on in leadership right now is this idea that the leader should be a, a curious open-minded question. Person and you know, it's funny, like you might think, well, that's natural. Of course, they should be that, but not, not the way we've thought about leaders in the past.
[00:17:54] Warren Berger: In the past, we thought about leaders as being very, very decisive, confident. People that don't really ask questions because they have the answers. That's why they're there. That's why we're following them because they have the answers, and they're going to tell us what to do and how we should do it. And so, that's the classic leadership model that a lot of people were brought up on and trained on.
[00:18:21] Warren Berger: And so it's a big deal to move away from that. It's a big deal to say. The leader is not going to try to project that know at all. I don't need to ask questions because I have the answers. The leader doesn't need to project that because it's not credible. No, one's really going to believe it in this day and age with the complexities of the world and the, and the industries we're in.
[00:18:47] Warren Berger: And, you know, you're just, you're not credible. If you try to predict. That sort of no at all style of leadership and it's also just not engaging with people, and it's not, it's not inspiring to people. You, again, going back to the idea of the mission statement, you know, questions are going to inspire and engage people more than statements.
[00:19:09] Warren Berger: So as a leader, if all you're doing is making statements to people, you're just not going to engage them in the same way. So, I think leaders are coming around to this more and more. But it's a big adjustment in their behavior and in their attitudes, it means they have to be in a weird way. They almost have to be more confident as a questioning leader than they were as a, as a know at all leader.
[00:19:36] Warren Berger: Because if you're going to be willing to be vulnerable, to admit you don't know, and to ask questions, you better be pretty conscious. That people will still follow you even under those circumstances. And so, I think the really confident leaders are okay with this. They can handle it, they can handle B becoming the questioner or being the questioner.
[00:20:02] Warren Berger: But the leaders who were maybe a little less confident, they have trouble because they're caught up in projecting an image, and they're there. They feel like, you know, if I don't, if I show vulnerability, I'm going to be in trouble. That's what's kinda going on. I think that that's the big shift that's going on is just that attitude, that, that shift in attitude.
[00:20:25] Warren Berger: Now, then once you shift attitudes, then it's a matter of how do you act on it? How do you, what, what are the, what are the behaviors and practices of a questioning later? And I think that's a whole other area that we can talk about, but it starts with the attitude. And this starts with the saying, I'm this type of person, a question.
[00:20:45] Warren Berger: Curious person. I'm not the other type of person. Yeah. It makes
[00:20:48] Darren Reinke: me think of first its leaders becoming active listeners, but this is really an extension beyond that as, okay. I'm listening now actually have to show some humility, some vulnerability to actually be that questioning leader, that curious leader.
[00:21:01] Darren Reinke: Right? Absolutely. So, what are some of the barriers? What are some of the mindset shifts that you need to incorporate? Our leadership leaders need to think about in terms of how they can become that, that questioning, that curious.
[00:21:13] Warren Berger: What was it, a bunch of things. I mean, number one, they have to, they have to make time for it, and they have to almost slow the pace.
[00:21:20] Warren Berger: And that's really hard for leaders, you know because it's hard for any of us, right. We're all under pressure. We're all under deadlines, and there's a tendency to want to move as quickly as possible. There's a tendency to want to make decisions very quickly, and you know, just do, do, do get. And the thing is, with a questioning mindset.
[00:21:42] Warren Berger: You know, there's a great book called thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman and questioning is a form of slow thinking. Slow thinking requires you to step back. It requires you to reflect. It requires you to maybe give yourself some quiet time and do some deep thinking. And if you don't do that, and if you're always in the fast thinking mode, Then you're going to be making decisions on a lot of times on gut instinct or on the easiest, most available information.
[00:22:15] Warren Berger: And so that tends to lead to, I mean, you can get away with it somewhat, but eventually that, that is going to lead to bad decisions. So. Leaders have to find a way to slow down, a way to reflect, a way to get more feedback from people. And all of these things are, you know, they, they kind of run counter to the, just get it done mentality and that's a big deal.
[00:22:42] Warren Berger: The other thing they need to do is they need to develop a relationship with the people around them, where they're comfortable asking questions. You know that may, they may not be used to it. So, what I, what I see some successful leaders do is, you know, they, they do that kind of walking around leadership and as they're walking around, they are asking questions of everybody, you know, and they're asking questions like, you know, what's the one thing that's getting in the way of, of you know, doing the job as well as you'd like, or, you know what is, what could.
[00:23:18] Warren Berger: Management do to help you. What are the biggest challenges in your job? What are you most excited about? What do you dread? You know that kind of thing. If a leader is going around asking those kinds of questions, they're getting a much better feel for the overall company and the mood and where people's head is at.
[00:23:38] Warren Berger: They're also creating more engagement. They're also creating more of a direct line of engagement with people in the company. And then at the same time, one other thing they should do is they should. In addition to them, the leaders asking questions, they want to encourage everyone else to be asking questions.
[00:23:55] Warren Berger: And that brings out a whole other set of challenges. Like, how do you do that? What's the mechanism? What are the practices you're going to use to solicit questions from people, but then also just as important, what are you going to do with those questions? If people raise them, are you going to act up.
[00:24:16] Warren Berger: Are you going to put them in a box somewhere and then ignore them? Cause if you do that, you, you really shouldn't bother to get people's questions unless you're going to do something with them. There's no answer on that. I mean, that that's every company needs to develop its own policies and practices for how they're going to encourage more, what platforms are they going to use to allow people to ask questions?
[00:24:39] Warren Berger: And then what are they going to do with those questions? Once they're.
[00:24:43] Darren Reinke: Just to be even more practical and tactical. Can you take me through an example of a company about some of the policies they implemented, some of the technologies and mediums, and also what perhaps agreements or commitments they made to how they actually address those questions?
[00:24:58] Warren Berger: Yeah. I mean, I've seen, I'm seeing companies do things like have town hall setups where people can ask any question of the leader that they want. And that's a, that's a pretty useful thing. I'm seeing people do things like dedicate a part of a meeting specifically to questions, but, but do it in a very thoughtful way.
[00:25:19] Warren Berger: Don't just, you know, what, what people do a lot of times as they have meetings in the, at the end, almost as a throwaway, they'll say, does anybody have any questions? And nobody asks any questions, but what I'm seeing, some people do is structure meetings. So that it's all about the questions, you know, say, I want everyone to come in with three questions.
[00:25:39] Warren Berger: That they're working on or that, that they're thinking about in their work or in our industry or in this company. And we're going to, we're going to share questions. We're going to work on questions. I'm seeing companies do question storming. You take the traditional brainstorming exercises, and you flip them so that they're all about generating questions instead of generating ideas.
[00:26:04] Warren Berger: And that kind of lubricates the questioning process a little bit. It gets the questioning muscles going. So, there are different actions and policies and approaches that people can take. I would say the main overriding thing is you need to, as a leader, you need to send a message out there. That questions are valuable and they're welcome.
[00:26:28] Warren Berger: And people need to hear that because otherwise. They have a tendency to think questions are not wanted. The other thing you can do as you're going along is you can try to educate people on, on questioning, try to educate them on what are productive questions and what are questions that are maybe less productive.
[00:26:50] Warren Berger: And people need to learn that stuff too because when they start out, they may be asking questions that aren't that helpful. They may be asking questions that are kind of selfish. What about our vacation policy? So, it's like, you need to almost train them and condition them to see, okay. You know?
[00:27:11] Warren Berger: Sure. You can ask any question you want, but the questions that are really going to have an impact or these types of questions, if you can identify things that are missing in our, in our company, in our workplace, with things that aren't working, or you see. A possibility that we're not seeing, if you can frame your questions around that, that's going to be really productive.
[00:27:34] Darren Reinke: And in terms of just thinking about people, maybe saying, thinking while we're in execution mode, we don't have time for questions. That's more for innovation firms. What are some, I don't know, guidelines or things you're seeing or things you're working with companies in terms of how they can balance questions with action.
[00:27:50] Warren Berger: Yeah. I think part of it is, you know, blocking off some time, if you can. You know, the famous thing that Google did with the 20% time, which had mixed results. I think they went back and forth on it, but it's a, it's a radical idea. And it's a good idea. I mean, I don't know if 20% is the answer or 10% or whatever, but the idea is a good one that, that you want to allow people some time to do some questioning, or if you want to call.
[00:28:19] Warren Berger: Thinking or innovating or whatever you want to call it, but, but you're allowing people time away from the deadline driven, you know, routine work that they do, and you're allowing and encouraging them to do another type of work to take their brain in a different direction. You have to give them time and permission to do that.
[00:28:41] Warren Berger: And I know companies are loads to do that because they say, we need that time. We need that productivity. But what you have to realize is that the benefits of it could be so much more productive, you know, then the people just going about and doing their work every day. Decent ideas come out of that. Or, or if you identify a problem you weren't aware of in the company, maybe you're doing something, there may be something you're doing that is not productive, and it's not helpful.
[00:29:11] Warren Berger: And you need to surface that somehow. So, it may seem inefficient, but in fact, it can be way more efficient than not doing it. You know, the, the thing I always say about questioning is people say questioning is inefficient because. It takes time away from doing, but what you have to realize is if you don't question, and you're always doing, you may be doing the wrong thing, you know, you may be doing something that's counterproductive and in the end, that's totally inefficient.
[00:29:42] Warren Berger: So you have to balance it. You have to say, well, that time we, we devote whatever percentage of time it is to this kind of thing is probably. Pay for itself because it's going to lead to some type of improvement that we wouldn't have gotten too otherwise.
[00:30:01] Darren Reinke: What advice would you give to leaders who run to get started with this are thinking, okay?
[00:30:05] Darren Reinke: You've talked about slow, the pace. Step back, reflect, get feedback, walk around, ask questions. What are some really practical tips that leaders can do to start to be that questioning curious?
[00:30:16] Warren Berger: Well, I think the first thing they should do is think about it a little bit. Think about questioning, think about you know, maybe do a little research on it and articulate in your own head, the value of it because you need to believe in it yourself and believe that it's a, it's a valuable thing.
[00:30:34] Warren Berger: Once you do that, then you need to convey that to your company. This all starts with, really, with ideas, not necessarily with. You can get to the steps later, but you need to start with believing in questioning and then getting the people around you to also believe in it. And once that belief system is in place and people agree.
[00:30:57] Warren Berger: Yeah. You know what? This is actually a good idea. Other good companies are doing this. We've looked at it. We've done a little research. We've seen that it gets results and that it engages people. It has a lot of positive benefits. Okay. So, when we understand. Now let's think about the policies and the ways to do it.
[00:31:17] Warren Berger: And then you get into the idea of, should we have a meeting once a week that's devoted to questioning, should we create a bulletin board or an online platform where people can share their questions? Should we have a question of the week? Should we turn our company into a statement into a mission question?
[00:31:34] Warren Berger: There's all these things you could do around that. But I think you start with the idea of. Do I believe in this? And once I'd say once I can say, yeah, I believe in it. How do I communicate that to everybody else? That communication is going to set the tone for everything that follows. It's going to give people permission, and that will naturally lead to policies and practices coming into place.
[00:31:59] Darren Reinke: What's the furthest you've seen in individual or a company or a team go with in terms of a commandment to question.
[00:32:06] Warren Berger: Well, I think I'm seeing the, the, the like Starbucks you know, I was actually working with Starbucks for a while, and you know that they started to turn everything from the, the mission statement to the, the way they communicated to people throughout the company.
[00:32:20] Warren Berger: They started to build everything around questions, and it was a, it was very engaging for people. It really kind of, you know, they, their whole thing is they want the operators of the Starbucks shops to feel like they're really part of the company. And they're really, you know, connected to, to headquarters.
[00:32:38] Warren Berger: And I think they found that, you know, this questioning model with putting questions out there, inviting questions back, you know, it has to be a two-way thing, but they found, I think that it really did increase that engagement level with, with all the people running the Starbucks restaurants. I see that I've seen other companies to, you know, take it to smaller levels or, you know, again, I mentioned, you know, maybe they're they're doing question exercises, you know, once a week.
[00:33:07] Warren Berger: It's different for everybody. If I had to pick maybe the most questioning company out there, you know, maybe it is Google. You know, Google has been for a while. Google has been doing things like town halls, where anyone can ask a question 20% time they even get into things like mindfulness, right. You know, and encouraging mindfulness sessions with their people.
[00:33:29] Warren Berger: So, so Google has been on board with this idea. For a while, you know, this idea that that questioning is, is kind of central to everything. And, you know, it probably makes sense that Google would feel that way because if you think about it, their whole business runs on questions, right? The, the Google search engine basically runs on questions.
[00:33:49] Warren Berger: So it's a natural thing for them to see questioning as a central to the business. And I think that's reflected in a lot of theirs, their practices and their operation.
[00:33:59] Darren Reinke: Or, hey, I know you're a really busy guy, but really appreciate you coming on today. Where can people go to find out more about you and your books and what you're writing and thinking about these days?
[00:34:07] Warren Berger: Yeah. I pretty much have all of it on my website. A more beautiful question.com. So just put those three words altogether, a more beautiful question. That's it. And that has like a, you know, everything about my appearances. It has a lot of articles about questioning. It'll tell you all about, you know, some of the science of questions.
[00:34:29] Warren Berger: You'll find out things like, you know, why the kids ask so many questions and all kinds of good stuff like that. So, it's a really a good central location where I put all my questioning research and thoughts and writing. And you can, you can, if you're interested in this subject, you can get a lot out of that site.
[00:34:48] Darren Reinke: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much.
[00:34:50] Warren Berger: Appreciate it, it was great talking to you.
[00:34:54] Darren Reinke: Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Savage leader podcast. My hope is: You're walking away with tactics that you can apply to become a better leader in your life and in your career. If you're looking for additional insight into. Be sure to check out my book titled, The Savage Leader, 13 Principles to Become a Better Leader From The Inside Out. Also be sure to subscribe to the podcast and I would truly appreciate it. If you left a review and also rate the podcast. Thanks and see you all on the next episode.