Questions Are the Answer

What if you could unlock a better answer to your most vexing problem—in your workplace, community, or home life—just by changing the question?

Talk to creative problem-solvers and they will often tell you, the key to their success is asking a different question.

Take Debbie Sterling, the social entrepreneur who created GoldieBlox. The idea came when a friend complained about too few women in engineering and Sterling wondered aloud: "why are all the great building toys made for boys?" Or consider Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, who asked: "would it change economic theory if we stopped pretending people were rational?" Or listen to technologist Elon Musk, who routinely challenges assumptions with questions like: "What are people accepting as an industry standard when there's room for significant improvement?"

Great questions like these have a catalytic quality—that is, they dissolve barriers to creative thinking and channel the pursuit of...