Questions Are the Answer

A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life

By: Hal Gregersen

Narrated by: Rick Adamson

2018 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner

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 Jeff Bezos whose relentless approach to problem solving has fueled Amazon’s exponential growth: “Getting the right question is key to getting the right answer.”

Great questions like these have a catalytic quality—that is, they dissolve barriers to creative thinking and channel the pursuit of solutions into new, accelerated pathways. Often, the moment they are voiced, they have the paradoxical effect of being utterly surprising yet instantly obvious.

For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions has always been clear—but it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn’t we know more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest ultimately including over two hundred interviews with creative thinkers. Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions—and breakthrough insights—and how anyone can create them.

Are you ready?

This is an excellent book that is hard to put down once you start. It's engaging and makes you think about many things. You won't be disappointed with this excellent book.

So glad I read this

This book really pushes my boundaries as a leader. It helped me realize the power of questions. It has strengthened my practice and leadership skill set.

Awesome

I loved it. I enjoyed listening to the audio book. I recommend it to everyone wants to improve his skill.

Breakthrough

This is one of those books that simply changes your outputs, making them simply better. I have the performance less than five stars because the narration, although well-delivered, was poorly directed and detached from the subject matter expertise clearly held and driver's by Hal Gregersen, the author. Mispronounced terms of art, as with the word "ideation" have this away. If Hal was in the sound engineering booth giving any level of guidance, that would have been caught and fixed. Instead, there's assume evidence this recording may not have been important enough to tend to more caringly.

Otherwise, a must-listen for anyone determined to find breakthrough answerers to to challenging issues.

Can One Philosophy Make Productive Thinking Feel Like Common Sense?

This book is essential for cultivating a proactive mental model—one that frames your life through possibility and positive momentum. By encouraging you to ask better questions, it helps you generate traction even in moments of high resistance.

While some may argue that the book stretches a single idea too far, I strongly disagree. The depth of examples and practical application makes the core concept not only compelling, but foundational. By the end, the philosophy feels so natural—so aligned with common sense—that it’s hard to imagine you ever operated without it.

This book doesn’t just teach—it integrates seamlessly into a productive mindset. It’s not just worth reading; it’s worth returning to.