In context, allow me to share this gem of a comic: <a href="http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park" rel="nofollow">http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park</a><p>I won't say anything about it, because I don't want to spoil it for you.
“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<p>Reminds me of:<p>"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." -Abraham Lincoln
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.<p>Today, I rarely spend much time pondering questions whose answer is in Wikipedia. I just look it up.<p>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.
Summary repo here: <a href="https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/powerful_questions" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/powerful_questions</a><p>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.
Powerful questions are disruptive. They invite revolution.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.